Hi, community!
I received 30+ notifications where moderator fixed my posts.
In most cases, it looks like as adding “paid asset” words to my links, like in this post.
I want to emphasize that I am against spam, and I try to provide useful answers at 1st, adding thematic links where it is possible (and appropriate) to my products.
Changing the text by moderator creates a dangerous precedent when the text can be changed in the way that I never wrote. However, I didn’t find such a case, but it’s possible.
You need a different mechanic, according to which the text should only be changed by the author after notification. @Brach_Unity @Bunny83 @LeonhardP
Any changes in the post can only be seen by the post author. Other users can’t see for now what was exactly changed in the post and by whom.
Let me take a look and see what happened here and if we can make this a better workflow.
While I can see where we may need to edit a post but I agree the OP should be notified and the edit should be clear and tracked transparently
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Hi, I already wanted to reach out to you as someone else has flagged many of your posts as SEO spam. I tried to explain that most of your posts were perfectly fine and I declined most of the reports. However you did quite often link to your paid assets, even when the relevance was just marginal. Like in one of the questions about how DontDestryOnLoad works.
I actually tried to defend your posts as much as I could, but I agree that some were not really on topic. The moderation queue was clogged over the last days with 20+ of your flagged posts. I declined most of them but they either got re-flagged or new ones popped up. I ignored them over the last days but no other moderator seems to have bothered and the queue was full all the time. I have removed some of your links which were off topic / tangential or clarified that you linked to a paid asset and then removed the flag.
I’m happy to not be involved in this mess and I tried to clarify that you’re a long term active user here 
I invited you in the PM I started with Ukounu about that issue. Hopefully this gets sorted out.
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Thank you all for the hard work you are doing here!
Moderators can edit your post and its not publicly shown!?
Pretty sure that is not legal. It would be one thing to add a note to a post, but directly changing the words is a serious breach of free speech.
This better be escalated to the top or you moderators are at serious risk of legal ramifications. If cooperate decides it’s ok, you better get it dated and in writing to protect yourselves.
Example. This is a 3rd-party post. The indicated link is not clickable for me, so I can’t check any changes. Such links are clickable only in my own posts personally for me to see changes.
Actually I also miss the revision history for posts. On UnityAnswers we had the revision history which also did not work properly, but at least you could see what changes were made by whom. Currently I sometimes see flagged posts in the moderation queue which hve all the content removed. So you don’t even know what the post originally contained.
During the move from UA to Discourse we lost many features (and a lot of content). Since nested comments are no longer a thing and comments on UA were up to 2k characters, those comments were simply stripped completely. I had over 10k comments on UA, many with additional examples or clarifications which are probably lost for good. Anyways, lets hope at least feature-wise we get some better tools in the future
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It seems Discourse has edit history on by default: https://meta.discourse.org/t/how-long-are-user-edits-visible-to-the-public/180483/4, but for some reason it has been disabled here and is visible only to staff.
I believe edit history should be visible to all users. Without it, posts can be altered to have entirely different meanings over time, rendering likes, answers, and other interactions irrelevant.
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In most jurisdictions, a company changing someone’s online post without their consent is generally considered illegal as it violates privacy laws and could be considered a form of tampering or even defamation, depending on the nature of the change and the context of the post; however, employers may have some leeway to address employee posts that could significantly harm the company’s reputation, provided they have clear policies in place and act within legal boundaries.
So essentially there is several laws that they could be brought to court on, varying by jurisdiction. There is no direct law to point to, but that isn’t how law works. I would guess if they are removing self promotions of your business then that has some monopolization implications and damage to business income.
Any modification of something you didn’t originally create without consent of the owner is a legal minefield. Companies need to learn to avoid this. Over time, anything that can happen, will happen. Imagine the worst thing a moderator could do to a post because of a potential personal vendetta.
So moderating a forum is against the law???
Do realise how ridiculous that sounds.
Not at all what I said.
They can delete or hide posts, request that the owner makes changes to the post, etc…
They cannot make changes to a post without consent. In a court of law, that post could be used against you as your words. You want to let someone else determine your words? It’s a literal example of someone putting words in your mouth.
You got any citations or legal precedent for that?
Because if so then thousands of forums across decades have been breaking the law.
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I quoted several potential laws that could be used depending on the situation. Privacy, Libel, Defamation, Monopolization, etc…
We all know that laws are way behind on technology, precedent can be set at anytime. Smart companies will play it safe, the rest will be hit with a tidal wave of lawsuits.
Steve Huffman, the previous owner of reddit, has a case against him right now for doing exactly this but its pretty hard to find much info while it’s ongoing.
Generally speaking Unity is pretty safe here. There Terms of Service, which everyone here agreed to, gives them permission to do this. Although extreme cases might be considered illegal. However, changing text in a rather benign way wont pose a problem.
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Exactly this is a private environment managed by a private company. What they says, goes.
The forums has explict rules about self promotion and filling the forums with posts that promote your own products, even if somewhat related to the thread, is fair grounds for getting those posts removed or edited.
There’s nothing remotely legally questionable here.
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There is no such thing as “free speech” in a moderated environment.
If you’re in an auditorium with a speaker, and you disturb the presentation by exercising your right to free speech you will be escorted from the premises rather quickly. 
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Let me see about getting it turned on again.
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Editing history should now be visible to all. you may need to refresh cache but the setting is enabled
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Yes, it’s working. But what about the mechanics of correcting the post only by author after notification from the moderator?
P.S. The layout is broken now:
