User blog comment:Ohmyn0/Let's Talk About Talk Pages/@comment-876022-20110602015155

However not all edits to talk or discussion pages are additions to the discussion, despite whether the characters increased by a slight to high margin. Maintenance edits, as per below, can preform the same notification as if a new message was posted to the talk or discussion page.

The other thing to do would be to have an edit filter created on wikis with AbuseFilter to check on certain namespaces with code similar to: ((lcase(added_lines) rlike "(\[\[user:|\[\[user talk:|{{signature|\[\[Special:Contributions)") Even though that isn't foolproof either.
 * (lcase(added_lines) rlike "(?<!~)~{3,4}(?!~)"))