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Edited by original poster vs edited by someone else

21:02 / 11.01.05

I can see that it should require several mods to agree that a post should be allowed to be edited by another mod who didn't write it. That makes sense; I'd prefer my post was deleted rather than modified, and while most of the edits that go on are for bad HTML, it's a reasonable safeguard.

However, if I or someone else edits my or their own post, shouldn't this require a bit less agreement? Certainly some, given that we don't want people doing a bit of retroactive editing to make other people look foolish and themselves look smart, but if it's with the agreement of the original person I think it's less of a change.

09:59 / 12.01.05

The current system requires two votes to affect a change to a post. I've always understood the requirement of two mods to agree is to cater for the possibility that a mod may take a personal grudge against a poster and point-blank refuse to accept any request from hir.

11:20 / 12.01.05

It also covers the problem of some moderators clicking 'agree' without paying any attention to what they're agreeing.

ONLY NICE THINGS

12:34 / 12.01.05

GA: If you diagree an action, it ceases to be offered. Therefore, a moderator who was hell-bent on preventing a change could just keep vetoing it. He or she would hgave to sleep at some point, one presumes. Automatically *agreeing* changes is a far bigger problem than automatically disagreeing them, as amendments can damage the sense of the thread. As such, I think it makes a degree of sense to keep it as is.

Tryphena Absent

13:25 / 12.01.05

if I or someone else edits my or their own post, shouldn't this require a bit less agreement?

No because it's just as easy to misjudge your own post- easier sometimes because people tend to hear what they mean to be there rather than what is there- as it is to misjudge someone elses.

And sometimes people want to fuck things up on purpose and will quite cheerfully use their own posts to do it. So even if one moderator likes the tosser, chances are someone else won't.

12:22 / 13.01.05

Frequently, deleting a post will derail the thread, leaving a nonsequitir, or several, in the thread. I've been known to edit down a post to delete whatever personal information the poster later regretted posting to preserve the integrity of the thread, rather than deleting the post outright. Usually, I give the requester a heads up to let them know, so that they can put the request through again if they don't want the edited post there.

10:08 / 14.01.05

Marge/Anna - yes, the "only needing one supporter" thing is something I was thinking about when starting the thread, and does make it a bit difficult to suggest a change. Fewer than 2 votes required leaves that open. More than 2 is a bit impractical, or at least slow.

On a related note, it might be nice to have something that checked for bad HTML. Livejournal has a system whereby if it detects something that is totally fucked, it posts it but with a warning at the top "Irreparable markup detected, poster must fix". That's in Perl IIRC though and this board is PHP; also it may only do it for LJ-specific tags, can't remember. But it might be nice to have something that detected unbalanced tags (mostly links, bolds and italics that aren't closed) and said "Are you sure?" when you tried to submit the post.

10:33 / 14.01.05

Alongside that, I'd quite like to see the board automatically make posted URLs into links.

23:05 / 14.01.05

do either of you know how to do that?

23:58 / 14.01.05

No idea, I'm afraid. I presume you'd have the board recognise any untagged string that begins with the letters 'http' and replace it with the same string, only within the link tags. But, like I say, I've not really got the faintest how you'd go about actually doing that.

Unless the board's programmed in Visual Basic. And it's not.

23:10 / 16.01.05

Yes.

Well, no, obviously, since I don't have access to the server and the code, but if I did I could.

11:14 / 19.01.05

Spatula: it's not so hard. Easiest thing to do would be to run a regular expression on the message posted through the entry form, which hunts out strings of the format http://blah.com or http://www.blah.com or www.blah.com (all followed by URLs, obviously), and places them into link tags. It makes the act of posting fractionally (and I mean fractionally) slower because regexes are slower than straight find/replace, but not really by much. Just requires altering the post functionality.

Is that what you'd do, fridge?

15:51 / 19.01.05

Yes, something along those lines, and it would only be slower by milliseconds. Another thing I'd do which I've seen on Vbulletin 3 is to have a maximum length for the actual link text and fill in with ..., since some of these URLs can be quite long and stretch pages.

e.g. http://www.server.com/something/whatever/argh/this_goes_on/forever.html

becomes http://www.server.com/someth...forever.html

The thing I suggested would be a little harder, and it's tricky to say without knowing the actual system that's being used to check for valid tags (i.e. only allowing B, I, STRONG, EM, A and IMG - I think that's it) but I'd probably incorporate a simultaneous check that the tags were actually closed, and if they weren't, send the poster to the preview page instead, with a big warning message saying "YOU DON'T SEEM TO HAVE CLOSED YOUR TAGS, THIS IS WHAT IT WILL LOOK LIKE IF POSTED, ARE YOU QUITE SURE?" Depending on the method used to check, probably use regexps there as well. I like regexps. I'm a bit of a Perl hacker I'm afraid.