A log of my posts across the forums.
Minor update, but important
Published on April 2, 2009 By GunslingerBara In Forum Issues

The forums have been updated again today with a minor change.  If a user edits his/her post, there will now be a "View Edits" button.  Clicking this button will show a history of that reply/post, along with highlights (red = removed text, green = added text).

If you do not see the button or clicking the button does nothing, please do a "hard refresh" by holding Ctrl and pressing F5.  This will clear your cache and force a download of the new image and javascript file.

Hopefully this will reduce the amount of griefers who go back and edit all of their posts.

Bara


Comments (Page 10)
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on Apr 06, 2009

At that rate, IE14 & Opera22 & Firefox16 will still battle it out for supremacy notwithstanding cross platforming compatibilty nightmares for users - where's the legendary simplicity of NetScape when we need it.

Here's the situation -- Browsers are dashboard radios in your cars, it comes stock from assembly lines and if you want the latest gimmick you need to learn how to wire it in, connect speakers and fit it in on the tight space alloted.

IE simply welds the music and the tuner so hard, treble becomes trouble and bass becomes cash. ActiveX and invasive bars are the usual collections of CDs & cassettes in the glovebox.

Sadly, all of it is rusting in dumpyards -- eventually.

Name a dragster which isn't customized by THE driver, fast & furiously.

on Apr 06, 2009

Loupdinour
NICE!  Looking back to my reply 14 of this thread I can see the color overrides you put in place inside the View Edit box.  The first edit was in red the second edit was in green the third was in blue....all of which got ignored (as it should be) inside the view edit box, but the colors still stuck in the post.  GJ!

Now the only "problem" with it is the fact of forcing a color background for the text.  Those two edits had a black background forced, so in the second edit, when the text got overrode to black, now you cannot read it due to the forced black background... Tis why I did the background color forcing...

I'll see about ignoring background colors as well.  Thank you.

Bara

on Apr 06, 2009

I'll see about ignoring background colors as well. Thank you.

Newp, Thank you!

on Apr 06, 2009

With regards to the view edits function-is there any way for it to only show what has actually been changed highlighted?

For instance, I have a paragraph 5 sentences long and I change 3 words in it.  Currently, it shows that I have deleted the entire paragraph and rewritten the paragraph as a whole with the new words inserted.  It's difficult to see exactly what has changed, and I was under the assumption that the highlighting was intended to make what was changed obvious.

on Apr 06, 2009

Sole Soul
With regards to the view edits function-is there any way for it to only show what has actually been changed highlighted?

For instance, I have a paragraph 5 sentences long and I change 3 words in it.  Currently, it shows that I have deleted the entire paragraph and rewritten the paragraph as a whole with the new words inserted.  It's difficult to see exactly what has changed, and I was under the assumption that the highlighting was intended to make what was changed obvious.

I was under the assumption people liked that, since it helps to hide minor spelling mistakes and errors.  This system wasn't intended to show every minor detail.  It was meant to show major changes to posts to prevent confusion and people aggressively modifying their posts.

Bara

on Apr 06, 2009

It was meant to show major changes to posts to prevent confusion and idiots messing with others.
You got that right!

However, as a future feature request . . .

on Apr 06, 2009

GunslingerBara
I was under the assumption people liked that, since it helps to hide minor spelling mistakes and errors.  This system wasn't intended to show every minor detail.  It was meant to show major changes to posts to prevent confusion and people aggressively modifying their posts.

Bara

Ah.


It was meant to show major changes to posts to prevent confusion and idiots messing with others.You got that right!
However, as a future feature request . . .

Heh.

Please? 

And this would tend to make the view edits function not show quite as much text, either, at least in general, which for posts that have been edited quite a bit might make a substantial difference.

on Apr 11, 2009

   My empire thread's View Edit is too large.

   Please go to this thread and help, yes I know, I put my post in the wrong forum, well it was a bug for me and not the game anyway sorry.

   Thank you for your help.

on Apr 11, 2009

I was under the assumption people liked that, since it helps to hide minor spelling mistakes and errors. This system wasn't intended to show every minor detail. It was meant to show major changes to posts to prevent confusion and people aggressively modifying their posts.
I agree that this is a good reason to provide this functionality and overall it does address the issue. The only problem that I have with it is that it does seem to be overly verbose and it mostly ends up tracking the minor editing and spelling corrections that we all end up doing immediately after submitting a post.

Back before the forum upgrade of about a year ago the way editing worked is that you could edit a post only up to the point that the next person responded to it. That worked well except in popular threads where you had just submitted a reply and were trying to correct a spelling or grammatical error but someone else's reply beat you to it.

I do believe that the functionality was originally intended to allow people to edit their posts for a reasonable time after making them even if someone did manage to post a reply prior to them doing so, but for some reason that did not turn out to be practical. In the end it turned out that you could edit your posts forever which of course introduces the problem that the view edit functionality was intended to address.

All in all the functionality is not all that intrusive given that you don't actually *have* to view the edits of every reply if you don't want to, however to be honest I don't really want to see someone's minor spelling/grammar corrections and would just as soon prefer that my own spelling/grammar corrections were not made so obvious to all that chose to view them. I suppose I could just do a better job of composing my replies but sometimes you're in a rush and everyone’s human.

It is good to have tractability of significant changes and I don't really see any method that could automatically differentiate between the minor things no one cares about and real changes to the content or intent of the reply that are significant.

For what it's worth I would just as soon go back to the old system of allowing edits only up and to the point that someone else replied to them and forgo the view edit functionality.

The other thing is that the forum functionality applies to both “blogs” and “forums”. Even though forums and blogs are conceptually different, the Article in the case of blogs and the Original Post in the case of forums are special cases when it comes to editing.  For as long as I can remember the Article/OP could be edited forever and there are important reasons to continue to allow this to happen. There are many cases where the OP of the thread is continually updated in response to the ongoing conversation. In this case there still is a need for something like the view edit functionality however many of these kinds of Articles/OP’s are very long lived and that 1st post can accumulate a *very* long view edit history.

I think this is at least part of the issue that GmOOnii is reporting above where in his Metaverse Empire thread https://forums.galciv2.com/340151 the “view edits” hangs up and never responds. Again I *think* that his issue is that he can no longer edit his OP because of perhaps an excessive amount of changes, particularly ones that show pictures that had at one time or other been in the OP.

The bottom line is that the ability to edit the OP of a thread that in some cases can be 3 or more years old with many *thousands* of replies needs to be preserved. If there has to be some kind of arbitrary limit on the “view edits” history that eventually causes someone to be unable to edit their OP then I think that either needs to be fixed or if it can’t be fixed then the view edit functionality should be scrapped.

on Apr 11, 2009

The ability to edit the original post has always been there.  However, I could introduce a "time limit" before editing will be recorded.  So for example, within 2 minutes of a posy/reply, you can edit and change what you want without the edit appearing in the View Edits list.  After that all edits will show up.

I can't seem to load galciv2.com from home, so I'll check it out on Tuesday.

Bara

on Apr 11, 2009

@ Mumblefratz, nice write up

  I have to agree with you if I had a empire thread around for three years with thousands of replies and I could not reply or even edit my thread then veiw edit should be scrapped only for OP.

on Apr 11, 2009

View edit should not affect any editing or posting... Where is this happening? https://forums.galciv2.com/340151 does not have thousands of replies and I can edit his post just fine.

Bara

on Apr 11, 2009

View edit should not affect any editing or posting... Where is this happening? https://forums.galciv2.com/340151 does not have thousands of replies and I can edit his post just fine.
No, his metaverse empires thread isn't that old nor long but there are a few around that are. As far as I know there's no issue with the older threads as they probably haven't had their OP edited in quite awhile. But yes it's the OP of https://forums.galciv2.com/340151 that has the problem (at least that's my interpretation of GmOOnii's complaint).

As far as GmOOnii's thread all I know for sure is that it seems to take me forever to access and once I do if I click on "view edits" of the OP it gives me the rotating wheel and says "We're looking up the edits for this post ..." but it never finishes (I've waited for up to 15 minutes). If I click on "view edits" again the search stops but I get the following Windows Internet Explorer error report.

An error occurred:

undefined

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500

undefined

I can however "view edits" for other replies in the thread without issue.

As far as you being able to edit his OP I don't know, but I assume that your ability to edit someone else's OP is different since that obviously requires special access. I do believe that his problem is that *he* can no longer edit his OP. 

[edit] This is probably something you shouldn't be worrying about on a Saturday night. I'm sure this can wait for normal business hours. [/edit]

on Apr 12, 2009

I'm always on call

Gmoonii, if you'd please clarify on the specific problems your having (with URL's please!) I can look into the issue.  I may have to put a limit on how many edits are returned, or allow moderators to individually set a limit to posts with long edits.

Bara

on Apr 12, 2009

However, I could introduce a "time limit" before editing will be recorded. So for example, within 2 minutes of a posy/reply, you can edit and change what you want without the edit appearing in the View Edits list. After that all edits will show up.

This would be great for those of us who re-read our posts and realize it looks like ZubaZ helped type it.

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