Loomio

Feature proposal: Editing of posts

BB Brent Bartlett Public Seen by 91

A recent proposal showed that a majority support a feature that allows editing of posts. Here's my suggestion for how this would work. I'm mainly opening this thread up for discussion of implementation, though, so everybody can kick ideas around and hopefully come up with something that we all like.

My suggestion is: There will be some kind of indication that a post has been edited, e.g. a string at the top or bottom of the post that says "Edited at ______" with a timestamp. This string will not appear if the post was edited a brief period of time after it was posted (say, 60 seconds). This allows users to clean up small typos and punctuation without being "penalized".

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Rich Thu 2 Oct 2014 9:34PM

If we're defining parameters, I'd go with five minutes before displaying an 'Edited..." message. I'm not sure I could correct a typo or markdown formatting issue in sixty seconds.

Perhaps offer a small free-text-type box so the author can add a reason for the edit too.

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Faldrian Thu 2 Oct 2014 10:35PM

I think it would be nice if there was a revision-system on posts. So you can annotate on comments what revision the post had when the comment was submitted. You could then browse the revision-history of the post if you need to look up some references (if they would have been edited out).

Beeing a quite complete and transparent implementation, I think it would be not as hard to implement in the federation (send an "new revision" update on a post when it is edited, as well as annotate the revision on comments when they are saved and sent).
It will however introduce new impacts on performance: more messages that will be federated and there will be a bigger post-table for the revisions (or use an extra table for all outdated revisions, so the normal post-lookup is not slowed down).
Also there might be problems when a comment arrives, referring to a revision of a post that has not even arrived at the pod where the comment just arrived.

Just a few thoughts... :)

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Brent Bartlett Thu 2 Oct 2014 11:53PM

I think that having revision history for comments is an interesting idea. The issue I have with it isn't implementation, though...it's privacy. Imagine that I read somebody's post, get upset, and write an angry reply. Well, 5 or 10 minutes later I've cooled down a bit, and I decide to edit the post to make it less angry. The post now shows that I've edited it, and the material that I've deleted is still in the revision history! There's nothing I can do to stop people from looking at the previous comment that I wanted to remove.

Another scenario is that I've posted some sensitive information. Maybe I didn't even know that the information was sensitive when I posted it. Later, I re-think what I've posted, or I find out that I've divulged information that I shouldn't have (The party's supposed to be a surprise!), so I go back to edit...but the sensitive information is still there in the history, available to anybody who wants to do a little digging.

Now, sure, knowing this, I could just copy the message, make the changes, delete the original, and re-post...but that defeats the whole purpose of having an editing feature in the first place. Also, if you don't know this, or you edit in a hurry and forget, it could come back to haunt you later. It doesn't seem like the possible benefits outweigh the possible nuisances.

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Rich Fri 3 Oct 2014 7:12AM

Should notifications also be sent after an edit?

So perhaps I Liked a post, I should be informed if that post has changed.

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Alberto Aru Fri 3 Oct 2014 9:22AM

I don't like the period thing, I think that the best choice is that we could edit the posts when we wanted.

@rich1, why not an option for that in the settings?

That what happens on Pump (or fb).

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Rich Fri 3 Oct 2014 9:26AM

Hey Alberto. The time limit would only be to control whether the "Edited at...." would be displayed. You could edit it at any time you like, even years later. But if you edit it within say 5 minutes of posting, then no "Edited at..." message would be displayed.

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Brent Bartlett Fri 3 Oct 2014 7:51PM

I like the Loomio timestamp better. Instead of giving a date and time, it gives a length of time, like "30 minutes ago" or "2 hours ago".

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AlexB Sun 5 Oct 2014 5:41PM

@brentbartlett I think the sensitive information scenario you mention is the reason why "edit" hasn't been implemented so far -- as I understand it, because of federation (which is "pull"), it is basically impossible to delete something efficiently. So the idea was that it would lull users into a false sense of security if they thought all they had to do was press "edit" and their sensitive information would disappear. In fact, all the other pods that their message had already been forwarded to would possess that sensitive information, and there may well be a significant lag before those pods realise they should delete it.

(Maybe someone more knowledgeable will correct me.)

To me, the primary reason people seem to want the edit function (and I keep seeing calls for it!) is to correct typos and such like. It's a feature people have come to expect from a social network/comment system. I don't think we need a revision-system for this, though I don't see why not. But I think this task will be conceptually simpler if we see typo-correction as the reason we're implementing this, rather than getting lost down the rabbit-hole of sensitive-information-hiding, which may well be impossible to solve securely.

On the amount of time before a timestamp (of whatever sort) gets attached, 5 minutes seems appropriate to me.

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Brent Bartlett Sun 5 Oct 2014 6:35PM

@alexb I think you make a very good point. Federation might make editing not quite as smooth as on other systems. I think that once all the kinks get worked out of federation, though, it will be just as smooth and error-free as any other social network.

For example, I have an account on diasp.org and JoinDiaspora. I make a comment on JD, and it pops up on diasp.org. Then, I delete it on JD, and it disappears from diasp.org. Edits would work the same way: I make a change on JD, and the comment changes on diasp.org.

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AlexB Sun 5 Oct 2014 6:54PM

Good point -- if we offer post-deletion, then my explanation as to why we don't offer post-editing doesn't quite work.

I suppose my main point is that we should see this feature as offering aesthetic editing rather than privacy-preserving editing, because the latter can't actually be offered properly (i.e. we'll never be able to change the fact that "once the information is out there it's out there").

Implementing for aesthetic editing should be relatively straightforward, while it would be impossible to try to achieve the ability to recall information that has already been sent out.

In essence, I agree with your original proposal, with the 5-minute amendment, and I'm agnostic about revision-history.

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