How to edit posts waiting in the moderator approval queue?
(1) By Mark Lawrence (mark) on 2020-03-15 12:20:19 [link] [source]
I thought editing posts was a feature of the forum. Yet the two posts I just made don't seem to have an edit button, possibly because they are in a moderator approval queue? Ideally I should be able to edit at any time.
(2) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2020-03-15 12:27:11 in reply to 1 [link] [source]
Ideally I should be able to edit at any time.
That's arguable, IMO: all edits send notifications to all forum members, and all moderators get emails for every requires-moderation post. If editing were allowed, moderators would be notified every time an in-moderation post is edited. Worse, there would be a race condition where the person is editing a post while the moderator allows or rejects it:
If Bob submits a post which lands in the moderation queue and then starts editing it, and a moderator rejects the post during that time, chaos would ensue when Bob taps Save, in the form of an error saying something to the effect of "unknown artifact," because the original would have been deleted by that point. Bob's just irrevocably lost an arbitrary amount of editing effort.
It's not clear to me what would happen if the moderator approved during that time - would the edits go through unmoderated (bad) or be queued for moderation again (less bad, but also administrative overhead)?
(3) By Mark Lawrence (mark) on 2020-03-15 13:33:13 in reply to 2 [link] [source]
Is this a distributed system? Moderation commands made by email? Some of the issues you describe wouldn't exist with a centralized database. For example, editing an in-moderation post could take it out of the queue.
The most likely time for an edit is shortly after posting, so a halfway featurefull system would allow that.
A post with a reasonable number of views or replies in my opinion should not be editable; it invalidates replies and memories.
It appears to me that Fossil gets some of this backwards.
(4) By Stephan Beal (stephan) on 2020-03-15 14:12:13 in reply to 3 [source]
Is this a distributed system? Moderation commands made by email? Some of the issues you describe wouldn't exist with a centralized database.
That's the thing - it is distributed, so some features which would seem, on the surface, trivial, are either really difficult or philosophically impossible to implement. e.g. locking of threads isn't realistic because anyone who clones it has full access to their copy and can unlock it or bypass the lock. If they then try to push back to the original repo, they either unlock the thread or their push is refused because of the lock, leaving them in a state which can never be reconciled with the copy they cloned from.
That said: this instance of the forum is effectively used like a central-server setup, but its data model and internals are distributed, and that brings with it certain features and limitations.