I’m totally on board with doing things right the first time, and if the pending-timeout thing has no support so be it. But I think there’s two debates that need to be had now:
Is it really a good and desirable thing, coding effort aside, to let people edit their historical comments at any time? I don’t think it is, for reasons I’ve outlined above, but perhaps I’m in the minority on this.
If we decide it is, then we can debate about how that can be correctly done.
A recent proposal showed that a majority support a feature that allows editing of posts.
Can someone point me to that proposal? I just don’t understand the rationale behind needing to be able to edit old posts. Maybe the other discussion will clear that up for me.
I wish it was not closed, I would have agreed to the proposal. I didn’t like the fact that only 3% were able to state their position and the poll was closed in less than 24 hrs. if I understand the loomio timeline.
@shirish with only on agree and one (unfair imho) block, the proposal is not ready to be accepted. Maybe it need to be discussed futher more, refined? May be its the concept of doing the right thing that need to be discussed? It seems to me to that the intent of the proposal was not fully understood by some people. And some advices feels like some people did not even read the discussion or try to understand the point.
But I also admit that I’m not good at communicating stuff.
Veni, vidi, failed. It’s your turn to try. Run another proposal.
Isn’t possible editing posts yet?
If I commit a mistake the unique solution is to delete it and rewrite? There is anyway to copy the markdown formatting of a published post? It is an unpleasant work to format again all the message that you want to republish in a correct version!
No.
Yes.
If you have any doubt, copy the raw markdown version of your post before submitting it.
The best way to avoid errors is to preview your post until you are certain everything is correct!
There have been some recent developments that might mean that an editing feature becomes more likely, but there are no definite plans to include it. Of course the usual situation remains the same: if anyone in the world cares enough about this feature to write the code, it can be included!
There is, actually. Simply add .json to the post url; the json contains markdown. (Maybe you need to fix empty lines.)
there’s information that may have been unknown to a poster at the time of writing a post that would be best included in op
there are mistakes that happen in posts which get a lot of attention that corrections made to a repost after deletion would not get, where a retraction and acknowledgement of the mistake in the op is the general ethical solution already
professional journalists with professional copy editors and proofreaders still have mistakes get through to a published story, there is no level of “make sure there are no mistakes” that will make up for the lack of edits in post
addendum:
say you post something and you find yourself drowning in harassment in the comments. currently, you can ignore users, which given a critical mass becomes a futile exercise; or you can delete the op. there isn’t a way to change privacy after the fact to keep discussion going in a circle of your choosing – you can’t shut out the commenters by locking down a thread. that’s another benefit to edits.
re: implementation: version control systems provide a good example already – differences are published and merged with the prior version to make a new version and the change is logged. it’s an old problem with an old solution that works.
I also want to edit posts. When will this be done? It is something that all other major networks have! These limitations are something that make it much harder to bring more people to Diaspora, since the person will (commonly) use it just because I use here, and I pointed… and in the first uses the person discover several simple limitations: “Cannot even edit posts? Facebook have that even for the simple mobile interface!”
This discussion started in 2014, and the situation today, 2018/01/14, seem to be exactly the same. Sad.
Someone who wants this feature has to work on it. It really is as simple as that.
Diaspora is an open-source project, which means that anyone in the world can contribute to it. It’s not like a proprietary centralised network in which users have to wait for the company that owns the software to implement features. If you want a feature, make it, or find someone who can make it for you. Or you can add to the bounty on this issue, to encourage someone to work on it. There are many ways to help the project to get the features you want.
Work on it might be raising the money to have someone else work on it.
I agree that this really needs work ASAP. From what has been written above is there enough information to write pseudo code an estimate the number of hours involved?
At least so we have some sort of base for the discussion. Is it 1,000 hours of time for someone already highly engaged in the Diaspora code or 10 hours for someone with reasonable experience in using Ruby?
Maybe have a bounty on some issues like this. Put some money up to make it happen.
There is a bounty on this issue. My previous comment contains a link to it!
Just adding this as some kind of update for people who read this discussion but don’t follow the issue on github:
@SuperTux88 implemented the first step of the edit feature in January - that is, adding editable entities on protocol level. This doesn’t add this functionality to diaspora* yet, but it is needed to make it possible to add it to diaspora in the future.
Apparently the post stopped being updated. But the issue seems to be gone. I just made a new thread, and could edit it after. That is all I can say.
Discourse is not diaspora*.
So? I cannot understand the reason of what you said.
This thread is about post editing in diaspora, not in discourse.
With the many new users coming from G+, posts edition is again very asked. I closed the other discussion on discourse in favor of this one and would like to resume the situation, so I’ll be able to link to this post from diaspora* when users ask about the status of the feature.
We have a draft spec of what could be the feature.
It would be nice to know the status of this document: is everybody okay with what is described there?
The protocol work has already be done by @supertux88 (thanks again!).
What we need now is to imagine a nice UX, and then to implement the back-end and the front-end inside diaspora*. The current core team is not working on it, so we’re waiting for someone to set up here. If you’re volunteer please comment here.
Is this issue typical for the development speed at Diaspora?
I’m new, just came over with the big Google+ migration, and I’m seriously considering joining development. I see a lot of missing features that I think shouldn’t be too hard to fix (although of course I’m ignoring protocol issues in my newbie ignorance). I find it hard to believe that in all this time, this still hasn’t been fixed.
If the protocol work has already been done (for me that would be the hard part), then should I pick this up as my first issue to fix?
I’m eager to contribute, but this lack of progress seems like it would be really discouraging. Is Diaspora so hard to change? Are so few people working on features like this? A lot of people seem to want it, and have wanted it for years.
I could point you at 10 year and older bugs from Google, and features I’d wanted at G+ from the start which never materialised.
Diaspora started with some excellent features, several of which I’ve long wanted at Google. It’s also lacking others.
It’s somewhat constrained by its requirement to interact with a defined protocol and a set of other platforms, including how to deal with unsupported or partially supported interactions. All with a volunteer team based on consensus and being willing to do the work, and in an environment with numerous other challenges (take a look at the history of Diaspora and its founders / personnel).
So, whilst I’d prefer that editing of posts might have occurred in something less than 8 years, I’m encouraged that progress is being made. The past can’t be changed, the future is change. Let’s try to see that it’s in the right directions.