[RFC] Edit comments after making them

[Kevin Bowman]

Hi everyone,

An interesting topic came up recently which I thought I'd ask the Group about.  Question: if a user comments on a talk, and then comments again on the same talk, would you expect their second comment to overwrite the first one or to add a second comment to the talk?  The website does the latter, but the recently-launched Twitter integration does the former.  I think the latter is correct, but it's worthy of wider discussion.

Also: is it valid to allow a user to edit their comment after they have submitted it?  I don't think there is currently a history of changes to a comment kept, and it's possible for a comment to spark discussion (or even offence) and for the user to then change the comment (possibly unfairly).  Not even Slashdot, the ultimate web discussion site, allows comments to be edited after submission (I don't think).

Kevin

[Derick Rethans]

On Mon, 7 Mar 2011, Kevin Bowman wrote:

> An interesting topic came up recently which I thought I'd ask the
> Group about. Question: if a user comments on a talk, and then
> comments again on the same talk, would you expect their second comment
> to overwrite the first one or to add a second comment to the talk?
> The website does the latter, but the recently-launched Twitter
> integration does the former. I think the latter is correct, but it's
> worthy of wider discussion.

I think it should override in twitter, just to be able to updated for
fixes and typoes. The twitter integration is supposed to override the
first one. It didn't do that because a bug and reassigned all my
comments (for all talks) to the new talk, and updated tem with the new
text ;-) (Which I see is still broken: http://joind.in/talk/view/2932)

> Also: is it valid to allow a user to edit their comment after they
> have submitted it? I don't think there is currently a history of
> changes to a comment kept, and it's possible for a comment to spark
> discussion (or even offence) and for the user to then change the
> comment (possibly unfairly).
> Not even Slashdot, the ultimate web discussion site, allows comments to be
> edited after submission (I don't think).

Right, but in some cases I might want to add some more tips for the
speaker if I remember them later.

cheers,
Derick

[Stefan Koopmanschap]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 12:11 AM, Kevin Bowman <kbo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> An interesting topic came up recently which I thought I'd ask the Group
> about.  Question: if a user comments on a talk, and then comments again on
> the same talk, would you expect their second comment to overwrite the first
> one or to add a second comment to the talk?  The website does the latter,
> but the recently-launched Twitter integration does the former.  I think the
> latter is correct, but it's worthy of wider discussion.

I think a second comment should be posted. I do think, however (not
sure how that works now), that a second rating by the same user should
not be counted towards the average. Actually, perhaps the user should
not receive the option to rate anymore once rated.

> Also: is it valid to allow a user to edit their comment after they have
> submitted it?  I don't think there is currently a history of changes to a
> comment kept, and it's possible for a comment to spark discussion (or even
> offence) and for the user to then change the comment (possibly unfairly).
>  Not even Slashdot, the ultimate web discussion site, allows comments to be
> edited after submission (I don't think).

Editting for spelling/grammar would be the only viable reason I can
see to edit a comment, and quite frankly: that's not that important.
There is a huge potential for abuse here. On the other hand, as long
as we've not had any reports of abuse, why would we change this? We
shouldn't change everything that has a potential for abuse, or we
could take down most of the site's functionality.

--
Stefan Koopmanschap
http://www.stefankoopmanschap.nl/
http://www.leftontheweb.com/

[Joshua Thijssen]

> I think a second comment should be posted. I do think, however (not
> sure how that works now), that a second rating by the same user should
> not be counted towards the average. Actually, perhaps the user should
> not receive the option to rate anymore once rated.

Maybe the same goes for reactions in the comments posted by the speaker(s)?

> Editting for spelling/grammar would be the only viable reason I can
> see to edit a comment, and quite frankly: that's not that important.
> There is a huge potential for abuse here. On the other hand, as long
> as we've not had any reports of abuse, why would we change this? We
> shouldn't change everything that has a potential for abuse, or we
> could take down most of the site's functionality.

Agreed, but some sites like reddit allow for a (small) window of a few
minutes to edit your comment. It would allow to fix your typo's, but not
enough to change/remove a comment after reactions from others.

[Kevin Bowman]

I think a second comment should be posted. I do think, however (not
sure how that works now), that a second rating by the same user should
not be counted towards the average. Actually, perhaps the user should
not receive the option to rate anymore once rated.

I agree.

as long as we've not had any reports of abuse, why would we change this?

... because that ability has only been there for around a week, so it'd be better to just not allow it from the outset if it's undesirable.

Maybe the same goes for reactions in the comments posted by the speaker(s)?

Agreed.

Agreed, but some sites like reddit allow for a (small) window of a few minutes to edit your comment.

Interesting...  could be more bother to implement than it's worth, though - I assume those sites have a background process to cope with this, which may be overkill on joind.in.

Kevin

[Joshua Thijssen]

Kevin Bowman wrote:
> Agreed, but some sites like reddit allow for a (small) window of a
> few minutes to edit your comment.
> Interesting... could be more bother to implement than it's worth,
> though - I assume those sites have a background process to cope with

> this, which may be overkill on joind.in <http://joind.in>.
Not sure (alltough reddit code is available). I assume it's nothing more
than checking the current timestamp against the creation timestamp.
Maybe nice it a bit up with removing the edit-link when the time passes.

[Chris Cornutt]

I agree with the "additional comments, no more ratings" idea. Keeps things simpler too. 

I can count on one hand the number of times someone has asked to be able to edit their comments and that was usually just for a misspelling, not a change in the content. Another potential option is the ability for them to submit an update and have the event admin approve the revision (not the talk's speaker though, of obvious reasons). This, too, could be more trouble than it's worth.

-chris

--
Senior Editor
PHPDeveloper.org
ccor...@phpdeveloper.org

@enygma

[Kevin Bowman]

I've summarised this thread as a feature request at http://joindin.jira.com/browse/JOINDIN-54 - anyone should feel free to implement it and send a pull request.

Thanks all,

Kevin

[lornajane]

Thanks Kevin.

Can I just re-iterate his point about pull requests? Discussion is
important and useful but if you want to do more than talk about how
things should be, then please do take the time to contribute. I'm
seeing some really great ideas coming past, but too many of them stay
as ideas rather than turning into pull requests, although one did
become a pull request but we weren't able to merge it as it wasn't
quite complete*.

Thanks

Lorna

* The pull request in question stopped anonymous commenters from
rating talks, which was widely agreed to be a useful change in
functionality. If anyone wants to finish it up, it's here:
https://github.com/joindin/joind.in/pull/314



On Mar 13, 8:42 pm, Kevin Bowman <kbow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've summarised this thread as a feature request athttp://joindin.jira.com/browse/JOINDIN-54- anyone should feel free to