[RFC] Post Revisions

[imkingdavid]

I could understand a line-based diff if most of the line was changed. But when it's one or two words, it just takes up space to display the whole line both times.

[callumacrae]

How GitHub does it is my favourite way (basically what unknownbliss said)

[Senky]

Yes, but GitHub has some problems with word-based diff. It works like this:

This is original post.

This is other host.

Diff:

This is originalther poshost

Note "o" and "t". On GitHub, it is not a word-based diff really. On GitHub it makes sense - it is diff for source code, but phpBB's posts are based on common text, so diff of in phpBB should look like this:

This is originalother posthost

[callumacrae]

It's not quite that bad: https://github.com/callumacrae/Zirck/co ... 2041c77ea0

-This is original post.
+This is other host.

[Senky]

Yeah, but you probably know what I mean. End user can easily get confused what happened, he just wanted to change two words and it seems like ... well, not whole words changed really. If it is not a big deal to do diff with whole words, it would probably be better I think...

[drathbun]

Code is written in lines. Posts aren't lines but rather are paragraphs. If you go with line diff, you're basically doing a paragraph diff. For example, this entire series of sentences is only one line so if I edit only one word in the entire paragraph, then the line-diff process will show the entire paragraph as being updated.

[imkingdavid]

Code is written in lines. Posts aren't lines but rather are paragraphs. If you go with line diff, you're basically doing a paragraph diff. For example, this entire series of sentences is only one line so if I edit only one word in the entire paragraph, then the line-diff process will show the entire paragraph as being updated.

Exactly. Each paragraph is one line, so a line-based diff doesn't work optimally for prose. Instead, we need to use word based or, if we can keep it from doing the things I mentioned previously, character based.

[brunoais]

I prefer word based

[imkingdavid]

In conjunction with this proposition (clearing the edit reason for each edit) I think we should also add a new ACP option along with the post revisions system to require a reason to be entered any time a post is edited. What do you think?

[drathbun]

My two cents:

If an owner edits their own post I don't care.

If a non-owner edits the post then I do care. For example, I don't want a moderator or admin editing someone else's post without recording why. The post revisions process takes care of the "what" and "when" of the event, but not the why.

But your question is not regarding that, but whether board owners can change that behavior via the ACP. As long as it's granular enough, meaning it allows me to set different permissions for post owner versus non-post owner then I would be in favor.