I'm fairly certain that the design involves a second table to store post versions rather than storing them within the existing posts table. So searching would definitely be a separate process.myself wrote:On the permissions thing... I think the more options you can provide, the more flexible the feature will become, and the better it will be received.
[Edit]
Earlier I suggested looking at some board statistics to see what sort of edit frequency there is. Here are stats from my phpBB2 board. Now these stats are not 100% effective since user edits on their post when the post is the last post in a topic were originally not recorded. Post edits were only counted when they were not the last post. Also moderator edits of other user posts were not tracked. I say "were" because some time back (several years ago?) I changed the edit process so that every edit was counted. I did this in order to gather information for building my own post revision tracking system. So, enough of the disclaimer. Here are the numbers:
Code: Select all
+-----------------+----------+
| post_edit_count | count(*) |
+-----------------+----------+
| 0 | 779246 |
| 1 | 6095 |
| 2 | 754 |
| 3 | 151 |
| 4 | 53 |
| 5 | 16 |
| 6 | 12 |
| 7 | 5 |
| 8 | 6 |
| 12 | 1 |
| 13 | 1 |
| 14 | 1 |
| 15 | 1 |
| 17 | 1 |
| 24 | 1 |
| 32 | 1 |
+-----------------+----------+
If I extrapolate the same ratio to phpbb.com there would be less than 42,000 rows in the post revisions table.
My point is, the expected number of post revisions is extremely low. Providing the ability to prune revisions would seem to be superfluous. On smaller boards with 50,000 posts the projected number of post revisions is 500.
Suppose that my numbers are completely off because phpBB2 did not fully track post edits. Well, suppose that revision tracking doesn't kick in until there has been at least one reply to the post? That would exactly mimic the way phpBB2 originally worked, and the numbers above would be valid. BTW, the topics that have been edited the most times (32 in one case) are the FAQ topics, which are updated much more frequently than normal posts.
Anyway, I just wanted to put some numbers behind the discussion so it's a bit more practical than fully theoretical. If someone has access to phpbb.com database to pull the same numbers, that would prove to be very interesting I think.