Re: Small edit impossible due to "body too similar"
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Continuing the discussion from Small edit impossible due to "body too similar" error:
It's the same issue -- whitespace only edits are blocked. There's no issue with edits that involve something other than whitespace. Test on http://try.discourse.org to see.
Why is this a thing? Surely fixing typos and whitespace errors is pretty minor, while substantially editing a post is what should be discouraged.What if I make a post that gets a bunch of likes and then change it to something else entirely? What if I edit an old post to make an absurd claim that goes unchallenged because no one else already on the thread is reading that far back?
I don't see the issue with allowing minor fixes.
Filed under: FUCKING HELL WHY DO MARKDOWN URLS BREAK <small> TAGS??; I haven't played Lost Coast either
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Surely fixing typos and whitespace errors is pretty minor, while substantially editing a post is what should be discouraged.
I totally agree with this. An edit that's intended solely to improve readability should always be allowed. I don't think there should be any restrictions; if someone drastically edits a post, it'll be logged in the edit history.
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Actually, having thought about it, the policy "whitespace only edits are blocked" is pretty stupid.
So I can't do a "th egood" -> "the good" change.
But I can do a "th egood" -> "the goodFOO" change and then a "the goodFOO" -> "the good" change.
In other words: I can achieve my original aim of a whitespace only edit by making two edits involving adding and deleting non-whitespace.
This is "nested quotes" again. The default behaviour of Discourse does not support something I want to do, but with some manual action let's me achieve my original aim nevertheless - it's just harder to do.
And in this case it goes against the stated intention of Discourse to improve the standard of discourse on the web. Fixing a typo will certainly raise the standard; but if it is that much trouble I will probably not bother in the future.
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Yup, it's behaviour that runs counter to what we're seeing in other forum platforms. That's one of the great things about having actually spent time studying the other platforms and seeing what everyone is doing, and how the users are using them.
Better question: is there full revision tracking? Just track all revisions of posts - most forums find that most of their posts never get edited, then you can see if things were changed and by whom - and just for fun you get to avoid all of the issues outlined in this thread and can safely drop the 'OMG it's too similar' solution-in-search-of-a-problem.
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It frustrates the hell out of me. Sam had something where he had a HTML comment in the FAQ wiki that was something like this
<!-- Please increment this number if you're making a whitespace only change version="1" -->Surely if you have to start resorting to shenanigans like this it's a bit of a red flag.
Filed under: Please fix it guys
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I will get this fixed next week, will just demand that cooked changed by at least 1 letter. That means you will not be able to bump stuff without changing the way a post renders.
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I will get this fixed next week, will just demand that cooked changed by at least 1 letter. That means you will not be able to bump stuff without changing the way a post renders.
How about using the same algorithm, but if the algorithm decides the content is too similar and it's the same post, perform a silent change without bumping anything?
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Yeah I think this is even better, totally agree.
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Actually, I think people will get all annoyed if they muck with html comments and we just swallow the changes.
Filed under:
<!-- it's not fair -->
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You must be used to being in a lose-lose situation by now.
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psst.. the html comments are in the cooked output
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Whitespace is no longer removed from posts before hashing to compare for differences.
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