User Comments

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, new copy here, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In at wisi in sapien gravida scelerisque. Sed pellentesque quam eu leo. Proin et libero in wisi interdum blandit. Vestibulum ante ipsum orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Integer consectetuer semper orci. primis in faucibus a little more editing. Duis odio. Vestibulum vulputate. Cras purus tortor, accumsan a, scelerisque ac, bibendum in, libero. Sed eu purus ac nisl hendrerit accumsan. Cras auctor dignissim sem. Sed dignissim ullamcorper lacus. Sed aliquam convallis eros. Proin tristique, ligula nec vulputate scelerisque, metus nisl cursus odio, rutrum porttitor metus urna et ipsum. Vestibulum a eros sit amet velit viverra blandit.

Then we'll add a whole new paragraph!

NOTE: This comment has been edited by its author! Additions are shown in italics, deletions with a strike-through.

Yet another test, this time posting as a “guest” user…

Good, seems to be okay.

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This is unedited an entry that I have edited. I have completely deleted my original comments.

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zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

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This looks mostly okay to me. But I think I have found a glitch.

In my previous comment (no.4 above) my initial, unedited text was “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz”.

I then edited. I deleted that first text entirely and replaced it with “zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba”.

However, looking at the resulting comment, it seems to me that the two strings are the wrong way round. Surely the “abc…” should come first as that was the first message?

Other than that, seems to work really well. Good work.

Thanks for participating Homer. Regarding your question - the revision handling for your comment (4) is working as I intended.

In this particular case you have completely replaced your first comment with new content in the edit - effectively creating a whole new comment.

The presentation logic I have implemented here assumes that, in these cases, the user would prefer to see the “live” comment first, followed by the original comment (which they might not even be interested in). If I’m wrong in this assumption, then I’ll adjust the code accordingly.

Remember this is intended as a proof-of-concept. It is exactly this sort of feedback that will help me to refine the code to match user’s expectations.

I really like your ideas here. The editing via temp cookie should work out very nicely as an alternative to preview.

What was it about Shapeshifter that made it the right choice for this site?

BTW: Looks like you've got a bit of a bug with the nbsp in the first line of this comment.

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Thanks for your kind comments Scott, I must stress that the I am only responsible for the implementation - the principles were first described by 37Signals and Ryan Brill.

I completely agree, being able to edit is good alternative to a preview. However, I am beginning to appreciate that preview still has it’s place.

I’m afraid I don’t see the “nbsp” bug, could you clarify?

{promote self} I wrote Shapeshifter. I maintain it and thus I know the codebase inside out - for me it is the ONLY choice for any website I develop! {/promote self}

Ah, silly me. I didn’t realize that you authored Shapeshifter. Of course it’s the only choice for you. ;-)

Anyhow, it looks like the nbsp disappeared in one of my edits, but what I saw was an “nbsp;” appear after my first edit where previously I had typed two spaces. I went back to delete the cruft, and I then saw the “nbsp;” with a strikethrough. Not sure if this is descriptive enough, and I’m not sure whether I could reproduce it either.

Anyhow, your implementation of Ryan and 37Signals’ ideas seems top notch. I’ll certainly be checking out the feature list of Shapeshifter in the very near future.

Aha! That’s a great description Scott and I know exactly why that happens now that you’ve explained it so clearly. I’ll patch this shortly.

Please do check out Shapeshifter - contact me if you need further information (you can email me directly via the “contact” link in the footer of the page).

The “nbsp” bug should now be fixed. Thanks again Scott.

Now that’s what I call fast. I’m impressed. :)

{grin}

Just giving your implementation a test run. I've not had time to actually put “my” (37signals, really) concept into action. I'm planning on working it directly into my blogging software, and each individual blogger will have the option to enable or disable comment editing. I'll probably use a slightly different set of rules and a slightly different implementation, but overall, it appears like you've basically hit what my aim is.

Now to test out a typa… typo… ;)

This sentence has been added as an edit. Also, the above typo was fixed.

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Ryan I would be very interested to review your implementation. I am also very happy to share code snippets if you’re interested.

In your article you identify the following problem:

“…if two comments were posted in quick succession, it would not allow the first of the two any time to edit.”

This is currently the only major flaw in my implementation (that I’m aware of anyway). I am currently working on a solution and should have this resolved over the weekend.

Thanks for dropping by! :-)

As I wrote above (comment #15), there is currently a significant problem with my editing system in that “…if two comments were posted in quick succession, it would not allow the first of the two any time to edit.”

On a busy website, with many contributors posting and with shorter intervals between posts, this is a major barrier.

This is because the system is designed to allow only the poster of the last comment in a thread the right to edit. The reasoning behind this is that, once further posts have been made, editing an earlier comment could render subsequent posts out of context.

However, I believe I could safely remove this restriction, because my implementation displays the edits that have been made to a comment (if any). Therefore, even though a post may have changed, the context of the thread doesn’t (if that makes sense).

If this is the case and I remove the last-poster-only restriction, then any contributor would retain the right to edit within the 15-minute zone.

Is my reasoning sound here? Is there any reason why I shouldn’t do this?

“The presentation logic I have implemented here assumes that, in these cases, the user would prefer to see the “live” comment first, followed by the original comment…”

Yes I understand now. That makes sence sense when I think about it. You are quite right to do it this way.

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Wow, this is a really cool concept, one I'd like to incorporate into my own blog.

Also, I agree that if you gice give a 15-minute period to edit, and throw out the last post rule, it should be fine.

The strikeout and italics should help to maintain comment and conversation integrity.

Good work! ;)

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Thanks Jish, especially for the reassurance!

I have given it a great deal of thought and I can’t conceive of any situation where removing the “last post only” rule would be dentrimental to comment threads here - simply because the edits are displayed.

I think I’m going to remove that rule.

Following on from Comment #16 (and others), all comments less than (or equal to) 15-minutes old are now editable by their authors.

This is a test comment