Internet Annoyances
January 12, 2012 - 6:11pm
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The internets have some peculiar annoying trends. I'll start with Babble.
What is with the uneditable first post? A good way to discern a rookie from a veteran poster (which I'm not, just observant) is a thread that starts with a symbol of some type or just the word "next". Why do we live with this?
So it is simply impossible to get someone to modify the software to allow first post editing? I'll bet if we make a concerted effort to piss off the group Anonymous enough every single blank first post would soon be filled up with "We are Anonymous. We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."
Speaking of this "hacker" group, when are we gonna get to see the secret Nasa photos showing Neil Armstrong prancing around on a stage, instead of expired credit card numbers and useless Hotmail passwords? I don't forgive you Anonymous, for being mundane.
^This^
Why do people say that? Are you indicating you agree to such an extent that you are only capable of expressing your agreement with a single word?
^This^
Jesus H Mary and Joseph.
Or how about "I wish there was a like button". Personally, I wish there was an "explode" button.
Youtube is a treasure trove. Why does every third comment start with the words "Thumbs up if". Is there a secret Powerball Lottery I'm not aware of that awards ten quadrillion dollars to the person with the largest number beside the little green thumb icon?
Then of course you have the geniuses who like to sit in front of a webcam yakking away about "life n' stuff", which is excruciating enough, but they then get the notion to upload it as a "video response" to say... Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.
Anyway, I don't Tweet and I don't Facebook, so perhaps someone can chime in on those abominations
The internets have some peculiar annoying trends. I'll start with Babble.
What is with the uneditable first post? A good way to discern a rookie from a veteran poster (which I'm not, just observant) is a thread that starts with a symbol of some type or just the word "next". Why do we live with this?
Here's my understanding of why this is. rabble.ca runs on a very popular web content management system called Drupal. Drupal is a very powerful web CMS. I understand that even whitehouse.gov runs on it these days. If you're designing a big complicated site like rabble.ca, you can do just about anything with it. That is "just about". My understanding is that it's not all that great for doing web forums like the babble section of rabble.ca So, there is this particularly irritating problem in the forums where you can't edit a first post.
This could probably be fixed, but it would take dozens of hours of tech guru time to do it. rabble.ca doesn't have the financial resources of whitehouse.gov and so, it doesn't get done.
I suppose it could get fixed if perhaps babble posters could get together to take up a collection to raise enough money for the tech gurus to put in the computer time to fix it. Till then, it's one of those little irritations we live with.
I don't really see any technical reason why the first post can't be edited. There is a permission in Drupal to allow users to edit their own forum posts. I can't imagine any kind of need for hours of work or what the gotcha would be. I have set up sites using the Drupal 6 core forum (what we are using here) and gave users the ability to edit their forum posts.
I had assumed that Rabble had made some kind of editorial decision to not allow it.
Sounds like this person is experiencing the same issue with drupal 7.x. And I'm thinking the s/w must make use of some kind of db or other and prolly mysql. It has to have some way of storing posts in a defined data structure for storage in a flat db file. The first post and every other one after that should be nodes, as in a linked list, with every one of them pointing back to the one before it and the post after like box cars in a train. I think editing or removing items in a linked list works without a hitch 90+ percent of the time when there is no situation of contention for the db record ie. the first node in a linked list. Break a link, tho, and you have a runaway train. I'm thinking that if not done properly, you could have a situation where an entire thread disappears for no apparent reason.
Interesting question: Are administrators able to edit the first post?
But then I'm wondering why is it a problem? I am no web programmer, but I think babble works pretty well. Why mess with it if it works? I mean anybody can monkey with the source code, but who has time to harden that code by rigorous testing in a live setup?
Interesting question: Are administrators able to edit the first post?
They can edit thread titles (which we humble users used to be able to in old babble), so I would guess the answer to your question is "yes".
Well then? I'd say it's a conspiracy to stop us from editing first posts.What do the internet feds/admins have to say about it? They can either grant us the privilege to edit first posts or not. And I'm almost certain the answer is either yes or no.
Fidel, the issue you linked to in #4 pertains to the Advanced Forum contributed module for D7. Babble is using the forum module that comes with core. I think core forum was a good choice for Babble.
Assuming that Rabble is using the most recent version of Drupal 6 (may or may not be the case, but core forum hasn't really changed in Drupal 6 in quite a while, here is the most recent version of the core forum module.
If you go to line 326 you see the permissions that forum module implements:
* Implementation of hook_perm().
*/
function forum_perm() {
return array('create forum topics', 'delete own forum topics', 'delete any forum topic', 'edit own forum topics', 'edit any forum topic', 'administer forums');
}
So core forum comes with the following editing permissions: "edit own forum topics" and "edit any forum topic". I would assume that moderators on babble have "edit any forum topic" as they appear to have the ability to edit. Maybe "administer forums" gives them the edit access though.
I don't know of any reasons off hand why they wouldn't give authenticated users the "edit own forum topics" permission. Maybe it interfered with something else, sometimes this happens with sites.
Alrighty then. So there exists 'edit any forum topic' capability.
Is the first post considered to be a forum topic?
Is a forum topic considered a node in a tree and leaf stucture that can be traversed/searched?
Is only the first post a node and each successive post a text comment belonging to that parent node or post#1?
Or is every post including the very first post simply a text comment within a data array?
I think editing the first post should be doable. How much re-writing of the core code would be necessary is another thing.
a "forum topic" (the first post) is a node, everything else is a comment. Babblers have the ability to edit their own comments but not edit their own forum topics.
no reworking of core core is necessary, but there must have been some reason they chose not to give people this permission.
Well I don't like that rookie setup. It's not very flexible. I would make it so as every post is a node, or every post is a comment but not both.
And admins holding out on us for editing rights on first nodes is a diabolical plot.