Making edit histories more viewable

[castaway]

I've just posted a bunch of patches, 433668 - 433678, which attempt to make the editing process more visible for non-editors. They do the following:

• Restrict the viewing of edits to nodes, to those that can actually view those nodes (canReadNode).
• Add a flag for the editors to set, if a particular edit is sensitive (eg removing email/passwords).
• Remove the 'history' link from the editors nodelet, and add it to the approval and node status nodelets.
• Create a new superdoc for editors, to view all recent edits made (default currently, the last 50).
• Link to the new doc from the editors nodelet.

For this to work, the edithistory table needs a new field, "private", see the node editors page patch.

My original thought was, why isn't there a way for editors to view all recent edits made? (Sometimes I go through NTC, edit 8 of 20 nodes or so, come back the next day, and wonder what happened to the rest :). I also realised that the edithistory page has been visible to non-editors for a while, yet no link existed for them to look at it.

Original notes:

# Current: Anyone can view the edithistory page (displaytype), for any
+ node
# (including wikis!)
# Only editors can view the actual edit page of any node (or gods)
#
# Should be: anyone can view the edithistory page for any node that th
+ey can
# read anyway
# Anyone can view the actual edit page for nodes they can view, except
+ when
# these are marked private
# Editors have a chance to mark edits as private, should only be used 
+for
# extreme cases such as removing credit card numbers/email addresses
# A edit marked as private automagically sets any previous edits to pr
+ivate.
# These edits are viewable in the edithistory page, but only editors c
+an view
# the actual contents.

Comments?

C.

[tye]

Good job. Thank you.

I'd like spiders to not spider edit histories. One way to prevent this is to not link to the next step for AnonyMonks. So I'd like AnonyMonk to have access to view the list of edits but not the content of any edits.

No access to anonymonks appeals to me for other reasons (that I'm not feeling eloquent enough to explain ATM). I realize that anonymous posters will sometimes have interest in the details of an edit. I don't mind that getting such requires registering, even if one never posts while registered for various reasons.

[castaway]

Added: Disallowed Anony Monk from viewing actual edits, in edithistory display page - (patch).

C.

[martinvi]

I don't know, if I should comment on the proposual or stay with 'perl 101'. So, please remember: Everything in my comment that is or look wrong is a hard reference to my misconception of the mechanics of PM.

Restrict the viewing of edits to nodes, to those that can actually view those nodes (canReadNode).

This is pretty obvious to me. If I can't view some information, I don't know about the change history of said information.

Add a flag for the editors to set, if a particular edit is sensitive (eg removing email/passwords).

Since I didn't understand the details of an "edits to nodes"-cycle, I can't say much about the necessarity of said flag. Of course, removing sensitive information is important, but what is the benefit of flaging sensitive edits as sensitive?

Remove the 'history' link from the editors nodelet, and add it to the approval and node status nodelets

I buy that one. The change history of a node -- and that's the way, I look on "edits to nodes" -- is part of the nodes metainformation, not of editors metainformation.

Create a new superdoc for editors, to view all recent edits made (...)
Link to the new doc from the editors nodelet.

I don't know, what a "superdoc" is, but I imagine a kind of "svn status --show-updates --verbose" or something similar. If that image is somewhere in the proximity of a "superdoc", it's quite reasonable to provide the complete list of changes between the "HEAD" and the "PREV" revision. And of course, there had to be a link for the benefit of those, who edit.

I hope, I'm somewhere within epsilon ;-)

[ysth]

All looks good, thanks.

Only thing that bothers me is showing the edithistory link even when there is none; I have a preference toward avoiding giving links to pages that turn up empty of detail (or forbidden). AM obviously shouldn't see the link, and it shouldn't show for non-editable nodetypes. Don't know if it is worth a db query to catch cases of no data, or if there is a way to make it determinable from the node itself.

[castaway]

I can prevent AM from seeing it, but as you say, I'm not sure its worth the extra effort of a DB query, just to check the presence. (Although it should be a fairly succint one: select count(*) from edithistory where edithistory_id=getId($NODE), and check for >1 ..

C.