Last edited

Ages ago, we briefly talked about this "Last edited" thing on discord.


I think it's there to shame people who can't get their grammar right on the first attempt. It was suggested it might be there to stop cheating (although that seems a little thin to me - it's not like the DM sees previous versions).

I think it's clutter.

What do we think?
Keep it as is.
Remove it completely.
Show it only to GM.

And on the subject of clutter...



Do we really need this above every post? And to see it on every "advanced" reply?

If you are talking about showing the number of times it was edited, I don't think that is valuable.

But knowing that a post was edited is important. We have to go back and check what changed and if we need to then change anything in the fiction of our game.

I have a rule in all my game that players don't edit the content of their posts. But many players are sloppy and forget or ignore that rule, and knowing that they did edit, and when, allows me to check (from memory or by asking them) that the facts in my head are still the facts on the page.

It would be nice to have a way to mark an edit as 'minor' so we can know that they (intended to) only change slight grammar or spelling ('there -> their' is not a big deal but 'not -> now' kinda is) so we don't have to look too closely.

Sometimes we want to change the title of a post, so we do need it on the advanced reply (which will hopefully become the only reply?).

It is a pity that, when we do change it, the site does not show the new title in 'the usual places'.

For the Edited thing: I think we should keep the time of the last edit but not show the number of edits. Rather than marking an edit as "minor", I'd prefer an option to mark an edit as "major", which would automatically mark the post as unread again.

---

For the header thing: I want to keep that. But I would prefer to remove the "Re:" from responses to threads. That has no use and only serves to cut off the ends of the titles of responses to long thread names

What do you mean by that?

Having the Mark as Major also mark the post as unread and send a notification would be a significant benefit.

I don't have strong feelings, but 'mark as minor' is the existing vernacular (from Wikipedia and such) and also means that, when (not if) the user forgets to select the correct one, we get told, rather than major edits going by unnoticed.

Agreed. We already removed it from displaying in many places, may as well get rid of it completely, it feels out of place on a PbP site and even served very little purpose on real forums.

On the home page, the 'search' page (All Latest Posts), and in email notifications, the thread title would still show as 'RE: Old Title' and not whatever new title we give it in the advanced post.

But this is probably what we want, since we don't want to represent it as a new thread, so I don't recommend changing how it works, it just does appear a bit odd the first few times it is encountered.

This could create unexpected consequences. The system keeps track of the last post you read, not whether you've read individual posts. If someone made a major edit to a post on an early page, and another user used the "take me to the last unread post" link then there would still be a bunch of pages unread after the edit (as their new last unread would be the start of the next page).

And they would lose track of which was their actual last read post.

Yeah. It all becomes a bit of mess without changing the db (which I've so far avoided).

We could still do a notification so people know there was a change that might constitute new facts.

Hm, I wouldn't assume people often edit posts far back so I didn't think of that. But that is a good thought to keep in mind. Probably not mark unread, though. But if we introduce more notifications, that could work to jsut push a notification.

I'm mostly thinking of this feature for when GMs post some rolls and then edit an actual post into that post. Every time that happens, I see it before the post is up and then only get reminded of that thread once someone else replies to it. Mark Unread has helped a bit with that, though.

Random thought to also help mitigate that. What if rolls weren't attached to posts but happened inbetween posts? That way you could roll and then make a post afterwards. Plus, you couldn't delete a post with a bad roll and post again because rolls are separate entities

Sending an email is pretty trivial, but I'm shocked at how few people subscribe to forums/threads. I think I'm the only person subscribing to email for IDRotF.

A homepage notification line for a major edit seems a little heavyweight, no?

I think something needs to be done. But I'm not sure this is it.

My workflow for these sorts of posts can be a bit...

Narrate a bit
Add rolls
Save to see my roll results
Describe those rolls
Add some more rolls
Save to see my roll results
Describe those rolls
etc.

I explicitly forbid that. I don't tend to play game that call for rolls before the fiction of the roll is known (even with DnD I always wanted the fiction first, else untrustworthy players could claim it as a 'clearing my throat' that failed, and 'now I want to persuade' or similar fudging of the consequence). When in doubt I have them post up to the point that the action could fail and then add the roll, and then make a new post with the rest (or wait for input if need be). But that is part of the social contract of my games and not site related.
Being able to delete a post and with it the rolls could be a big deal. A simple way to mitigate this would be very nice, and should be talked about for V2 if it does not fit here.

Just it has never been a problem for me does not mean it is not a problem.

Maybe people will start using emails more now that they are working better?

Email is the standard notification mechanism for (almost?) all PbP sites and if people choose not to use them then I can can't be bothered to cater for their choices.
I don't know. If someone makes a major change (changed the fiction) then we have to know about it, whatever it takes,

Wasn't there talk of some dropdown thing with mentions and stuff? It would maybe fit in there 💁‍♀️

---

Why would I subscribe to threads? I'll see them faster on GP than I'd see the email. And if I subscribe to all my games, (assuming I would get email notifications) my entire email post box would be nothing but GP. And if I don't subscribe to all of them, then what's the point since I'd still have to go to the site to check on the others.
I'm about as surprised that anyone uses notifications as you are that not more people do 😆

---

My workflow for these sorts of posts can be a bit...
Yea, exactly. And people won't see any of the latter bits unless you make a new post or send a discord note to your players or something

It's mostly GMs doing that in my experience. Players usually end their posts with rolls while GMs often start with them.

I've caught people cheat like that before 😅
It wasn't a big deal so I let it slide. And GMs can take away their players' permissions to delete posts if they feel it might be a problem. So it's not like it's a huge deal (though newer members might not know these options) but it is a deal