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.

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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 💁‍♀️

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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 😆

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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

I took @mentions out. I got the impression that people didn't like the implementation, so I shot it head.
Oh yeah. I know what the problem is. I don't know the solution though.

I have seen many games where players post "TBD" (normally in angle brackets, but I can not post those here:) and roll and then come back and fill in what they did. They even have a name: "TBD posts", and are sufficiently standard that many assume that is how things are done, so I have to explicitly ban them in all my games to counter that assumption.

Really? I thought I was the only person on the site/discord who wasn't head over heels in love with the idea of @ mentions 😆
I feel like having rolls not be part of posts but something you do inbetween posts would be a good solution (or allowing both maybe).

The solution of 'don't play with people you don't trust' is not helpful here so adding mechanisms that protect against this cheating is a good thing.

The only reason I use dice rollers is to simulate the shared experience of everyone looking over to see the outcome on important rolls. I found that aspect lacking on games where I have players use whatever (physical?) dice they have lying around. Rolling on the site added that excitement back.

Might be different in different systems maybe. I've seen those from players but very rarely. Mostly from GMs.
Doesn't matter though. TBD posts are a big hassle, regardless of who they come from, in my opinion

Yea, "never play with new members" is not a good solution I think 😆

I would feel weird if a game didn't have dice rolls in the thread. Just someone writing "I totally rolled a 19 there, btw" would feel strange. Even if I know and trust the user

Whereas I positively encourage TBD style posts from players. I almost can't imagine playing without them. Meh - wouldn't it be awful if we were all the same?

But yeah, knowing when a post is finished so I can react is somewhat of a problem.

Some of us play games across many sites and constantly hitting F5 on all of them is not practical, especially when some of them will only have posts a few times a day, and emails would let us know immediately.

Not everyone has as many updates, most only have a few a day.

It is simple enough to have ones email system sort mails in such a way to make dealing with them easy.

If someone chooses not to use the notification system then the system can not help them and they need to come up with their own system, but that is out of our hands.

If we send emails for edits we should also mark the thread as unread (using the current mechanism) as those are the two mechanisms used here. This might be a v2 issues, though?

I only really find this with DnD games/players. But that does mean it is a common standard.

Marking the whole thread as unread for everyone (except the editor) is trivial from a coding standpoint - but it gives no indication of what happened if it was a major edit on an early post.

Maybe the solution is to mark the whole thread unread (as you suggest), and rely on people saying "Oi! Stop making major edits on early posts! It's confusing!"

Minor edit by default so it's opt in.

Yep. Non-idea. But miles better than no indication that things changed.

We're in agreement.

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And I'm not saying using email notifications is a bad idea for everyone. Just that it'd be very impractical for me. And considering you need to manually subscribe to threads for notifications, I don't think we should consider them a core part of the site but rather an addition. I'd be very annoyed if we implemented a solution that required me to rely on an outside service (email) rather than keep things in one place

My policy is still Don't Edit, and I will just point people at that rule each time they disobey.

Yeah, other places do this better. Some let you set defaults for which threads you automatically subscribe to (ones in your games, ones you reply to, all of a certain type) and you only need to do anything when you want to do something different to your default.

At leas GP lets us subscribe to a forum, so I get email for this thread as soon as it is created, no action required.

Lots to catch up on -- y'all are busy posters. I use TBD style posts all the time, and there are loads of games (beyond D&D) that really encourage roll-then-narrate workflows, or even narrate-roll-narrate more. Love the idea of a little switch that says 'good to go,' but it's easy enough to include an OOC note saying as much. I normally use [post coming], [under construction] or the like, and rarely if ever have a problem with it in my games. Cross-posting is a *much* bigger deal, as it can take me some time to draft up a larger post...

Because you use discord to alert people after your post is finished. The site alone doesn't support TBD posts

Sure it does. Just use an OOC comment. I've operated that way across more than a half-dozen PbP sites for close to 20 years, and I haven't had problems with that on any of them. Discord does make things easier and faster, but I'd argue that there are way more problematic things real-time comms solve beyond "TBD" posts.

Of course you can do this. But my point is that many people don't and it's an annoying issue that I wish there was a fix from the site for 😄

Allow me to clarify...

We deserve rights too 😄

You do, I agree. Also, I was being generous with having it only be once a minute...

I'm pretty new to the site, but I edit my posts pretty frequently. Mostly it's for grammar, spelling, or upon looking back I realize I didn't say what I meant to say clearly. If I couldn't edit posts in forum I would find posting much more burdensome as I'd have to do my drafts in a word document. It would slow down my post time. I'd probably post less reliably. If people are afraid of cheating then I think keeping when and how many times something is edited to be useful. I'm not sure I fully understand the cheating issue. How do you cheat at an RPG? Maybe make it so dice rolls can't be modified but the text can?

That is pretty much what we have already. You can only add more dice rolls to a post, not change existing ones, nor their descriptions.
I think the 'cheating' issues were:
you can delete a post with a bad roll and add another post, hoping for better rolls. I have not encountered this, I tend to play games where 'bad rolls' are not a bad thing and players desire them to add interesting elements to the story, but others might not feel the same.

But also, with specific regard to the topic of 'editing' I have seen players who never 'fail' at important things, but always claim they were doing something trivial when the bad roll happened. Editing the post (or worse, post "TBD" and waiting to see they dice outcome before describing the action) can lead to this.
That last one is a problem. If what you said was not clear and people have read it, you need to make it very clear what you changed so everyone is on the same page.

Many of the 'grammar/spelling' edits would be considered "minor edits" since they might not change the meaning of the post, but clarifying something that was not clear is a "major edit", and everyone needs to go back and read it again... and also need untangled what was said before from what is said now with no easy way to see the exact changes made. Either the edit needs an accompanying list of changes (a 'diff', if you will) or it would have been better to add another post saying "oops, I meant to say...".

This might just be my opinion, but I play with neurodivergent players who struggle a lot with reality and having players 'change reality' by subtly editing post is as major problem for them.

That seems very clunky to me. I know you had said that you can't know everyone you play with so trust can be an issue, but in general isn't it better to give people the benefit of the doubt first and address problems as they arise? If someone changes something several pages back but everyone has moved on how does that help or hinder anyone at all? It seems like editing has a narrow window of relevancy, and then it doesn't matter much to the rest of the game.
That is a valid point. Do you think that this falls under the umbrella of social contract established before the game? You said you have a hard rule about editing in your games. Do you think that adam needs to make that built in to the forum? I think that might cut down on the flexibility of the forums for other players who have different needs or wants.

It's already possible to disable post editing in a specific forum, I believe

Yes, it is a social contract thing. It is also a constant fight. :(
No, it is a per game or per group thing and not a site issue. Correct use of the minor edit checkbox might help.

It is just a pity that so few people are willing to consider the harm and force others to 'out themselves' before they will consider it valid to say 'please don't edit'.

Fortunately I do not suffer this way, but always had rules about editing because things get confusing when various people think different things happened. We can not share a narrative when we are not on the same page. Explicit editing is the only solution I have found to work, so that is now my rule for all games. Only after enforcing this rule did people start admitting that they 'struggle' (i.e. panic or shutdown) over this elsewhere, bringing the problem to my attention.

I have not tried that, minor edits have never been a problem and disallowing edits is not a feature most other places have. It is good that is an option if it is needed.

I had a player notify me of another player cheating by deleting their post with a bad roll and then posting a new post with a better roll. It was the first time (at least that I'm aware of) and I always assumed deleting posts was disabled by default. Is there a way to make that default? Players shouldn't need to be able to delete posts when they can edit them instead, and GMs can delete the post in the rare cases it is an issue.

We can change it on a per forum basis, and can set the default for each game in its Administrative Control Panel (top right of game forum).

Maybe this (no delete) should be the default? Seems like an issue we should discuss more in its own thread.

It seems like having the ability to delete posts be turned off for players as the default would nullify cheating.
My neurodivergence would make it very difficult for me to not be able to fix something I perceived as an error that disrupts continuity. Since neurodivergence is not a monolith (I'm quite sure there is no such thing as a group of humans that is monolithic, even though that is often the default way of viewing groups of humans), I don't think there is any way around talking to the individuals of your group about what they need. There are people with mutually exclusive needs and they just may not be able to play together.

I can tell you right now it would be very difficult for me to play in your no editing group. I'd sit on posts and revise them many times in a word document before posting and would post less frequently and would lag behind. It would ruin my verisimilitude and I'd have a lot less fun, and the games would just become points of stress to the point which I would just stop playing.

Getting to the main point I personally don't know if a minor/major edit button would help as that is up to the person editing and one person's minor edit may be another's major. I think the only thing that would really help in that regard is being able to see a log of what was edited, but I imagine that would be difficult to implement.

Which is why my rule is that edits need to be explicit. If you need to edit something, make sure everyone knows about the edit and knows what changed, then the group can know to work around it.
That would be ideal. It would solve all these problems. It might be a thing we can aim for in v2.