Community posts...?

[mathbalarka]

Is it possible to add a tool that would make a certain post by someone edited indefinitely long and by any member within the forum?

As a defense, perhaps that tool will be only available from MCP and be accessible to a staff. Also, the ones who can edit that must be at least a craftsman?

I am not sure if this is a good idea, but I believe such tools are needed sometimes. For example, assume I am writing a thread concerning the recent developments on twin prime, just like the one in Useful Mathematical Resource forum. The developments are on-going, so one needs to constantly edit it after a few weeks to keep everyone informed about this, as well as adding more references. But after 24 hours, the editing ability is expired and I cannot edit it anymore. I am not complaining, but if such a tool was available, I would have PM'd an MHB staff requesting to activate the community posting ability. Thus, after reviewing the post on whether or not it is worthed, the staff will activate the ability, thus any of the forum member at least an MHB craftsman can edit the recent on-going developments in.

I believe I have pointed out the necessities as well as defensive anti-spam or troll measures. But perhaps VB does not support such tools? Perhaps it needs too much coding to add in? In such cases, no big deal.

Thank you for your considerations
Balarka
.

 

[Prove It]

Why not just make another post in that thread?

 

[Deveno]

I can think of a couple reasons:

If the development of an idea is long, re-posting to obtain a simple edit might make such a thread unreadable as the number of pages gets very large.

It occurs to me that what might occur is something like working on a "book in progress", there are two parts:

(a) the "finished" (or at least "finished with") part
(b) discussion and tangents related to part (a)

Now maintenance of such a thread could obviously be done by a sufficiently high-ranked staff member, but that *may* place a high workload on the staff (especially if the originating idea and main contributions come from non-staff members).

Overall, one would like to wind up with an initial offering that is accessible not only to those who have been participating, but to any who might stumble across it in their interwebs wanderings.

For a "single-author" musing, the current "tutorial/commentary" format would probably serve, as whatever staff/non-staff communication was necessary would be one on one, and straight-forward. With a collaborative effort, this could get a bit dicey.

I think that such capabilities do exist, it is largely a question of whether or not the staff has the necessary organizational infrastructure to deal with the on-going maintenance required. It seems to me certain kinds of threads/sections like this could well become over time quite time-consuming.

 

[Jameson]

One of my goals this year is to reduce the amount of add-ons we use or optimize them to require less server resources. Given that goal, adding a new plugin doesn't make sense here so I propose another option. If someone has been on the site for a decent amount of time and has the intention of writing tutorials or other kinds of posts that work better with many edits, then we can make a special usergroup with unlimited editing time and add these users to that group.

 

[Deveno]

I concur...this seems to be something that could be handled through appropriate permissions granted via the control panel (or some similar administrative tool), but there will probably have to be a staff member assigned to monitoring the "special" usergroup, to prevent abuses.

In effect, our very own "mini-wiki" but with limited membership.

Meh...if it doesn't work out as planned, we can always burn the place to the ground, and collect the insurance (just joking...)!

 

[Jameson]

Well the only downside to my proposal is that these members couldn't edit others' posts, only their own. They could edit their own indefinitely though.

Speaking of a wiki, we could set one up if it seems like a better platform to share our custom content. That or maybe a blog. With a blog we could have permissions that are different than the MHB ones so we could give more power to users there. Just some ideas to toss around. The blog idea has been discussed for a while now.

 

[Deveno]

Interesting idea...but I assume there are financial considerations with that, too?

 

[mathbalarka]

Speaking of a wiki, we could set one up if it seems like a better platform to share our custom content. That or maybe a blog. With a blog we could have permissions that are different than the MHB ones so we could give more power to users there. Just some ideas to toss around. The blog idea has been discussed for a while now.

Jameson, if you do that, I'll leave MSE and come back here at 100%, even more active than MMF. Probably a forum blog is a never-before-applied idea on internet forum history, AFAIK.

Financial consideration is a matter, yes, but perhaps donating will be more frequent if set up a wiki/blog?

 

[Jameson]

Setting up a wiki site or a blog would both be free, so finances aren't a problem at all. The only potential thing to work out would be the design of it and how to integrate it with the forum. I could get one up and running though in a heartbeat.

 

[mathbalarka]

The only potential thing to work out would be the design of it

But that's not a problem at all. How about setting up a competition?

(Haha, I am going to be nominated for the best ideas award for all this idea )

 

[MarkFL]

Well the only downside to my proposal is that these members couldn't edit others' posts, only their own. They could edit their own indefinitely though...

Another alternative we might consider is adding the users who are staff approved to have the ability to edit these posts as moderators to the Useful Mathematics Resources subforum, where only the "Can Edit Posts" option is set to Yes.

edit: Now I see that child forums inherit the moderators of the parent, so this may not be a viable option after all.

edit 2: We could manually turn off all moderating privileges to the child forums...

 

[mathbalarka]

Somehow, 'editing their posts indefinitely' seems like a not-so-much good idea to me. What this suggestion meant was collaborative editing, so to speak.

 

[MarkFL]

Somehow, 'editing their posts indefinitely' seems like a not-so-much good idea to me. What this suggestion meant was collaborative editing, so to speak.

In order to be able to edit a post made by someone else (a collaborative effort), one must be granted moderating privileges, and there is no option in the AdminCP (that I know of, but I am still relatively new to its use) to limit moderators to the period of time during which they may edit posts.

 

[mathbalarka]

Yes, that is why I prefer wiki much. Some tutorials and posts (questions and answers alike) are off-the chain, and it would be loads better to collaboratively add ideas to them.

 

[Jameson]

Somehow, 'editing their posts indefinitely' seems like a not-so-much good idea to me. What this suggestion meant was collaborative editing, so to speak.

Well Mark's suggestion kind of fulfills your original request, however maybe a Wiki page here is an idea you like better? I'm not opposed to trying that out or trying out a blog. If you still like these ideas let me talk it over with the staff and see what we can do.

 

[mathbalarka]

maybe a Wiki page here is an idea you like better?

Hahaha, yes.