Fuddland

I’ve long been an admirer of Lump’s commenting system, which allows people to edit their comment for up to 15 minutes after it was originally posted—it allows links that have been messed-up to be corrected or typos to be addressed [some of us could have done with this a couple of weeks ago over at D4D!]. So I was pretty happy when Mark Jaquith guest-posted on Scriptygoddess a technique for MT-based blogs to add this very function.

It took a bit of time to iron out a couple of general bugs, and then some fairly heavy editing of the script to get it outputting things specific to my layout [and to make that output XHTML 1.0 Strict-compliant], but I think it should be working now. I’m not completely sure it will work across all timezones, but time will tell I suppose.

I’ve set the time-limit of the life of the “Edit this comment” link to 20 minutes and the final time-out to be 30 minutes, so if you choose to edit your comment you’ll have a minimum of 10 minutes and maximum of about 30 minutes in which to make your changes, and you can edit it as many times as you like within that time. Note that MT still sends me an email containing the text of the original comment, so if someone drastically changes the sentiment of their comment, I’ll know about it. [Ooh, that sounds a bit like a threat doesn’t it?]

#1

Daisy | 2004 / 04 / 17 – 22:31

Test number one. It’s now… 22:31. Will be back in 10 minutes to edit. I like this idea!

#2

David | 2004 / 04 / 17 – 23:01

Re #1: It’s now 23:01—looks like you missed your window to edit your comment, scatterbrain!

[Unless, of course, it just didn’t work.]

[Edited by commenter — 23:01]

#3

Daisy | 2004 / 04 / 17 – 23:37

It’s now 23:37 and you’re right, I’m a scatterbrain. I was fiddling with a new list chez daisy. Pfft. Right, test #2.

2 minutes later - it works! And it tells you how long you’ve got to edit.

*steps back in admiration*

[Edited by commenter — 23:40]

#4

David | 2004 / 04 / 18 – 00:38

Re #3: Hoorah! Please aim all admiration in Mark’s general direction. :)

#5

mrtn | 2004 / 04 / 19 – 12:22

seems to be the in thing to do to test this new-fangled thingy out

ooh, wondered how the verification was done. email address. cool. and the timer going down in real-time is pretty cool too.

[Edited by commenter — 12:24]

#6

mrtn | 2004 / 04 / 19 – 12:29

comment deleted because it was irrelevant

[Edited by commenter — 12:36]

#7

David | 2004 / 04 / 19 – 12:35

Re #5: Yeah, email and IP address are checked actually, so even if someone knows what email address you’ve used to make a comment, they need to be using the same computer [or to have spoofed the IP—and I really don’t think anyone’s going to go to those lengths!] to edit a recent comment.

The downside is, if you’ve got a dynamic IP and it changes [e.g. you disconnect and dial up again] within the 30 minutes, you won’t be able to edit your comment.

#8

David | 2004 / 04 / 19 – 15:30

mrtn has discovered a fairly major bug whereby, if you edit your comment and delete the entire thing, effectively submitting a blank comment, the interface breaks down completely.

Until this is addressed, there’s a neat workaround: don’t submit blank comments!

#9

David | 2004 / 04 / 19 – 20:14

Further to #8: Bugfix by Mark should have sorted it. Yay!

#10

David* | 2004 / 04 / 19 – 22:13

but what happens if someone is feeling mischievous and enters a felonious name into the name field and starts posting comments about deleted comments and insulting your general readership all the while posing as the you of you?

this seems like a serious problem, dude. ; P

#11

David | 2004 / 04 / 19 – 22:36

Re #10: Weird. I don’t remember writing that. ;)

#12

mrtn | 2004 / 04 / 20 – 12:49

comment deleted because it was testing

[Edited by commenter — 12:50]

Commenting on this post is closed. Thanks to all those who left comments. If you'd still like to say something about this entry, feel free to email me.