Display diffs to authenticated users

One simple fix for this would be to simply enable 'view revisions' permissions for authenticated/anonymous users. This would have this information, along with the author who changed it, as well as logs about why (if the person had the foresight to enter them).

Any objections?

Adjusting title.

Based on discussions in http://drupal.org/node/183926 this appears to be the functionality that's suggested, and would meet both use cases.

View revisions would be across all content nodes of the site. Handbook pages, forum topics, project descriptions.....

It is already enabled for the Documentation role. Would this really be helpful for the rest of the population?

Potential downsides are performance. I will have to check with killes to see what his thoughts are on this aspect. If there are no issues from his perspective I am will to enable visibility for authenticated users. If anonymous users cannot be bothered to create an account then I am not so worried about them as this would be a 'benefit' of creating an account.

Still not sold on 'benefits' presented so far. The vast majority of updates are typo's and verbiage fixes.

As this is a web site change to permissions, moving to webmasters queue.

Steven

The main benefits as I see it are:

- Easy to tell when the last time a document was updated and by whom. Useful for evaulating whether or not information might be out of date.
- Easy to tell when the document was initially created and by whom. Useful for tracking down "why" information about specific changes.
- Easy to tell at a glance whether this document has seen major restructural changes, or whether it's mostly been minor typos and that kind of thing. Much *more* useful when we have diff module installed on drupal.org.
- With this tab being visible to everyone, makes people more cognisant of putting in a log message (maybe).

I'm not sure that there would be huge performance concerns, as the revisions are stored anyway; it's just a matter of displaying them. But Gerhard would know.

The only downside I can think of is there's a lot less of a point in enabling this tab when we don't have diff module installed, but this could be an incremental improvement.

I am in favour of allowing authenticated users see the revisision, but not anonymous users.

We can always switch them off again.

Done.

Well that was easy. ;) Thanks, guys! :D

So, now that we have a 'why', Can anyone think of a way to determine that the outcome is a success?

What about diff.module?

- Runs on at least g.d.o, infra.d.o, and sec.d.o, probably ass.d.o, too.
- Hugely useful, e.g. to see what someone changed.
- Integrates seemlessly with the revisions tab.
- Co-maintained by moshe and myself -- not exactly the most slacker of all slacking contrib maintaining duos.

Any objections, killes?

Thanks,
-Derek

p.s. I just made forum posts, newsletters, stories, and pages default to making new revisions at http://drupal.org/admin/content/types -- books and projects were already configured that way.

Oh, and I noticed over at http://drupal.org/node/183926 someone mentioned the only possible hold up for diff.module is that it needs a review by the security team. Uhh, moshe and I are both on the security team, and we're the maintainers. ;) Believe me, we've audited closely...

I've reviewed diff.module and I believe its ok.

Actually, could we please *not* enable revisions by default on Forum topics (at least)? I want to make a core patch that makes the log field required on nodes that have that option turned on by default (so that people actually fill out the dang thing), and it doesn't make any sense with forum topics, as only 1/2000000000000 will actually need that level of control.

Or if you'd rather we wait until a) such a patch exists, b) it's applied to 6.x, and c) it's deployed on drupal.org, that works too. :P I guess I just don't get the point of it on forum topics, really. Those are by nature not updated over time by multiple people, but rather posted once and then left alone.

Stories fall under that umbrella too (i didn't even realize we had those enabled for people), and newsletters you could claim do as well, but those are for important announcements, so revisions make sense.

Ok, sure, reverted forum posts. However, diff/revisions only help anything if people make revisions (even without a log field). Lots of the important front-page posts are in fact forum posts, so it'd be nice that people were conscious of that and made revisions whenever they promote something, or edit something on the fp, etc.

In the future, it'd be very nice to remember "create new revision" on a node, so that once it's selected once, it defaults to on again until someone unselects it... but I digress.

Heine reviewed diff.module and agreed. So, on it goes. ;)

Yay!

Unfortunately or not by design, we are posting front page posts as forum topic in the news and announcements forum for quite some time now. That said, we are "misusing" forums to some degree, and indeed, default revisioning for forums might not be a good idea. But remembering the revision checkbox state is a long time wishlist item (for me at least :), so I wholeheartedly agree that it should be tackled.