Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.It happened to me once on my live drupal6 site (http://hfopi.org for reference) that I edited a comment when I meant to reply to it. I could not recover the full original post which troubled me a bit. Now I wrote a tiny patch that adds a warning if a moderator/admin wants to edit a comment posted by another user.. Here it is ;)
| Comment | File | Size | Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| warn_on_alien_comment_edit.patch | 901 bytes | eMPee584 |
Comments
Comment #4
vm commentedI believe that something of this nature would go into Drupal 7 as Drupal 6.x is feature frozen.
One should make sure this patch applies to drupal 7. (hence the marking of patch (code needs work))
Also note: If this patch applies cleanly to Drupal 7 the patch should be marked patch (code needs review) It will then be tested by others and then be set patch (ready to be committed).
Comment #5
eMPee584 commentedAnd well I believe what happened to me will happen to a great many other developers within the v6 cycle and thus would really like to see this go in before v7. It does not break the API, nor add a feature, nor pose any debugging effort, and it protects admins from easy data loss. Classifying this as bug would probably not be adequate, but please reconsider merging this before 6.0.
P.S.: even though the warning itself tells the user to mark his changes, the primary purpose of the warning message is to visually emphasize that one is editing a comment posted by someone else, which is quite likely to happen if one accidentally clicks on edit instead of reply, both shown side by side beneath the comment.
Comment #6
birdmanx35 commentedThis is a feature request, and feature requests go to 7.x. Admins who can edit comments usually know what they are doing.
Comment #7
eMPee584 commentedforgive my impatience... but I believe at least one admin will wipe out at least one user comment by accidentally editing instead of replying. Which probably means loss of multiple bytes of data. Which is bad. Usability bug? 6.1?
Comment #8
vm commentedIt's been this way as long as I can remember. If I accidentally hit edit instead of reply, I see text in the text area. This has been enough to trigger the "OOPS" reaction and hit the back button on a browser.
I do like the idea you've put forth. I just don't see it as a bug. Usability issue I'd agree with, especially for new users. If what you believe in would be a benefit to the community and you want it out there now, maybe a simple contrib module would suffice? until this can be pushed into core at any level.
some feedback:
At first glance the message seems a tad long. I think the message would be better suited if shortened. Maybe something like "You are editing a comment submitted by another user" would suffice.
Comment #9
eMPee584 commentedSorry for not replying so long.. I phrased it the way i did because that is an important issue - a website owner should imho not alter user's comments on their own, not to correct linguistic mistakes nor to modify the content. I think it is important to warn the admin editing the post not take editing comments lightly. It's about the integrity of the intended meaning, any altering of comments should be thought over very carefully... What do you thikn?
Comment #10
maartenvg commentedI agree with VeryMisunderstood, I think this is a feature request that is very susceptible to personal preference, and therefore better justified as a module. As a module you can provide a solution to the community fast, and easily backport it to D5 and D6 as well. If it happens to be a much used module, then we might consider to have it in core.
Especially the view "an admin should almost never edit comments for the sake of integrity" is a lot stronger than that of the average Drupal user. As far as I know, drupal doesn't want to be a teacher of morals, only provide a framework to do stuff in. There are enough uses where people can and do think lightly about editing comments, in which such a stout warning might be overkill.
I vote "won't fix", or perhaps "postponed" untill proven necessary by module popularity.
Comment #11
eMPee584 commentedWell it's not another level of complication in that it introduces another form submitting cycle, it is just a small warning box, reminding admins of the fact that it is not possible to see that what is put out with the commenter's name is not actually written by the commenter. The formulation intentionally leaves out any evaluation of this fact because of your 'drupal is not supposed to teach good practice'-mantra. And, writing, submitting and maintaining a module for a one-line warning is (pardon me) b$, imho.
edit:
...thinking of it it might even be good to output a small warning even on editing your own posts!
Comment #12
catchThis should come with a test. A better separation between the edit, reply and delete links would probably be a better improvement.
Comment #13
eMPee584 commentedWow. I certainly will not create a test for it (HOW? What to test?), neither put any other work into this. The whole discussion is void and useless, 3445 characters of hot air and three years waiting for nothing, i wonder why keep posting patches if all they do is bitrot then die. It would have been a simple and user friendly improvement in favour of 'journalistic integrity' and against accidental edits and could have been put into effect three years ago, now the
usability categorydoesn't even exist any more. Another case of Sad & PoorTM.