Proposal: make the revisions tab accessible to all users

I'm in favour of this change, but two potential concerns were brought up on the mailing list discussion:

1. Are there performance implications with this page, or can it be cached like any old normal Drupal page? I don't know the answer to this.

2. We probably need to add *revision* to our robots.txt file so that Google doesn't index 50,000 copies of basically the same page. And this might actually be worth adding to core as well, if it's a valid concern. Any SEO types out there?

I am not in favor of doing this for anonymous users.

It would add yet another distraction/complication for those who are not members of the community. Already those new to Drupal drown in an overwhelming amount of knowledge and distractions.

I am confused by some of the reasoning as well. The only thing revisions is useful for is seeing the history of a particular node and who edited it.

There's one argument in that thread that is compelling as it relates to this feature request. And that's that without the revisions tab showing, anonymous users (who make up the vast majority of drupal.org's traffic) might be under the mistaken impression that documentation writing happens within a small, closed group of maintainers, and if they see a problem, they may feel that they're powerless to do anything about it.

A revisions tab == "wiki" == "Oh, ok. I can jump in here and fix this," and seems a reasonable approach to see if we can attract more contributors that way.

I'm much in favour of this.

It's useful on Drupal just to see when the page was last edited, and if anyone has checked it and if the point is subject to debate - these are all important for people evaluating Drupal.

I'd also like to get credit if I contribute docs

I just don't see a downside to this.

I'd really prefer a block that lists the contributors

select distinct(u.uid), u.name from node_revisions n inner join users u on u.uid = n.uid where n.nid = %d

Technical merits aside, the revision tab was and is not about 'credit'. As I said in the doc thread, I am more interested in hearing where a block or other notice about documentation would be placed then enabling this.

See my blog post on why we stopped crediting on individual pages.

I agree with webchick as she explains it in #4.

Though I really like Steve D.'s latest proposal, there is a bunch of coding that would need to take place to create the "prettier" version of the revisions page. Conversely, simply making the revisions tab viewable for anonymous users only requires a simple change in permissions. Other than checking on the SEO and performance questions that webchick raised, there would be no other work needed to implement this.

The revisions tab viewable to anonymous users is a way to show and model for non-technically oriented potential Drupal adopters what open source is all about. It powerfully communicates project transparency. It would serve as a strong promotion for the project as a whole.

@steve-d: "Putting all philosophical debate aside"

We certainly don't want to rehash everything that went on the listserve. However, you've made a feature request. Feature requests invite replies to the proposal based on any relevant concern/argument from a technical, philosophical or other perspective.

I maybe wasn't clear enough: I don't want to enable the revisions tab for anon users. It does not offer any helpful additional information.

Background: I've recently disabled all urls which have "sort=" in them. This resulted in 750k of URLs being blocked for google now. There are however robots which won't honour this request and I don't want to add more publically visible URLs.

For the block idea, see: http://drupal.org/node/263767

@killes,

Could you explain your concern about publicly visible URLs? Is the concern that search engines will return not meaningful results to users, therefore having a negative SEO consequence for Drupal.org?

Also, given how huge a market share Google has on search, isn't the ability to block pages from the Google bot what is really important?

Shai

@sean, you get credit here: http://drupal.org/node/14205

I like #6, which is along the lines of my suggestion on the email thread. I'd then modify the block listed in the other issue to say:

The following people contributed to this page of documentation: [ comma delimited list of unlinked names here ]
Learn how you can contribute documentation too! New users to Drupal are especially invited to create documentation pages. New users have the freshest perspective on what other new users might need. Documenting the hurdles you have overcome is invaluable for future new users.

It's simple, gives credit without worrying about how "much" credit each person deserves, has no links which makes it harder for emailing questions, and makes it clear that anyone can join that list and help out rather than it being a single person owning the page. And it respects the "won't fix" on this issue.

Michelle

@sepeck: Oh no I don't.

I've only created one page and that's been edited by a member of the documentation team.

I don't feel hard done by - but nor do I have any non-altruistic motivation for writing another page.

@seanburlington: "No I don't [get credit]. I've only created one page and that's been edited by a member of the documentation team [so it's not counted in the query that builds http://drupal.org/node/14205]."

I believe that's a bug with Drupal 5 and once drupal.org gets upgraded to Drupal 6 you should show up on that page.

@Michelle, Please post your idea at: http://drupal.org/node/263767. That issue is about the block, this issue about the visibility of the revisions tab. Of course they are connected and Killes did post his alternative idea here. But in terms of issue tracking and overall sanity, I think if you want that idea considered -- you should post it at the other issue. When you post over there, please include Killes sample query in the post. Thanks.

Shai

Given that this has been marked "won't fix", I've created an alternative proposal which requests to add "and view revisions" to the string: "Login or register to post comments." So the string would read, "Login or register to post comments and view revisions."

Shai

@sean give me the page link and I will correct it.

@sepeck: Thanks for the offer :-)

It's this page
http://drupal.org/node/213374

But please don't go out of your way - one page isn't a big deal - I was just making a point ;-)

I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm looking for ways to promote my services - and I'd like it if writing Drupal documentation could be a way of doing that.

Ideally I'd like it if my contributions were available here http://drupal.org/user/142969 .

If not I'll probably write some documentation anyway and put it somewhere else - so it's no great loss to me and I don't have any expectation that people like you 'ought' to change anything.

One page is a big deal so it's not out of the way as I was also making a point. It's a known behavior that isn't desired and is fortunately getting fixed with when drupal.org gets updated to d6.

oh yes, fixed. :)