19
votes
Feature request: edit notifications
I know this doesn't happen often, but I've seen it happen a few times and I think it would be useful to have a notifications page for edited comments. When someone replies to me I get a notification, I can reply to it and/or mark it as read, and forget about it. Sometimes the person that replied to me edits the comment to add extra information, but since I've already marked it as read I may never see the added info. I'd like to receive a notification whenever one or more editions are made to a reply I received that I've already marked as read.
It has been discussed already and I think it have a ticket in the code repository.
The
easybest way of avoiding spam of notification is to have it trigger only if the changes is meaningful.Example:
Now the first is easy, the second.. I'm only doubtful of the complexity of writing a good code to detect whole word changes but that shouldn't be impossible anyway (git diff)
I feel like it could be as simple as checking the diff size and if it's smaller than a set amount, ignore the edit.
That is a risky approach as if someone change a single word it can change the whole meaning of a sentence but not trigger a notification.
Bear with me for this extreme example:
It's 2 character longer, but the meaning couldn't be far different.
Imagine that having gathered tons of votes before the change and you get yourself a nice screenshot to accuse the community to be racist.
I don't think that'd be a problem since the post/comment is tagged as edited. Alternatively, a version history could be kept. Plus, let's be real: images are not a trustworthy source of information. They can be easily edited/faked even if there wasn't a way to edit comments. If anybody wanted to make such a heavy accusation, they'd have to link the exact comment in order to have any credibility.
I was only considering "notify parent comment" use case. In a way your point is still valid in this context, but developing a system capable of understanding differences in meaning would be extremely difficult and, honestly, not worth the effort for such a minor feature.
While the diff size approach is far from perfect, it offers a good enough solution (obviously my opinion) with little effort put into it for a minor issue.
Oh no, the whole point of my example is that a change like that is not gonna trigger a notification (3 characters) and don't need an image. It could be linked back and discredit the community.
Here is another example:
Someone open a topic about a shitty experience with a service.
Lots of people pour in and get the image of this company as scumbag.
The company reach out and prove that it was an honest mistake and compensate the user.
The topic is edited with something like:
"I was mistaken, follow up here!"
As a link to a new topic maybe.
Now that new topic could not get the same traction and/or the people that formed a bad idea of that service could miss it.
Again the edit will not trigger (to short).
As a developer, determining the context of words is not hard. The point is to decide which algorithm to use.
It could. And people would see that it's tagged as edited so it has no credibility (unless there was a way to see exactly what was edited).
I don't know about this one. This is just a matter of figuring out the right threshold. A whole sentence like "I was mistaken, follow up here!" and the link after it (even though it's not visible in the comment, it could still be counted for this) should be enough to trigger a notification. I definitely agree that having a way to do it based on the context would be great, but I don't know if it's worth the effort. Again, the diff size strategy isn't perfect by any means, but it should get the job done for the most part.
PS: The new topic definitely wouldn't get as much traction, but there's not much you can do about that... The only person that would be notified would be the parent comment anyways, so most would miss it regardless of the algorithm used for it.
I just learned about this researching for a different feature, but I believe the data science topic that covers this is conveniently called Edit distance or Levenshtein distance.
Example python/cpp implementation: https://github.com/aflc/editdistance
edit: changed link to non-mobile wikipedia
Try not to link mobile Wikipedia pages, please!
Aside from that, though, this seems like a really neat concept. I've never heard of it before and now I'm interested. (Gotta love a good recursive definition.)
Darn it, I almost always remember to remove the m. as I’ve been trained by that bot on Reddit. Oops! Glad I could share some learnin’.
And I just learned that the quotation carat extends until a double line break. Whoops.
That's a good point, hadn't thought of that. It still very much solves the problem of editing a highly voted post to change its meaning. If you delete it and make another one it won't have the votes.
I think I’d prefer to get notified about every change, as long as the changes themselves are clearly marked in the notifications page (e.g. as red/green highlighted text). It would be confusing to see the “edited” flag appear on a reply without having received a notification for it.
Edit: also, multiple edit notifications could be combined together instead of generating individual notifications. This would keep multiple edits from filling up your notifications, unless you’re actively reading each one.
Eh, I agree but having a delayed notification means having a script running every "x" time.
And that take extra resources.
I’m not sure what you mean by delayed notification. The thing I’m proposing could be done when building the notification list: check for multiple edits and unify them into a single entry.
Then I don't know what you mean.
With multiple edit I thought you were talking "on the same comment". Maybe you mean on several different comment?
It still gonna require a crawler. Everything that don't happen in real time, needs an extra script and extra resource to make it run.
What needs to happen asynchronously? Wouldn't you send the notifications right away when the comment is edited?
To be totally clear about the system I'm thinking about, it'd work like this:
Frankly it sounds like you're describing the hard way. The easy way would be to limit the number and/or frequency of edits or something. (or not of edits, but of notifications themselves. Let people edit whatever they want, but don't send more than 1 notification per hour and more than 3 in total for example)
You're right. I meant the "best" way meaning the get the better result. I edited the comment now :)
Git diff works on a line-by-line basis, so it wouldn't be too good for the application you're describing here. wdiff is part of gnu coreutils, but then again, I doubt this website would use external binaries.
Programatically, a bitwise XOR should be enough to determine whether or not it's a significant change, but then you'll run into the issue of a single letter changing the entire meaning, and not getting a notification.
I was mentioning git diff as a visual example of what should be shown to the user.
I worded it poorly now that I read my comment again.
This is a really good idea, but there has to be a button that lets you turn off the edit notifications for certain post, since it would be easy to exploit it and spam ping someone.
You really ought to proofread your comments. :)
I assumed it was going to be lead to a joke about the necessity of edits. I disagree though, I don't think we need edits at all since I have excellent speliing.
Oh boy, really sorry about that. Posted that on my new phone, and as it turns out, I can't use the keyboard of this thing. Thanks for notifying me though, fixed my original post.
No problem! I know the feeling; enjoy the phone. :)
My original idea was that you should not receive it more that once per comment, and not get a new edit notification until you marked the old one as read. Adding to that what @crius proposed would reduce the amount of useless notifications you get even more, and having a button to turn them off (individually and globally) as you propose would solve all the spam problems they may cause.