Wordpress Plugins

Comment Editing Should Be Back

18 Comments

Comment editing should be back. Immediately after you enter a comment, you both an “edit” and “delete” button should appear after the time stamp for your comment. The “edit” feature has a 10 minute grace period. The “delete” feature has a 1 minute grace period. Also, even if the grace period has not lapsed, these buttons will also only appear fewer than 3 comments have been entered after yours. (This is to reduce the possibility that people get into rapid fire arguments and want to “edit” what they said 9 minutes ago, but which someone already responded to.)

If you cannot see the “edit” or “delete” buttons, or if they do not work, let me know. Note: There can be weirdness if the time runs out after you load the window but before you click the edit or delete buttons. So, if you want to delete, you need to do it quickly.

Just so I remember: I had to edit line 144 in Plugin Editable Comments to correct the bug in the time period. The orginal plugin uses $comment->comment_date. That sort of worked provided I added 6 hours to grace period for the “edit” and “delete” buttons. That’s rather pesky, and I suspect people in other time zones will be adding a different number of hours. I changed this to $comment->comment_date_gmt and now the edit and delete buttons seem to appear for the appropriate amount of time.

Anyway… play with edit and delete. Also, let me know if you think the buttons need slightly longer or shorter amounts of time. Maybe 5 minutes is enough for editing and 30 seconds enough for deleting? What do you think?

Update: Where the “edit” and “delete” buttons appear:

Unless you use Firefox with the plugin to highlight “nofollow” links, mostly ignore the pick. You screen won’t show pink. But it’s useful for me to explain what you are seeing.

In the image above, you see a comment I entered. It shows my name in pink. This is followed by the comment number, a date and the “Edit This” button. I, Lucia, see this button; I don’t know if Zeke sees it. Others’ should not see it. Next, in pink, you should see “Edit” and “Delete”. You should see these two buttons if

  • You entered the comment.
  • For the delete button: less than 1 minute had passed when you loaded this fresh page.
  • For the edit button: less than 10 minutes had passed when you loaded this fresh page.
  • Yours comment was between 3rd to last and last when you loaded this fresh page.

During the grace period, you can click these buttons and edit or delete. If you click edit, an edit window should open. It looks like this:

Note: The edit window uses javascript. So, it may not work if you have javascript turned off.

You can edit your comment, click update, and your new comment will look like this:

The “Delete” button will still appear if less than 1 minute has elapsed since you entered your comment. Otherwise, it will have vanished.

If you leave the screen and the page is still there, the buttons don’t automagically vanish, but they will not function. So, if you click “edit” after the 10 minute time period is done, the edit screen will say “fail”.

18 thoughts on “Comment Editing Should Be Back”

  1. One thing is for sure… as bad as Lucia is at all this computer stuff, she definately WAS NOT the Climategate hacker!

  2. Well… No. I’m not the hacker. But the problem with the plugin wasn’t me it was a small but in someone else’s program. It wasn’t visible to me because the display is different for someone logged in (i.e. me) and others. So… the bug wasn’t evident to me.

  3. This is just a test massage message to try the edit feature. Hmmmm.. the edit feature obviously works, but when the edited version came up, the delete button was not there.

    Round 2: Same effect after adding the previous sentence, the delete button disappears after an edit. So if one’s comment is a flame, and one is really worked up, goes back to edit it, to make it really hurt, and THEN comes to one’s senses, and wants to delete it after all (as they should), they are out of luck.

  4. Lucia,

    I see now, the delete button times out, I suspect, from the first comment submission. To be absolutely useful the delete button timer needs to be reset (start timing over please) each time an edited comment is re-submitted.

    Kip

  5. Kip–
    Technically, I could edit the plugin written by someone else. But I avoid doing that as much as possible because it makes the burden of running the blog too high.
    So… I edited the actual bug in the plugin, but i’m not going to edit to add the functionality you want.

    I’d explain what might be involved in doing what you suggest… but basically, it’s too much trouble for me.

    All in all, if you enter a comment and think “yikes” immediately, just delete, delete. If you edit and then find you want to delete, just go in, edit again, and remove what you wrote. There will be an empty comment which I will delete later. But most blogs don’t even have a delete button. So, I don’t see how this is a major problem.

  8. Kip

    but when the edited version came up, the delete button was not there.

    Well… this is mostly because I give you 10 minutes to edit but only 1 minute to delete. If you write something, the edit to make it worse then regret the new intemperate content…. yeah…. Your now even worse comment is up there.

  9. I strive to write annoying, inane wonderfully wonderful comments.

    Using the editing/formatting buttons in “Edit” mode led to immediate submission of the comment. Aside from that, everything worked.

  10. “AMac (Comment#59375)
    November 7th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
    I strive to write annoying, insane comments”

    Hey… so do I! 😉

    Andrew

  13. It didn’t work, and now I look like a fool. Or perhaps I don’t know how to work it, and am just ignorant.

  14. Yes. The comments are submitted immediately. So, some people might see your original comment. Then, an edit/delete should appear.. I’ll take a screen shot to show you….

    To delete, click “delete”. To edit, click edit. 🙂

  15. Max,

    I posted an update to explain what you should see in more detail.

    What did you try to do? Other people succeeded, but I can’t figure out what might be wrong unless I have details. (Amount of time? Did you try to delete? Or Edit?)

    Did an edit window show up? (If not, that could be a javascript issue.)

  16. By the way, who has been saying that the land thermometers are well placed and that Watts makes a big deal out of nothing. I saw some of the pictures of those thermometers and big surprise they are terribly located.

    I had false hopes that people would make some concessions about cheating after the Michael Fann graph but instead he was defended as a wonderful scientist.

  17. Lucia,

    I’m sorry, but I have been too busy with other things, and haven’t followed up on your instructions.

    So I am going to submit this now, and see what happens.

    OK, I got the edit and delete button.

    I chose edit, and added “too” in the first sentence.

    I will now click on the update button.

Comments are closed.