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Develop a technical approach for editing a specific comment
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Description

This tasks represents the work with researching the technical constraints we will need to consider when designing a feature that will enable contributors to edit single comments posted to talk pages (e.g. How can the software reliably detect the boundaries of a comment so the proper amount of editable content is presented to contributors when they click "edit"?)

  • How to handle the number of lines within a comment change works
  • How to keep the signature out of the edit range

Event Timeline

ppelberg renamed this task from Develop an approach for editing a specific comment to Develop a technical approach for editing a specific comment.Jan 12 2020, 11:51 PM
ppelberg created this task.

There's questions regarding whether we should include any sort of "this comment was edited" notice on an edited comment. Meeting discussion leans towards "no", in part because there's no good way to link to the revision history showing the change without making a second edit to add that link in.

We've started on an approach based on David's rebalancer, which can slice a reply tree into three balanced parts based on an arbitrary selection. We still need to work out how to handle the number of lines within a comment change works, and also how to keep the signature out of the edit range (T245220).

For the time being, we are going to pause development on the new workflow for editing single comments on talk pages.

Reasons

  1. We have yet to develop an approach we think would work reliably enough for people on "real" talk pages (read: talk pages on production wikis)
  2. Introducing this functionality is not a high priority at this time

Next steps

  • @Esanders, are you able to comment the approaches we've explored so far and the advantages and disadvantages with each one?