tracking of edits

[solak]

Title
tracking of edits

Short, concise description of the idea
I want to be able to track edits to an entry.

Full description of the ideaIf I track a friend's entry, I am notified of comments there, and of edits on the comments there, but I am not notified of edits to the entry itself. Please let us turn that on. My preference would be that it is

Comments

[silverflight8]

I edit my entries usually because I've just spotted a spelling mistake or something in them. I doubt you want notifications of that.

[lady_angelina]

But then people edit their comments for the same reason, and those who are tracking those threads get notifications for those. As someone who's been involved in LJ RP who's played with lots of spelling/grammar/typo-conscious players, you can imagine how many of the notifications I get are just edits for things like that. XD (To say nothing of the ones I'm responsible for, since I'm perfectionist like that. XD )

[silverflight8]

I guess what we'd need is a ticky box for "Not significant change" so that it didn't get mailed out to everyone...but then that relies on the person who's making the entry who may not want it to be broadcast....argh. XD This is going nowhere.

(also the combination of your title and the cute kitty icon is making me giggle.)

[lady_angelina]

No, I understand what you're saying. =) That would actually be awesome if it were possible, because most of my comment edits are for stupid little things like that. However, the problem would not only be in terms of who's conscious enough to ticky/non-ticky the option box, but also in what's considered to be "significant" versus "not significant." A simple little typo or a missing word can change the whole meaning of a sentence, and I hardly consider that to be insignificant. On the other hand, I wouldn't consider something like deleting a whole paragraph that got mistakenly duplicated because of a copy and paste error, to be significant because it wouldn't change the intrinsic meaning of the comment. But then, those are my interpretations; someone else might disagree with me on this.

(Haha, thanks! XD I'm just too lazy to change from my default icon, which is the kitten. :3 And the displayed name comes from a really "note-worthy" quote from an infamous video game. XD I'll spare you the gory details, unless you're into

[lady_angelina]

Personally, I would like something like this because I tend to just look at an entry once and then never come back to it again. If someone puts in a "ETA (edited to add)" blurb in their entry hours after I've first looked at it, chances are, I probably won't even notice it. And because I imagine other people are the same way, if I have to update one of my existing entries with new info, I find it's easier just to post a new entry, which has the unfortunate implication of spamming someone's Friends page.

I'm actually not sure why edits to journal/community entries aren't tracked (at least visibly to end-users), but if it were technically feasible, I'm all for it.

[charliemc]

NO.

-1

I constantly edit -- mostly because I share photos, and they don't always line up the way I want them to. I do NOT want that tracked. Period.

[andy]

Yeah, I pretty much never get longer entries right the first time.

[charliemc]

I used to post EVERYTHING Private by default, then check it and edit it. That's how anal I am about it. (smile)

But my older sister Tracks to see posts, so I quit that...

[cos]

This strikes me as a silly objection. When you edit a comment because you got something wrong, do you not want that tracked either? How is the system supposed to tell the difference between edits that change meaning of add significant information, and edits that are merely formatting?

Keep in mind, of course, that usually when someone tracks a post, it's at least a few minutes after it has been posted, so any initial edits you make wouldn't be tracked anyway.

[cos]

I agree that this is a bug. When you're tracking something, you should get a new email if it gets edited.

summary so far

[solak]

So what I'm seeing in these comments is that there is a use for having note edits cause notifications, but that many people do want to distinguish notes and comments from edits to them. Uncertainty remains, however, as to whether the editor or the notifyee decides whether they want those notifications sent.

Re: summary so far

[mlady_rebecca]

Uncertainty remains, however, as to whether the editor or the notifyee decides whether they want those notifications sent.

Personally, I think the journal owner (or community maintainer) should control what can be sent out as a notify.

As a community maintainer, I'd love to be able to track changes to posts in my community. As for my personal journal, I wouldn't want every change broadcast. In fact, there are very few changes I'd want broadcast.

Re: summary so far

[solak]

But the creation of note entries already causes notifications to go out. Why not updates to those notes? If I'm a reader interested in your content, I want to know when there's new content, whether it's in a new note or a new paragraph added to a note I already read. If you're adding content to your note, don't you want me to read it?

I don't understand any of these objections to having update notifications sent out, considering what notifications are already sent out. Are we suddenly feeling private about information we're publicizing on the internet, just because an oversight in the design of LJ caused a certain type of notification to be omitted in the current implementation? Excuse me for being baffled by this.

Re: summary so far

[mlady_rebecca]

If I had something new I wanted to make sure my friends list would see, I'd make a new post with that content or make a new post to refer them back to an old post. Most of my edits to a post are cosmetic. A few are notes to myself. Very rarely are they substantial content changes. So, no, I don't want each and every tiny change publicized. That's spamming your friends.