[pmwiki-users] Preventing vandalism

[Pico]

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 07:42:16AM -0400, Pico wrote:
>> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
>>> On Sat, Jun 10, 2006 at 12:59:48AM +0200, kirpi at kirpi.it wrote:
>>>> Just an idea, while reading these lines; is there any way to let the
>>>> posts (read edits) to a site/group/page be handled about the same way
>>>> they often are in many usenet forums or blogs, or even shared
>>>> calendars, which is: queued for a "moderator" to approve them?
>>> Yes, it can be done.  I'll write up a complete recipe for it,
>>> but the essential concept is to change Site.EditForm so that the
>>> "Save as draft" button is labelled "Save" and is all that
>>> a typical author sees, while the "Save" button is labeled
>>> "Publish" and and is displayed only to moderators.
>> What happen with multiple edits prior to approval under such approaches?

[snip]

> The first author would get the original page; pressing "Save"
> would invoke PmWiki's "save as draft" option, and would save the
> draft page under PageName-Draft.  Each subsequent author would then
> be given the latest (unapproved) draft held in PageName-Draft -- i.e.,
> the version that has all of the prior authors' edits.   

[snip

> The moderator gets the single draft page that reflects the cumulative
> edits of all five authors (i.e., PageName-Draft).  Pressing "Publish"
> invokes PmWiki's normal "save" operation, and saves the draft as
> the official version of the page.  What's more, the draft has its 
> own history, so the moderator can revert some of the draft edits
> before saving.
> 
[snip]

>> I suppose that all my questions might be answered if I had a clearer 
>> understanding of how drafts work under PmWiki right now.  In that light, 
>> if you humor me by explaining the obvious, I will try to incorporate it 
>> into the documentation about drafts.
> 
> Excellent!  I'm not sure if it belongs in the official documentation
> or as a cookbook page.
> 
> Pm
> 


PmWiki's Save As Draft function couldn't be simpler and more obvious, 
and yet, it was so confusing to me that I (mis)used it once and then 
never took the time to figure out what I was missing and, as a result, I 
just avoided using it.

For what its worth, here is what I thought, and how I interacted, to the 
Save As Draft option

OriginalDocument

1. I edit Original document and press Save As Draft and am presented 
with a new document, called

OriginalDocument-Draft


2. So far so good, I can see that this is a new document, and that the 
original document still exists.

3. My confusion arises when I return to edit the draft document, called 
"OriginalDocument-Draft"  How do I save my subsequent edits?

a. Inuitively, I press save, because I see that I am editing a document 
called "OriginalDocument-Draft" and I want to keep saving changes to 
that document.

b. Intuitively, I avoid pressing Save As Draft because I assume, from my 
prior experience, that pressing that button will simply create a new 
document and append "-Draft" to the end, resulting in a new document 
called "OriginalDocument-Draft-Draft"

4. When I press save, I am surprised that my interim draft has been 
published to the original and, next time around, I decide to stick with 
a more manual approach that I can control and understand (copy and paste 
into a new document that I edit and save).

In hindsight, I can see that I am an idiot.  Or, to put a nice spin on 
it, I think too much and act like I didn't think at all.

In this case, the underlying assumption that I made was that the Save, 
and Save As Draft, buttons always work in the same way - Save always 
saves the current document with the same name and Save As Draft always 
renames the current document by appending "-draft" to the prior name.

I failed to recognize that these buttons had more intelligence behind 
them to allow them to behave differently under different situations.

So, how could PmWiki best communicate to authors that the Save and Save 
As Draft are "smart" buttons that behave differently depending on context?

No one will go looking for documentation about how to save a document, 
or even how to use the Save As Draft function.  In the end, I would 
suggest one, or more, or the following options:

1. Dynamically relabel the buttons when their function changes, i.e. 
when the document being edited ends with "-draft" change the labels to 
reflect the fact that the "Save" will now publish the draft to the 
original and that the Save As Draft will save this draft.

2. Prompt the author with a message when saves will be posted to a 
different name.  The most important time is when a draft will be posted 
to the original.  You could also supply a message when Save as draft 
will post the original to a new document with "-draft" appended to the 
name (but that seems less important, in my experience).

Pico