GolfHos

Reference:

http://www.golfhos.com/topic-1799

Scenario:

A thread is started by an overfed, long-haired leaping gnome.  He forgets to append to said title a spoiler alert.  Mortified, he rushes back in and fixes the problem by posting a new title.  He then retreats to his home and loved ones and prepares himself for the rituals of Seppuku.  The thing is, there have already been a few posts added to the thread and they all have the original title.  As people quote existing posts the recent posts page reflects the title as it appears in the quoted post.  'Tis a crapshoot.

Solution:

Normalize the damn database.  Errrrmmmm, I mean, is there a way to have the recent posts page reflect the title as held by the original post?

Even after you edit the title, I think your original title remains until someone replies in the thread.  Scroll through the thread and look at the titles appearing the posts' headers -- you can see the changes.

Clive, what seems to happen is that the new post takes on its title one of two ways.

(1) If it's a simple 'reply' it gets the title of either the thread itself or the original post.  Hard to say if the former is even possible without seeing the schema.

(2) If it's a quoted response it gets the title of the quoted post. 

If you run down the thread you can kind of see how this plays out.  Keep in mind that my response to TFT was the first time I modified the title and then later I modified the title of the original post.   As everyone replied and quoted other posts the titles propagated accordingly.   

That's weird. i've got to run back to my UML class, but I'll look into this later.

If anyone needs me I'll be on holodeck 4.

Speaking of Unwanted Persistence.   ::)

I think I see what you mean.  ::) ;D

LOL!!!  Don't tell Toys For Tots.  He'll go mad with power.

As if I'd stoop so low.

Agreed.

Gaylord.

Weird thread. ;)

I was looking all over for "that thread". ;D

Test.

Test.

In the board list, this thread shows up with the most recent title change.  But in Active Topics, it still shows the OP-associated title regardless of subsequent-post changes.

And my previous post was a reply to the post wherein I'd edited the title to "Test Change: Reply To OP".

Change didn't carry forward!

Quoted Torp's "Lawers have nothing better to do than change forum titles all day" post.

Previous post reflected Torp's title on "Recent Posts" page.

Used "Reply" button at top of page on this one.  I expect the OP title to reflect.

Told ya.

I rule at IT.

You rule!

Looks like you have to actually quote, not just click "Quote".

Or not!

My quoted replies aren't perpetuating the changed title.  ???

The internets just hate you. ;)

Only on the "Recent Posts" page.  At least that's how it works for me.  The "Active Topics" or whatever it's called always has the OP title.

You so unrule.

lol :D

I think I've fixed the Active Topics/Recent Posts by Category page so it now displays the original title.

However, the Recent Posts on the front page uses a very simple, fast query to get the last 30 posts, and I'm not sure I want to change it so that it uses the subject/title from the original post.  It might slow down the front page load time.

I'm very tempted to normalize the database, but that would be a serious branch from the smf codebase, and I'm hesitant to do that.  It would be much tougher to incorporate any patches or mods built by the SMF team and community.

One possible workaround might be when a user creates a new post to always overwrite the subject for that post with the current subject of the original post.  We don't really gain much from allowing a responder to modify the subject, anyway.

It seems it might be easy to disable or hide the subject field from any other than the OP and admins.

Yeah, I actually changed the subject field to readonly for the non-OP last night, but then changed it back.  It solved the problem of pranksters changing the subject for fun, but doesn't solve the original problem of a person replying to a post that had the original title (w/o spoiler).

I understand the (de)normalization issue and it's fair enough you don't want to delve into that.  It seems like your workaround idea might be the way to go.

Hmm, I thought about this some more and making the Subject readonly does get us get us halfway there, so I put that change back.

New Topic from within a forum isn't letting me enter a subject. 

 :(

LOL!  I just realized it too when I tried to create a new thread.

I just backed out the change.  Sorry about that. :-[

No worries.  I just modified an earlier one-post thread of mine that everyone ignored.   ;)

Eeek.  But modifications don't register on recent posts so it's on page 87.   >:(

http://www.golfhos.com/forum/index.php/topic,1497.msg18448.html

I think I've got the workaround working properly now.  When replying, the Subject field is now readonly, but not when creating a new thread.  Also, when replying, the subject field should be pre-filled with the subject of the original post, and not the subject of the post that you're replying to.

Well if the subject is read-only then wouldn't the subject of the post your replying to have to be the same as the original?

Not always, that's why this is more complicated than it appears at first. 

Example:

- Aske creates a thread called "Masters OMG!!!!  I <3 Tiger!"
- stroh replies to the original post and propagates the original title.
- Aske goes back and edits the original title to now say "Masters (Spoiler)"
- Now if spaceage goes and quotes stroh's post, previously, spaceage's reply would now have a readonly subject of "Masters OMG!!!!", but after this change spaceage's reply has a readonly subject of the original post, which has been changed ("Masters (Spoiler)").

Does that make sense?

Yeah, I had forgot about edits. :)