Currently, Bulletin Board posts are commonly used as promotion guides, version logs, instruction manuals, and other reference materials for games and groups. One person would usually be assigned to compose and publish such materials here on the Developer Forums. However, what if that person is inactive and cannot update the post? Then the developers would have to wait for the person to go active, or make an entirely new post, which can becoming confusing.
My suggestion is that Bulletin Board posts should be given the option to add additional authors, so that keeping the post up-to-date does not fall on the responsibility of just one person. All authors can add and remove authors as needed.
EDIT: Yeah, it’s not a good idea. Thanks for the feedback guys.
May I ask how this could be abused?
The only way someone could edit your post is if you gave them permissions to, and it would only be in the bulletin board.
I mean, that’s the creators problem for giving them perms, and the edits can easily be checked to see if it was really the user in question.
Maybe some way could be added to display the most recent editor, so people know the problem isn’t because of the main poster, and instead of someone they gave access to.
Well, because it can be a problem, this can’t be added. Also it seems too specific to be a devforum feature. You’re better off requesting at the discourse meta.
Or you know, have the author be someone who is constantly active. Have the owner even do it. The owner is more likely to be active. If this is not possible, then just keep reposting.
Editing others posts is a permission I believe is reserved only to sages / PA (I believe) / DET and honestly, for good reason.
If people could edit a post made by another person then the editor would be effectively speaking through another persons account which I believe is loosely against developer forum TOS (I wouldn’t say fully since bulletin board has its own rules regarding making posts on behalf of others.)
Furthermore, the ethics of this is a complete mess. What if someone turns nasty and suddenly starts for example editing the thread to post content not appropriate for the forum? Now sure, it could be seen by sages that they did not edit the post. But from anyone reading the post then its the author that said that.
Overall the entire idea is a bit of a mess, if someone goes inactive and the post is a good month old, just copy paste the source and repost it since while it would most likely qualify as spam in any normal category, in bulletin board I honestly would be shocked if there were any objections to doing that.
I don’t think it should matter. Threads made there are just meant to be linked directly on Roblox (which is why the rules don’t want you posting discord links, using profanity, etc. on those posts), not something you would be regularly reading as a developer. That is why it is muted by default. But yeah, speaking through someone else’s account is pretty unethical.
This something possible with vanilla Discourse as far as I know.
@Hooksmith is currently working on a plugin that will inform users of changes made by other users, so that eliminates most of the potential abuse.
anyways
However this could lead to the creation of Alt Accounts to bypass forum account termination/suspension. This most likely has a lot to consider and work to be done before being implemented.
[spoiler]and discourse plugins are a pain to make[/spoiler]
If collaborative editing in Bulletin Board just so happened to be allowed, that plugin would potentially be the solution to prevent placing the author in full responsibility in the public’s perspective. I did not know that it would only deal with post titles, thanks for letting me know.
Actually, thinking about the very reason why post edit history is only visible to specific people, this would potentially be a privacy issue. I guess collaborative editing is really not a good idea.
I don’t really like this idea seeing as writing on behalf of someone else already isn’t allowed and this is kind of the same. Plus unless you could prove who wrote what it’s very venerable for abused.
Discourse has a feature for this, called Wikis, but with the way it works; the post is editable by everyone [past a certain trust level].
While this could be achieved with a plugin, there’s not much of a motivation for it; what benefit do you get from this? Why not just send the changes to the user for them to add themselves?