Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I fixed this page to not display a list of letter links if the number of links exceeds 260. It will now show all the links.

Since ModifiedDate doesn't always get set, the links on this page are now sorted by CreationDate.

Going in reverse chronological order, I have started to review the submissions still listed here. I have already marked as deleted several that were empty or which lacked the Zillions file it was allegedly linking to. But I did not actually delete anything. I have left alone some submissions made by other editors. In particular, I hope that Jeremy Good and Joe Joyce will attend to their old submissions and either complete them or delete them. Going from the bottom up, I have not yet found any that could be published. I will continue with this tomorrow.

I think one of the reasons we have gotten so many empty submissions is that graphics could be uploaded only by users marked as contributors. To make it easier for newcomers to submit content, I have removed the requirement that only "contributors" may upload files. I have replaced it with the policy that blocked users may not upload anything. This replaces whitelisting with blacklisting. Newcomers are assumed to be trustworthy until they prove themselves not to be. With the restrictions that are already on uploading, I doubt it will be abused much.

Members may now view and comment on new submissions before they are approved for publication. Hopefully, feedback from other members will help authors and editors process new submissions more quickly. Until approved, new submissions will still be unindexed and unviewable by the general public, and they will display notices indicating that they are works in progress awaiting editorial approval.

When a submission is updated, it will be saved to a new row in the Revisions table. This is in addition to updating its row in the MemberSubmissions table. This will preserve a copy of it in case it is deleted or it is changed by subsequent revisions. Pairs of revisions may be compared together. This is useful for letting editors quickly see what changes someone has made without rereading the whole submission. To keep the Revisions table from growing too large, it is also possible to delete revisions. Currently, the only option is for a revisor to delete all of his own revisions except for the very latest one. So, no one may delete all of his revisions, no one may delete someone else's revisions, and no one may delete the revision matching the current version of the submission.

To see how many revisions a submission has, an editor or author may check the Edit menu for the page. Anyone who views this page may also see the number of revisions given with the listing.

Very nice!  I was considering attempting this, but using diffs instead of saving the entire revision (but with the final, and perhaps various intermediate versions, saved in full so that lots of diffs wouldn't need to be processed to display a page).  That might be something to still try, if the size of the revisions table is a concern.

I can't see revision counts from any of the Edit links that I know about (but can in this New Submissions list), nor a link to the revisions.php script.  The editor-use Edit page has text concerning revisions, but the link doesn't work, and the author-use Edit page hasn't been changed recently.

And a separate issue (for editors): does loading the Edit Index Information (for editors) page take a long time to load the inventor/author dropdowns for anyone else?  If so, I'd like to move those into a new script, so that categorization, primary/secondary links, etc. and approval can be done more quickly.

Very nice!  I was considering attempting this, but using diffs instead of saving the entire revision (but with the final, and perhaps various intermediate versions, saved in full so that lots of diffs wouldn't need to be processed to display a page).  That might be something to still try, if the size of the revisions table is a concern.

It occurred to me that I could do this after I set it up for doing comparisons between revisions, but this would also make it more complicated. Hopefully, the ability to delete old revisions will keep it from growing too large. If needed, I can also add automatic garbage collection that keeps the size of the Revisions table down.

I can't see revision counts from any of the Edit links that I know about (but can in this New Submissions list), nor a link to the revisions.php script. 

You're going to see revision counts only for pages that actually have revisions. Most submissions do not have any, because they were submitted before revisions started being saved. When I just checked one of the latest submissions, it had a couple revisions listed in the Edit menu. Remember that you have to be signed in to see the Edit menu.

The editor-use Edit page has text concerning revisions, but the link doesn't work, and the author-use Edit page hasn't been changed recently.

Okay, I have now fixed that.

And a separate issue (for editors): does loading the Edit Index Information (for editors) page take a long time to load the inventor/author dropdowns for anyone else?  If so, I'd like to move those into a new script, so that categorization, primary/secondary links, etc. and approval can be done more quickly.

We have had a quick edit script for several years now, which dispenses with the long list of possible author and inventor ids. I used to use it back when I used a 2400 baud modem to get on the internet. Just use the link that says "quick edit" instead of the one that says "edit".

I fixed a bug on this page: the query ordered by CreationDate but tried to group for display based on ModifiedDate; I think here having the query order by ModifiedDate makes more sense.  However, there are a handful of pages here with ModifiedDate=0000-00-00, which get tacked on at the end.

@Fergus, I'm not sure what causes a page will have this degenerate ModifiedDate?  Even your test page that has revisions in the table suffers that affliction.

I went back and deleted some old submissions of mine from years ago. In one last case, however, I'm unable to edit or delete a particular submission, because when I click on it it says the page cannot be found. I'm not sure if the system still thinks it has not been deleted. In any case, could an editor please try to delete the following old submission of mine, if possible (it could matter since I believe nowadays there is a limit of having 9[?] unprocessed submissions at any one time for a contributor, especially if the submissions are counted by the database, rather than by an editor):

https://www.chessvariants.com/link/4bughouse

https://www.chessvariants.com/link/4bughouse

It had entries in other tables of the database. I have now deleted them.

I added information on the last action to each submission listing. This will be either the latest comment or the latest revision, and it will give us an indication of which submissions require attention. When the last action was by the author, the last action text will appear green, and this will indicate that some attention is required from the editors. When the last action was not by the author, the last action text will appear red, and this will either mean that someone is working on it, or that we're waiting for some action by the author.

When I reverted the Futashikana Shogi pages back to their original form, they also reverted to pending editorial approval. This game has already been approved before. If an editor could fix this that would be great.

Okay.

Hi, I have some unprocessessed submissions dating back to August (Empire Chess and Shinobi Chess)... Is there any reason why they're stuck in limbo still?

Hi Daniel, sorry, those had slipped beyond my radar. I'll make another pass through the list when I can.

Thanks -- and would you be able to do Chennis as well? That's my last one.

I changed this page to be sorted by CreationDate, because ModifiedDate has sometimes not been set.

Hi, still waiting for Chennis (submitted January) to be published

Suzumu Shogi and Mitsugumi Shogi (Rules pages and GC preset pages) are ready.

The Heavy Shako GC preset page is also ready.

Mitsugumi-Shogi (Note the hyphen!!!) can be deleted.

What if you sorted based on the timestamp of the last action taken for each article? That way you don't have to worry about unset modification dates, and you can see which articles have changes ready for review.

This page has been getting very slow of late. I think it's because it counts the number of revisions for each entry, and the Revisions table has been growing in size. So, when we make lots of small revisions to a page, let's make sure to delete most of the past ones.

I modified the script to count comments and revisions with a single query for each table at the beginning, but it was still going slowly, because it also does queries for each item to find out the last action. To address that, I modified the one-time queries to also include information on the latest commentdate or revisiontime. But I'm not sure how to modify it to also include who wrote the comment or made the revision. So, it is still doing additional queries while listing the output. But instead of doing two queries for each item, is is now doing only one. Also, I was able to simplify each of those queries by including the commentdate or revisiontime from the one-time queries. So, altogether, it was previously doing four additional queries per item, and now it is doing only one additional query, and each of those should take less time now, which should speed it up, but it's still listing items in spurts.

Additionally, it is also checking whether there is an entry in MemberSubmissions, which takes another query. So, it's actually doing two additional queries per item. For items created after the Revisions tables, I might be able to use the revisions count to tell whether the page has been created yet, which would save the need to query MemberSubmissions. Certainly, if there are any revisions, the page has already been created, and I could query MemberSubmissions only for items with no revisions. So, it will now query the MemberSubmissions table only when the revision count is zero, which should shave off some more time.

The last several pages I've reviewed (starting with submissions from somewhere Jan/Feb 2023?), when I go to the edit (index information) form, the categories are all unchecked. I'm not sure why that would be, and I haven't had time to debug: was there a change in the initial submission scripts that didn't save categories properly, or is there something wrong with the edit form's fetching of them?...