There are some boards, you will never need it and there are others where it is a absolutely must have.

Here is one of my storys (sorry for my bad English):

Yesterday there was a user in one of my boards (vb4), who told me a moderator was editing his posts in that way, to let him look bad in the board. I reviewed his postings and saw, that the moderator had only removed the fullquotes of the previous posting and had not changed a single line of his writing. The users attempted by this way to force me to kick this moderator, but he didn't know, that I could see the edit history. So I could prove him, that he was lying to me an that the moderator has done his job good. Without this build in tool in VB, it would be impossible to me and the moderator, to see and show the truth in this case.

its always, to me, seemed to be one thing not needed a lot but when needed its critical.
kind of like a nightly backup LOL

its always, to me, seemed to be one thing not needed a lot but when needed its critical.

kind of like a nightly backup LOL

I make daily SQL backups for similar reasons.

I have a script on cron that automatically dumps the database and compresses it every night during off-peak hours.

right now I do dailies (everything, full sql, etc) to dedicated drive and weekly that will be ssh to a remote server which itself is backed up nightly LOL

I make daily SQL backups and weekly gallery backups.

Making even infrequent backups of my entire site is pretty much impossible. When you run a site that's media centric and has over 200GB of files uploaded, maintaining backups is a severe pain.

yeah I am only about 60 gb right now but cpremote does incremental which helps. database is biggest thing though IMO.
forum will run w/o a picture....not so good w/o a database LOL

Yesterday there was a user in one of my boards (vb4), who told me a moderator was editing his posts in that way, to let him look bad in the board. I reviewed his postings and saw, that the moderator had only removed the fullquotes of the previous posting and had not changed a single line of his writing. The users attempted by this way to force me to kick this moderator, but he didn't know, that I could see the edit history. So I could prove him, that he was lying to me an that the moderator has done his job good. Without this build in tool in VB, it would be impossible to me and the moderator, to see and show the truth in this case.

And he couldn't see that the edits are viewable by himself and the moderators?

No, he could only see, that it was edit. As reason the moderator wrote a note, that he removed the fullquote. Edit history in this board is only viewable by the admin.

Agreed that it's ok if it can be controlled, especially if only used in certain critical forum sections or on certain threads only.

I am seriously a compulsive ninja-editor though, and would probably crash my own server with nitpicking grammar adjustments.

@ Jay, your "Life of Brian" video doesn't load for people in the US.

Some functionality is simply too basic to be a hook, because it has to do with basic database structure. Imagine that forum categories would be a hook. Its so vital, that you can not risk such function to be dependent upon a 3rd party. If the hook is abandoned, then this will cause major data loss and functionality loss. You would be stuck on the last IPB version that would work with the hook.

Coming from other platforms, which all have post edit history, migration to IPS, results in data loss. (even with a hook providing this). There is no import script.

I definitely agree that such a feature should be included by default, but if you take regular backups and the backups include the post history data then major data loss shouldn't be too much of an issue; if the hook is later abandoned you could nonetheless still have the data backed up.

I am seriously a compulsive ninja-editor though, and would probably crash my own server with nitpicking grammar adjustments.

The history only has to be made increment like its known from the Wikipedia, and not of the whole post. In this way I don't think it will affect so much the database.

Once something like this is implemented, it wouldn't take much for an all-on Wiki addition as I suggested here:

My opinion is that it sounds like a nice feature, but could cause large databases to grow in size greatly. This (database size) can be a real problem for very large boards.

vBulletin has this feature and my post edit history table is 7% the size of the post table. After the post table, the next biggest table is the PM table.

I dont see keeping the post edit history a problem, even for large boards.

I don't see much use for old topics, never mind their version history to be honest. It should also be a per forum setting.

Ive caught members who changed their (ie lied) story through the post edit history.

I think it would be best to have a setting to only log history of edits made after a specific time period. 10 minutes, for example.

So it doesn't waste database space and add clutter for quick edits.

Post edit history
My forum has about 250.000 posts with post edit history. We can not afford to loose this data.
The function is also very important to my site. Here is why: There are a lot of instances where post edit history allows staff to find out what has happened in the past. Without post edit history you are basically blind in such situations. This function normally has a time limit. Any edit done within a certain time span will not be listed as a seperate edit in the post edit log.

[*]I think any medium to large site frequently encounters the issue of members vandalizing their posts and thereby making many threads unreadable. With post edit history, moderators can quickly undo this. [*]Another issue that we frequently encounter is when we receive a report about rule breaches or abuse, but it has been edited out of the post. The staff can then no longer check what the situation was.

I think at the end of the day IPS acknowledges there is a high demand for this feature and since they take into account the fact that they cater to all kinds of sites they certainly want to incorporate this feature. However, they worry about resources. I would suggest that instead of arguing why the feature be added, you guys should instead suggest ways for the feature to be added without it causing resource problems. That should make it faster for getting the feature added.

I think at the end of the day IPS acknowledges there is a high demand for this feature and since they take into account the fact that they cater to all kinds of sites they certainly want to incorporate this feature. However, they worry about resources. I would suggest that instead of arguing why the feature be added, you guys should instead suggest ways for the feature to be added without it causing resource problems. That should make it faster for getting the feature added.

I did.

I think it would be best to have a setting to only log history of edits made after a specific time period. 10 minutes, for example.

So it doesn't waste database space and add clutter for quick edits.

It may also be useful to have any repeat edits made within a certain time period to apply only once. So, for example, if someone edits their post 30 minutes after making it, then edits it once more 31 minutes later, it will only record the later edit.

Basically, add some form of logic to the function. You don't need to log everything. As an example, I've edited this post over 5 times now. But since I made the edit within 10 minutes of posting, it wouldn't waste space and resources by logging the edits I'm making in this brief time span.

I don't have any resource issues with post edit history on my big board. I get 5 million hits per month.

I would say it will come.... maybe not for several versions as stock, but it has extremely high demand.

I think at the end of the day IPS acknowledges there is a high demand for this feature and since they take into account the fact that they cater to all kinds of sites they certainly want to incorporate this feature. However, they worry about resources. I would suggest that instead of arguing why the feature be added, you guys should instead suggest ways for the feature to be added without it causing resource problems. That should make it faster for getting the feature added.

I factually fail to see the difference... if there was such a resource issue, Content would not have this very function for pages, templates, and database records, on every edit, rather without choice except for databases...

My suggestion was for the sake of avoiding useless clutter as well as cutting back on database space.

There's generally no reason to log every edit made a few minutes after the post was submitted. I edit posts within seconds after making them constantly. But that's because I have a very bad habit of editing my posts instead of previewing them before posting.

Had a look ad a one of my boards, where users can only edit their post on this board, in the first 10 minutes after the first saving. Post-data ist 21,9 Mib and postedithistory-date ist 3,5 Mib.

Post edit history

My forum has about 250.000 posts with post edit history. We can not afford to loose this data.

The function is also very important to my site. Here is why:

[*]I think any medium to large site frequently encounters the issue of members vandalizing their posts and thereby making many threads unreadable. With post edit history, moderators can quickly undo this. [*]Another issue that we frequently encounter is when we receive a report about rule breaches or abuse, but it has been edited out of the post. The staff can then no longer check what the situation was.

There are a lot of instances where post edit history allows staff to find out what has happened in the past. Without post edit history you are basically blind in such situations.

This function normally has a time limit. Any edit done within a certain time span will not be listed as a seperate edit in the post edit log.

Very good point.

Hey guys.

http://community.invisionpower.com/resources/bugs.html/_/ip-board/moderatorial-bbcodes-r38971

Read the last comment.

You have hope.

That sounds very good :)