That'd be less ugly than an empty node or even one full of long stretches of striked text...

It wouldn't make the node owned by the NodeReaper, which leads to questions like unreaping and exclusion from searches, etc.

On the other hand, it is uglier than a node with a mature update that is more informative and customized to the specific circumstances.

On the gripping hand, I don't foresee such getting implemented anyway. So I'm not going try to hash out more details of the design. (I prefer the previously identified route of getting preview for updates and then edit histories).

(I prefer the previously identified route of getting preview for updates and then edit histories).

I'm curious about this....
I certainly appreciate having the preview button available when creating a node, and I miss it when when updating.

I tried a Super Search on "previewing updates" which turned up nothing. Is there a separate discussion on this elsewhere, or plans to implement it?

Sorry, I don't have a ready pointer to a node on this subject nor a good lead on a quick way to find one.

One reason for preview is to reduce the number of changes that get logged. I suspect that additional tricks will be required to reduce the resource requirements for logging changes to a reasonable level, though. We already have previews (and change logging) for other types of updates.

- tye        

I sometimes simply abandon a reply in mid-edit - pretty much a self reap before posting. Using the preview button and actually reading what you have written often aids in such a decision.

The most common source of duplicate posts I've noticed is when a node is posted by Anonymous Monk, then is duplicated by a registered monk. Perhaps a solution to that is to provide a way of changing ownership of the original node so it doesn't need to be duplicated? I guess this could lead to problems with people trying to claim nodes they didn't author so it's not clear that this solution would be better than the (relatively minor) current problem.

it is trivial to change the owner of a node from anonymonk to a registered user - provided you have appropriate permissions to edit the node.

I suspect the most elegant implementation of what you suggest would be to empower the janitors to do this and anyone could request that a node owner be changed from anonymonk by /msg'ing them

I am not sure how to overcome the obvious issues of verifying the authenticity of the claim of ownership of a node and/or the issue of someone eventually trying to abuse this process for such things as reputation gain.

Absent a solution for those probs - I doubt anything like this would ever see the light of day.

There are two things that would ameliorate the effects of bogus claims:

• The simplest implementation of ownership transference wouldn't carry across any XP appropriate to the node's rep - no immediate XP advantage
• A time limit (say, half an hour) from time of posting could be imposed after which a petition for ownership change is much less likely to be granted.

These don't eliminate the possibility for abuse, but do reduce the attractiveness and likelyhood while allowing the vast majority of valid claims to be processed.

---

Perl is Huffman encoded by design.

I'd rather it be automated, simply requiring that a request come from a logged-in user, from the same IP address used to create the node, and within say 2 hours of the creation time.

But I don't consider it an important problem to solve. If you didn't notice that

You are not logged in

then you deserve a little loss. (:

- tye