Determining "D'oh!" draft delay

January 30, 2019 4:26 PM

Would it be possible to create draft FPPs before the end of the 24-hour delay? In other words, you would get the D'oh!/"you have already posted a link in the past 24 hours" page after hitting publish instead of when you click on New Post. I think the 24-hour delay is a good thing but it's intended to prevent people from posting not writing. Changing the order would allow people to check HTML formatting and link accuracy earlier in the writing process if they want to post on back-to-back days. Aside from changing the back end of the publishing process (which I know nothing about and may very well be insurmountable) would it add additional work or issues for the mods over time? Is this something that other people who post FPPs would like?

previously

posted by not_the_water to Feature Requests at 4:26 PM (20 comments total)

I think we've talked about it once or twice before, but we can consider it again. I don't think it would create more work for the mods, per se, though I worry a little about people getting too antsy about posting when the "neeeearly there!" gap between can't post yet and ready to post gets more narrow. But that might be me worrying too much.

But what I don't know is how much of a pain it would be under the hood to rearrange that workflow. There's some surprisingly eldritch bits in some of the post management stuff, as we've discovered over time as frimble has revisited this or that bit of it; it might be a cinch to change this, it might be a pain in the ass.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:30 PM on January 30, 2019

I'm all for having the ability to draft before the 24-hour moratorium on posting again passes. I also am aware that I no next to nothing about the behind the scenes programming and as Cortex says, this might be a simple adjustment or it might require taking a part the whole engine, here's hoping it's a quick fix. Cheers.
posted by Fizz at 4:33 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I would love this. I wouldn't use it very often, but whenever I would use it I'd be very happy.
posted by Grandysaur at 5:14 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]

I dunno, there are plenty of folks who make quality posts on a daily or near-daily basis. If it wouldn't be too much of a pain in the butt, I think this would be a fine feature to add. However, I feel like there is already kind of a decent list of features and interface modifications that everyone including the mods have said would be good, but which have yet to be implemented. I'd prefer to see some of that backlog cleared out before we seriously entertain new feature requests.

That's not a knock on frimble, mind you. I am certain they are working industriously on all kinds of behind-the-scenes stuff that is almost entirely invisible to the userbase as long as it's being done but which would become immediately apparent if it stopped. And I know that hiring more staff is not in the cards in the foreseeable future. It just seems a tiny bit pointless to talk about adding a whole post drafting feature when the down arrow is still anchored on the tags instead of the comment box.

I suggest just drafting your posts in an old-fashioned text editor, like God intended.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:16 PM on January 30, 2019 [8 favorites]

Not that I'm a high volume poster or anything, but it's common that less than a day after posting one thing, I'll find something else I wish I could post. What currently happens in this sort of situation is I don't use any sort of system to remember that I wanted to post the second thing and then I get busy with other things and it never gets posted.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 8:10 PM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]

I suggest just drafting your posts in an old-fashioned text editor, like God intended.

And using the other posting pages like Ask.Me and FanFare to test html.

Leave the tags for last, can't accidentally post if you leave the tags off.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:32 PM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

I'm not sure that this has to be on Metafilter to be very nearly as useful - It's not the worst thing to have to copy and paste your code from somewhere like http://scratchpad.io/, which saves everything through crashes, as I tested while writing this post.

You can bookmark it, add it to a reminder, something like that, and then just make your post when you're able. It probably wouldn't be that hard to write up a little HTML file that does something similar using LocalStorage, to keep everything offline.
posted by sagc at 9:25 PM on January 30, 2019

I suggest just drafting your posts in an old-fashioned text editor, like God intended.

And using the other posting pages like Ask.Me and FanFare to test html.

That people have workarounds for these constraints that involve almost posting on the wrong subsite suggests that a fix is needed.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:55 PM on January 30, 2019 [7 favorites]

That people have workarounds for these constraints that involve almost posting on the wrong subsite suggests that a fix is needed.

Yes, the workarounds are a pain, especially for fully testing a post as you are trying to build it; as the mods know I've accidentally ended up posting on the wrong subsite and had to get them to quickly delete.

I would love the ability to draft as soon as I've submitted a post (as I can do on various platforms). Faffing around with workarounds has resulted in the loss of several posts, and the giving up through frustration on some others.

It doesn't have to be an extensive change to the current form; just make the submit button invisible until the 24 hours are up.
posted by Wordshore at 1:33 AM on January 31, 2019 [5 favorites]

how often are users really planning another FPP the same day they already posted one?

pretty much every single time i've ever posted one tbh bc i always, always find something else seconds later. ymmv if you are not cursed by the same gods i am.
posted by poffin boffin at 3:19 AM on January 31, 2019 [6 favorites]

floam: how often are users really planning another FPP the same day they already posted one?

poffin boffin: pretty much every single time i've ever posted one tbh bc i always, always find something else seconds later. ymmv if you are not cursed by the same gods i am.

One of us, one of us, gooble-gobble gooble-gobble.

There are probably a handful of people who are fanatics and post with really high frequency, but seem to also be a good number who get on a roll, and in some cases, prefer or are only really able to post in a narrow window of downtime (see impatient pony: queuing FPPs and preview posts before 24 hours, two recent-ish MetaTalks).


My personal work-around is to draft posts in comments of older threads, so I can make use of MetaFilter's link, bold and italics shortcuts, and I use Character Count Tool to make the title text fit in 72 characters. Another problem with this and other work-arounds is that there's no link-checking (which you can do manually, by simply plunking URLs into the site search, but that takes a bit of work), and it's hard to check tags to see what similar items have been posted before, also potentially catching doubles.
posted by filthy light thief at 7:04 AM on January 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

That people have workarounds for these constraints that involve almost posting on the wrong subsite suggests that a fix is needed.

Well, yes and no. I think the larger ask is "Hey here is a problem that affects a small subset of power users in a small but substantial way. Is it worth devoting mod coding resources to this issue above other issues that may need addressing?" And honestly, I personally don't know (this is not a thing I would need but that doesn't matter in the scheme of things) but it is worth understanding that

- coding features takes time
- time for coding is finite
- there are unintended consequences to every feature change
- there may be other ways to mostly solve the problem that don't involve limited coding resources

I think more to the point, the thing that is often difficult here in MeTa is the general maxim: just because something isn't optimized for your use case doesn't mean there may not be other good reasons for it being that way.

To be honest, I sort of like Wordshore's " just make the submit button invisible until the 24 hours are up." approach. So not even really a coding change (like there's no "save drafts" thing that needs to be built) but a simple timer.
posted by jessamyn (retired) at 10:33 AM on January 31, 2019 [4 favorites]

Yes I think Wordshore's idea is good. You can trial format the post as much as you want, just not publish it for 24 hours.
posted by carter at 10:59 AM on January 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

Yeah, to be clear that'd be the ideal outcome in my mind: that there is basically no coding headaches involved in changing what's shown in the less-than-24-hours-since-last-post case from a "not yet!" message to a draft-with-no-post-button case. Might turn out to be that simple, might not, but I'll have frimble take a look either way.
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:11 AM on January 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

what's shown in the less-than-24-hours-since-last-post case from a "not yet!" message to a draft-with-no-post-button case.

Can we get it to show the “Ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word!” pop up message that Nedry uses in Jurassic Park?
posted by Fizz at 1:16 PM on January 31, 2019 [6 favorites]

Well, yes and no. I think the larger ask is "Hey here is a problem that affects a small subset of power users in a small but substantial way. Is it worth devoting mod coding resources to this issue above other issues that may need addressing?" And honestly, I personally don't know (this is not a thing I would need but that doesn't matter in the scheme of things) but it is worth understanding that.

Yes, and I think a reasonable response to this is that, while no one user is the community, power users in general drive the flavor of the blue. Since there will hopefully always be power users, it might be nice to cater to that behavior.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:33 PM on January 31, 2019 [2 favorites]

YES PLEASE YES GOD PLEASE this is basically what I was asking for with my new MeTa, I would RIDE THIS PONY TO THE GATES OF HELL if you gave it to me

it would make it SO MUCH EASIER to make FPPs ahead of time if I could load them into the cannon before the time was up, and I never do that for shit that's actually time-sensitive anyway

pleaaaaaaaase, that way if I make one post at 12p and then the next day can't get to a computer till 5p, I don't lose all those hours and then have to make a weekend post which I don't like to do as much, I would love this feature so so much. then I could queue the new post and just hit send on my phone around the deadline time, instead of hoping I can get to my laptop when I'm doing a bunch of things.

Avaricious big-eyed wanting aside, I totally get it if the site code makes this unfeasible. But of the people requesting it in this thread, I... don't really associate anyone with a tendency towards newsfilter asking for it? And I mean, we have so many drives trying to get people to post to the front page, I guess I don't quite get why reducing FPPs is a goal. One user posting five different posts on First Nations culture (hi, poffin, I appreciate those a lot) is not going to suck up time and energy from everyone else's posts on, I dunno, neuroscience and edible crickets.
posted by sciatrix at 3:24 PM on January 31, 2019 [3 favorites]

I like Wordshore and jessamyn's suggestions.
posted by terrapin at 6:35 AM on February 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

Unless I’m misunderstanding something, isn’t removing the publish button in essence the same thing as this pony request? Being able to trial format a post is the whole point. It doesn’t matter how it’s executed, being able to make a draft post at any time is the fundamental goal. Maybe I didn’t make that clear enough
posted by not_the_water at 10:27 AM on February 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

how often are users really planning another FPP the same day they already posted one?

pretty much every single time i've ever posted one tbh bc i always, always find something else seconds later. ymmv if you are not cursed by the same gods i am.

I know those gods and I approve of this pony request.
posted by homunculus at 4:49 PM on February 5, 2019