[Discuss] Google & phpBB Summer of Code Participants Ann...

[imkingdavid]

Please use this topic to discuss the "Google & phpBB Summer of Code Participants Announced" announcement

Here is a list of the RFCs and Tickets related to the accepted proposals. Please discuss the implementation of the proposals in those locations, rather than here.
Search Backend Refactoring - RFC | Ticket
Attachment Improvements - RFC | Ticket
Auth Plugin Refactoring & User Integration - RFC | Ticket
Post Revisions/Edit Log - RFC | Ticket

[callumacrae]

Congrats, guys!

[naderman]

Congratulations indeed! Looking forward to working with you guys. We've had a lot of interested students join us on IRC and contribute patches recently. I really hope you will all stay around to work on phpBB!

[drathbun]

Post Revisions/Edit Log by David King, United States
David will implement a post revision system, enabling moderators to view detailed differences between edits made to a post with the ability to revert. This feature will have an option to be disabled, and can be further configured via the ACP to enable revision pruning.

This is an excellent feature, and in fact one that I've written for *mumble-older-version-of-phpbb-mumble* and am about to go live with. I would suggest to the coder, however, that a separate table is not required. In my implementation I create additional rows in the posts_text table, and store a tag called post_version that differentiates the various versions. The current version is always 0, so most of the phpBB code that retrieves post information simply adds "and post_version = 0" to the SQL code. By including this in the index performance does not suffer. Every edit for a post becomes an insert, with pseudo-code as follows:

Code: Select all

Update posts_text set post_version = post_version + 1;
Insert new post_text values;

The moderator option to review post versions include HTML "diff" code borrowed from Wordpress which seems to work similar to the library linked in the proposal linked in the announcement topic. A moderator can restore an older version of a post edit, but so can the owner of the post. A moderator can also lock a post to prevent further editing.

It's an excellent feature / concept, and I'm glad to see it coming about. It can help board moderators combat spam (as mentioned in the proposal) but it can also help when board users post a question, get their answer, and then go back and edit their original post to "thanks" or something that completely destroys the flow of the conversation.

I can also envision it being very powerful when used for legal investigations. Since nothing is ever edited (or deleted) only stored as versions, we can recreate the entire process that it took to get to a particular post. By including a "soft delete" feature you have a fairly bullet-proof legal archive of post activity.

[imkingdavid]

drathbun, thanks for the comments on the post revisions feature. I will consider what you said about using the existing posts table instead of adding a new revisions table, but there are a couple of issues that I can foresee with the fact that each revision would be then treated as a different post by the software. For instance, let's say that a moderator locks editing to the current revision of the post, but the post is then switched to a different revision. Because it is stored as a separate post, this revision is not locked and can be edited yet again. With the way I propose, only the information that is specific to each revision is stored separately, and the rest is globally applied to any revision of that post. Of course, to fix that with your solution, it would simply mean updating all posts that are revisions of a post whenever something is done to that post, such as locking it from being edited.

Anyway, to all, from now on please use this topic for discussion of the GSoC/PSoC program, and discuss the actual proposals and their implementations on the Area51 forum in the respective RFCs or in the Tracker in the respective tickets instead of here.

EDIT: To be helpful, I edited the first post of this topic with links to the tickets and RFCs for each of the proposals. Note that Joas's proposal is simply to finish up some RFCs for 3.1, so you can simply browse the 3.1 RFC forum on Area51 if you wish to provide input on those.

[Pony99CA]

I certainly applaud this action to help enhance and improve phpBB. However, I also hope that time spent mentoring will have little or no impact on phpBB 3.1, which is already (arguably) late. In other words, I hope that mentors' work on phpBB 3.1 is already done or that they're giving up their personal time to mentor instead of time that they would have spent working on phpBB 3.1 (not that anybody can really track that).

Steve

[drathbun]

EDIT: To be helpful, I edited the first post of this topic with links to the tickets and RFCs for each of the proposals.

Thanks

[CaNNon_]

Good luck with the projects they all look interesting.

[bjongen]

Congratulations and good luck! It's gonna be a good summer!

[/a3]

PostgreSQL/Sphinx indexing, better attachments, auth plugins? And not to mention the existing RFCs and post revisions? Sounds pretty exciting to me.

Good luck to all involved.

[SuperFedya]

Why Sphinx and not Apache Solr?
http://beerpla.net/2009/09/03/compariso ... inx-fight/

[Erik Frèrejean]

Most likely because there is already a Sphinx search backed for phpBB (this board runs it and the plugin can be found on GitHub, which then easily can be re-factored to work with the new system, AFAIK there isn't a Solr plugin and writing search plugins is outside the scope of that project.

[kickball365]

Wow, this is going to be great to see implemented! GOOD LUCK and KICK ASS! While it may be approaching spring/summer we're already looking forward to the Fall for the next release (hopeful!).

K365

[Techie-Micheal]

...

Code: Select all

Update posts_text set post_version = post_version + 1;
Insert new post_text values;

...

Keywords all-caps please.

[Jabhi]

Congrats and happy coding....