"Body is too similar to what you recently posted" when editing

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A small but annoying thing: I sometimes make typos in my comments, and sometimes I even notice them and go back to fix them. This runs into the warning in the title, which I guess is a doublepost-protection. Could it be disabled on editing?

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How about a 10 minute grace period before the rule is enforced? I don’t have internet at home at the moment (two months after ordering it) so anything I post is written on a phone screen with Swype. I often only notice an error when I’ve already posted a comment and the keyboard isn’t taking up half the screen.

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It would still need to separate edits from posts, though - assuming the purpose really is to avoid accidental double-posts, a ten-minute window where it was allowed would be counterproductive. :wink:

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This only happens when the edits are pure whitespace (no actual characters).

You can test it yourself at http://try.discourse.org

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Don’t tell too many people, but you can use this as a workaround:

<!-- edit -->
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Or you could, y’know, edit using actual words and letters of the post, too.

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That seempointless when the editi s to fixt his kind of thing.

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That seempointless when the editi s to fixt his kind of thing.`
         ^
         \- add an S?
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Ha, yes. Oops.
(Any post about grammar or spelling must contain at least one mistake, etc)

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@codinghorror: Can we please, please get rid of this horrible feature? What does it add? If I want to change the line breaks, let me. How does preventing me from doing so make the system better?

I was trying to edit my post here. It’s very difficult to insert visible line breaks between chunks of quoted text, because the preview shows something different to what gets posted (preview shows white gaps between the blocks, which disappear when posting) so I kept trying different variations. Each time I did so I had to change the punctuation because of that message.

Finally, I hit upon the “correct” solution (putting a space before the > in the second quoted block), and now I still can’t add the period back to the end of my first sentence, because it has a memory of that edited version and thinks it’s the same as the original version (without breaks between the blocks).

Sure, I could change something else and finally be allowed to fix the grammar of my post, but why should I be forced to?

Edit: Less emotionally, here are two three reasons I think you should change it:

  1. You may believe that white space changes don’t affect the body of the post, but it does, as my experience with needing to put an extra space before the > to break up quoted text showed. I’m sure there are other cases where white space inadvertently affects the post.

  2. Even if you have eliminated all cases where whitespace affects the post, it still does not add to the user experience to present them with the message.

  3. Are you saving the raw version of the user’s post for later editing? (You seem to be, as my multi-carriage-return paragraphs here appear to return to me unmolested when editing.) If so, even whitespace that is not visible in the published post may be helpful to the author, to allow them to break up their own text better when editing.

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Quotes in a direct series is tough in Markdown. I don’t recommend whitespace for that, I recommend HTML comments.

> this

<!-- break -->

> and this

The raw and cooked versions of posts are always saved. To view the raw, try /raw/{topicid}/{postid}. This one is /raw/27400/11 – you will have to “open in new tab” on that link though.

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This is not public knowledge, and doesn’t change the fact that whitespace changes can have visible effects on the published posts.

Great! So further reason (per my point #3 above) to allow pure whitespace changes.

Put it this way: if you were using a coding language without syntactically significant whitespace (e.g. Javascript), would you appreciate it if your editor popped up an error message every time you made whitespace-only edits, simply because it considered the new version to be functionally equivalent to the old version?

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Just as an update, this no longer reacts to only whitespace edits. Or am I misremembering, @riking?

Total duplicates (vs. Whitespace only duplicates) will still be detected.

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That would be Muphry’s Law

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Yes, that’s correct.

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Nope - what I quoted is apparently known as Skitt’s law. :smiley:

Murphy’s has a few different definitions…

  • “If there’s a wrong way to do it, someone eventually will”, which is as much a plea to design things so they can’t be used wrong as a sigh of exparation. (I’m used to this one.)

  • “If it can fail, it eventually will”, which is literally true (and should be kept in mind when designing things that are important and/or hard to maintain).

  • “If it can go wrong, it will” - same thing, but more of a sigh and less a reminder…

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Muphry’s Law is actually a thing, addressing problems of spelling, grammar, typesetting, and of citing Murphy’s law in that context.

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Oh damn, I didn’t actually notice the spelling. :smiley:

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It’s recursive.

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