I'd like to have a possibility to retitle a thread of nodes conveniently, just like davido's Janitors Thread Retitler v3.1 and similar to The editors' hall of mirrors and trickery.

I imagine the process as follows:

  1. The janitor clicks retitle in the Editors Nodelet
  2. A Textbox is displayed. Janitor enters a new title and clicks preview.
  3. The new thread titles are displayed
  4. The janitor clicks submit
  5. The nodes get retitled and unconsidered
  6. An editorial note is left in the first retitled node that includes the consideration, the considerer, the janitor and the number of votes (Keep/Edit/Delete)
  7. Textbox and button are displayed for a autogenerated /msg to the OP

Maybe one could tweak davido's script to do this? What do you think?

Then I was thinking do do the retitling automatically (like autoreaping). But doing that blindly would be a bad idea facing considerations like change "defalt" to "default" or retitle: some more specific, please. So a retitling syntax would be neccessary. to change a part of the title: 

retitle/defalt/default/

[download]
to change the whole title 
retitle/*/This is a new title/

[download]


holli, /regexed monk/

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: On Site retitle function
by Corion (Patriarch) on Aug 12, 2005 at 07:14 UTC

    The idea in principle is good, but I'm very strongly against automating the selection of the new title. Many suggestions are really bad suggestions even though they collect enough "edit" votes.

    Ideally, the functionality would be on-site and would be editing the database instead of running as a separate script, but it shouldn't be hard to implement that.

[reply]
      edit means title is bad, janitor discretion
[reply]
Re: On Site retitle function
by Arunbear (Prior) on Aug 12, 2005 at 20:32 UTC
    This has been implemented on the test server (minus automated choice of title), but I have not moved the code over because I was worried that it may place too great a load on the database.

    The code traverses the thread and for each node that needs re-titling, executes an Update (to change the title) and an Insert (to update the node history).

    Take for example 'Algorithm wanted' (481987) which at the moment has 83 replies; clicking the retitle button would execute 84 Updates and 84 Inserts. Even if the re-titling could be done using a single Update (I think we would need subqueries to do that), there's no escaping the Inserts if we want edit histories.

    For any interested pmdevs, the re-titler is node 324584 on the test server.

[reply]

      The existing retitling scripts put a far higher load on the site because they request each node to be retitled via HTTP, and save it again, not only causing your UPDATE statements but also updating the user settings and other stuff. So in my opinion, the load is negligible. Mad props for implementing this!

[reply]
        But the retitling scripts can go to sleep between node updates, I'm not sure the onsite retitler has that option.
[reply]
Re: On Site retitle function (close)
by tye (Sage) on Aug 12, 2005 at 16:32 UTC

    The process should have "from" and "to" fields. The "from" field defaults to the title of the considered node with the "Re(^\d+)?: " removed (using the regex used elsewhere). The "to" field could default to the consideration reason so the janitor could remove the extra bits rather than paste, but blank is probably better (display the consideration reason on the form so cut'n'paste of part of it is easy).

    "The nodes get retitled and unconsidered" should end "and the one node gets unconsidered", but that should be optional, because you might retitle a node that is currently considered for some other reason, so I'd personally just not unconsider. But a checkbox for such would be fine is someone wants to do that work when implementing this.

    The title change should be added to each of the janitorial node histories and a note should not be added to any node contents.

    I believe someone has already been testing a retitle feature on the test server.

    - tye        

[reply]

Back to Inner Scriptorium