I'm in the process of massively overhauling the classic (and lately malfunctional, and years-abandoned) "RH Topic Tags" extension. I have made a great deal of progress with it, including new features (quite a big list), better behavior from old features (ditto), patching two security problems, and getting it to work robustly in phpBB 3.3.x.
However, in the course of using it "live" for a couple of months now, it has become clear that the actual utility of the thing is frustratingly low, because of how it operates (and pretty much must operate): a topic's tags are assigned to the first post in the topic. Under most systems' circumstances, this can only be edited by the original post author, or by an admin or moderator.
Consequently, it is not presently possible for other users to add or change topic tags, so any topics pre-existing the installation of the tags extension cannot be tagged except by a handful of overworked individuals instead of improved by the board's user community. LIkewise, something new but mis-tagged cannot be fixed except by a tiny number of people.
Of course, the problem with giving everyone (or everyone in an established-users group) permission to edit posts authored by others is that it would allow them to change the wording of the original posts, perhaps in trolling or other nasty ways. Some users are extremely proprietary about their posts, typos and all, so this would be a recipe for massive drama even in the absence of bad-actors.
What is needed
This extension needs to add a permission to open a post for editing (preferably only the top/first post in a topic) but be excluded from editing the main text within that post, and just be able to adjust the tags, heading/title (e.g. to remove redundant labeling words that have been moved into tags), and the description (if you have the topic description field) - the metadata in other words - but not be able to alter the main content of the post (unless you are the original author or a mod/admin who otherwise has permission to do that). So, an "Edit post - Lite version" permission.
It appears to me that this is doable because of the classes and other metadata assigned to particular document-object-model objects in the page, including all of these form fields that make up a post in editing mode.
But I do not yet understand enough about the guts of phpBB's highly (unnecessarily?) complex templating and permissions system to pull this off by myself, even so far with "AI" (LLM) attempts at helping to analyze the code.
I need input from someone who already understands these matters better than I do. But I'm not looking for a "pay me to develop this for you" offer; I've already put in 2 months of rather excruciating work to fix up RH Topic Tags for modern usage, and when I'm certain that it's seaworthy, it's going up on GitHub for free for everyone. So, I'm looking for one or more collaborators in getting it seaworthy. This is not a commercial project of any kind.
(PS: I'm aware of a paid fork of the Topic Tags extension, and have looked at it a little. My version implements some of what it does, and fixes/improves some things that it does not, while that other one does some things mine does not. Its approach to what tags "are" and "are for" is a very different usage model from mine, which is geared more for an "everyone on the board can tag things" implementation, while the other party's fork is more for an "admins/moderators will use a controlled set of pre-determined tags" approach. I think the version I'm polishing up has much broader utility.)
However, in the course of using it "live" for a couple of months now, it has become clear that the actual utility of the thing is frustratingly low, because of how it operates (and pretty much must operate): a topic's tags are assigned to the first post in the topic. Under most systems' circumstances, this can only be edited by the original post author, or by an admin or moderator.
Consequently, it is not presently possible for other users to add or change topic tags, so any topics pre-existing the installation of the tags extension cannot be tagged except by a handful of overworked individuals instead of improved by the board's user community. LIkewise, something new but mis-tagged cannot be fixed except by a tiny number of people.
Of course, the problem with giving everyone (or everyone in an established-users group) permission to edit posts authored by others is that it would allow them to change the wording of the original posts, perhaps in trolling or other nasty ways. Some users are extremely proprietary about their posts, typos and all, so this would be a recipe for massive drama even in the absence of bad-actors.
What is needed
This extension needs to add a permission to open a post for editing (preferably only the top/first post in a topic) but be excluded from editing the main text within that post, and just be able to adjust the tags, heading/title (e.g. to remove redundant labeling words that have been moved into tags), and the description (if you have the topic description field) - the metadata in other words - but not be able to alter the main content of the post (unless you are the original author or a mod/admin who otherwise has permission to do that). So, an "Edit post - Lite version" permission.
It appears to me that this is doable because of the classes and other metadata assigned to particular document-object-model objects in the page, including all of these form fields that make up a post in editing mode.
But I do not yet understand enough about the guts of phpBB's highly (unnecessarily?) complex templating and permissions system to pull this off by myself, even so far with "AI" (LLM) attempts at helping to analyze the code.
I need input from someone who already understands these matters better than I do. But I'm not looking for a "pay me to develop this for you" offer; I've already put in 2 months of rather excruciating work to fix up RH Topic Tags for modern usage, and when I'm certain that it's seaworthy, it's going up on GitHub for free for everyone. So, I'm looking for one or more collaborators in getting it seaworthy. This is not a commercial project of any kind.
(PS: I'm aware of a paid fork of the Topic Tags extension, and have looked at it a little. My version implements some of what it does, and fixes/improves some things that it does not, while that other one does some things mine does not. Its approach to what tags "are" and "are for" is a very different usage model from mine, which is geared more for an "everyone on the board can tag things" implementation, while the other party's fork is more for an "admins/moderators will use a controlled set of pre-determined tags" approach. I think the version I'm polishing up has much broader utility.)
Statistics: Posted by SMcCandlish — Thu Feb 20, 2025 7:25 am