Edit or Delete Your Machine Comments

Live to blog, blog to live. That’s what we sometimes say, especially when we remember to blog a blog.

What is the 102nd blog post about? It’s about a new feature on Pinball Map that we like to call “edit or delete your machine comments.”

Sometimes operators write to us, “please make it so we can edit other people’s comments.” To which we reply, “That is a bad idea. How come you don’t know that?”

But what’s less bad is the ability to edit your own machine comments. You see, sometimes we make mistakes. These mistakes might be a typo (misspelled word) or other grammar mistake (such as an omitted word). If a mistake is made, a user would often leave a brand new comment correcting the comment they had just made. Less often, a user would remove the entire machine and re-add it just to “fix” their comment. Or likewise, they would remove the machine and re-add it in order to remove a comment that was no longer applicable (even administrators - those bastions of clean data - would sometimes do that).

We even had a user delete their account in order to try and remove a comment that they regretted (that didn’t work, btw - we just remove the username).

Clearly there was a problem in need of a solution.

The solution was to allow users to edit or delete their own comments, and that solution is now in the palm of your hands and also on your desk.

Edited comments will include an asterisk (*) after the date. Deleted comments will be gone.

Please, whatever you do, note that the “Location Activity” and “Recent Activity” (on the app) feeds will show the first draft of the comment and will also show the deleted comment. Those feeds are logs that you have the privilege of viewing, and logs don’t lie.

Ok everybody, do your best out there.