Allow users to create discussion threads in addition to submitting links...

[ghost]

Here's my attempt at issue #64.

This change will allow users to create discussion threads ("self" threads, "Ask/Show *" threads, etc.) instead of posting links.

This commit does not include markdown (I assume markdown will be used for comments as well?) to keep the scope of these changes small.

There may be bugs here, But I wanted some early feedback to see if this feature was something that would be used or not. I believe It Works, but there is definitely some room for improvement...

[treygriffith]

This is definitely a useful change, but I have a couple of questions:

1. Why are you relying on the source of the link to determine self-posts? It seems to me that there could be quite a few instances in which that fails either because the link is to another page on the site (e.g. pullup.io/some-new-page-that-everyone-should-see), or because the source is edited by the user.
2. Why use the summary field as the content of the self-post? Maybe it's ok, but they seem like two very different pieces of information to me, which is why you had to mangle the display of the submitted item quite a bit based on whether or not this is a self post.

[megamattron]

Oops, I missed the discussion by @treygriffith here and merged it as it seemed mostly right. Now that I see it up on the site though, I think the summary reveal button might have been broken.

[ghost]

@megamattron The summary reveal works fine for me, what kind of problem are you seeing?

@treygriffith
These are two good points.

I agree on point 1. Improving this should be trivial and all links to this domain will appear as self-posts (Currently, the only difference is that the 'summary' is not hidden by default on self-posts).

As an aside, I don't understand the reason for allowing the user to edit the source field when submitting. Wouldn't it be more consistent to deduce it from the submitted URL. (e.g. I don't see how we would benefit from a post to 'example.com' having the source be something else).

Regarding point 2, It seemed to me that the comment & summary both serve the same purpose (i.e. a commentary on the submission). I don't see any reason for a self-post to include a summary in addition to the comment, although I suppose there could be a case for allowing a URL submission to have a summary & comment...

[megamattron]

For me, in Chrome OS X clicking on the ... next to the story title does nothing. That used to reveal the story summary.

[treygriffith]

@cgroner

Editing the source field does seem silly - it's the domain of the submission, so it should be constant. I still think the flag for a self-post should be separate, but it's a good rule in general.

After thinking about it, I actually don't think you should ever have a comment on a URL link - if you do, it's really just like a comment that is stuck to the top of the discussion, which likely isn't what we want to encourage.

In which case, the "summary" for a Link and the "summary" for a self-post really are the same field. So I think I agree with you on point 2.

I'm having the same issue as Matt in that the "..." on the main page doesn't reveal the summary of self posts.

@megamattron I accidentally posted a discussion on pullup.io (I thought it was localhost). Since we don't have a delete feature yet, could you dump it from the database?

[ghost]

OK, I see it now. I mistakenly thought you were talking about the summary on the thread/comment page. #178 Should resolve this.

It does make a good case for some regression tests :)

[megamattron]

I think the ... thing just got fixed in #178 which just got pushed, try it out. I'm going to leave your discussion post and just use it as a way to announce the new feature :)

[treygriffith]

Works for me!

@megamattron For a case like this where the original implementation did not include a flag on the document indicating it is a self-post, but we want to change that going forward, how do you see us modifying existing documents in the database? Should we use a migration tool like mongo-migrate? This might be important enough to open a new issue to deal with.

[megamattron]

@treygriffith a very good question. To be honest, I'm not sure. I've done this with relational DBs before, but not mongo. Go ahead and open a new issue and we can discuss.

[ghost]

@treygriffith

Since each self-posts URL points to it's own ._id, couldn't we just use that to identify self-posts in the models isSelfPost method? It seems to me that the only thing that sets a self-post apart from any other is that it references itself.

[treygriffith]

Yeah, that's actually a much cleaner solution, and you're right that it's the only unique part of the self-post. And then issue #182 wouldn't come into play, we can punt on that a bit longer 👍