Submission editing Feature Discussion

The idea of making Score Submissions editable has been tossed around before, but it's clear upon first though that there are lots of potential pitfalls and opportunities for abuse for such a feature if it's not designed properly. This discussion page is intended to help center a discussion and collect various ideas and implementations that would allow for editing of submissions while mitigating most or all of the potential issues.

This is not meant to discuss if such a feature should ever be implemented. Such a discussion should happen elsewhere.

Primary Concerns With Allowing Editing:

Here is a partial list of potential problems or methods for abuse if the current submission process simply allowed editing.

  • Editing a submission after some users have voted would mean those votes may no longer match the voter's intent
  • Submission evidence that indicates problems could be removed, "fixed", and re-added, with no means for future adjudicators to view that evidence

Methods to Address These Concerns:

  • No evidence should be allowed to be removed from a submission. All evidence should remain attached and viewable by anyone, even after a submission is accepted. We could consider some sort of "archive" option or the like that removes it from being front and center, in case of potential clutter issues.
  • All submissions should have a full edit history tracked, and accessible, similar to a wiki page. Viewing the submission should allow seeing the full history.
  • No submission should be able to be edited while keeping it's existing votes, as no voter should have to worry that the contents of a submission are changing after they vote.
    • Option 1: Only allow editing on a submission that has votes. This would present a "window" after submission where the user can edit. Note that this has the potential for someone for a submitter to make edits to their submission, and upon trying to save the changes, finding out they can't because someone voted on it in the meantime. It allows simple changes, but likely does not help anyone fix mistakes once others have noticed it.
    • Option 2: All existing votes are cleared from a submission upon saving edits. This could be done either with or without notifications. This does present the "penalty" where editing the submission means you have to start getting votes on it from scratch. I do wonder if this presents it's own potential for abuse, with some regularly editing a bad submission to prevent it from being voted down.
    • Option 3: Option 2 with some combination of time and number of edit limits.

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