I would suggest a feature that allows someone with GM access to (1) view prior versions of a post that has been edited, and (2) revert to the pre-edited version.

This would have saved me some errors on a number of occasions, and once I even deleted an entire critical post by accident through hitting "post" accidentally when I was trying to copy.  That messed up an entire adventure for my longsuffering crew.

Right now, as I understand it, edited posts completely overwrite previous versions, and there is no way to retrieve anything that was accidentally deleted.

That is correct.  That's why there is a warning when you are about to delete a post.

What you are asking for is a complete rewrite of the site's code, and a massive bloating of the database as previous versions of posts would need to be stored.

What about an "Undo" feature? In other words, when you edit or delete a post, save the previous version for some amount of time (for example, 10 minutes to a hour?) before then wiping it out. That would have at least given Heath a chance to get that critical post back.

Just a suggestion!

I think the undo has more to do with your browser and computer. I know for a while I would lose a post and tried the undo when you right click and it wouldn't work. Then recently I noticed it does work. Also on my phone I notice if I happen to hit something and go off the page I can hit the back button and sometimes what I wrote it still there.

So you might want to test it out, and see if you have had it there all along.

In reply to bigbadron (msg # 2):

But I'm not talking about deleting (other than accidental deletion in an edit).  I'm talking about editing and saving previous versions that were edited, much like the Wiki.

EDIT: For the moderators, this would also likely be a useful tool to determine some TOU violations.  Right now, for example, a player could go in and edit a post to take out offending language/content, and there is no previous version of the post to demonstrate if the ToU were violated.
This message was last edited by the user at 17:19, Fri 08 Aug 2014.

If they take it out, then that's all we need.  We don't need to see what was there.

The moderators really aren't interested in tracking down those who had a brief moment of bad judgement, then edited it.

If this happens in game, and is serious enough for it to warrant moderator involvement, then the GM can simply remove the player's posting access until the moderators can have a look at it.

If the player has the good sense to edit his own post to remove a ToU violation before a moderator sees it then, as far as we're concerned, the situation has been dealt with, and no further action need be taken.

As previously stated, saving previous versions of edited posts would bloat the database ridiculously.

Perhaps an option for a future perk, might be to allow a pseudo undo for a particular person... the option would take the original contents of any post that they Edit, and place the original in an Undo clipboard.  It would presumably only hold the most recent edit.  But if someone realized after making an edit, that they selected more of the text than they though and wiped out too much of a post in their edit, they could go back and copy things out of the undo buffer and put it back into the post.  [of course being another edit, the old edited post would replace the undo buffer, once they repair it.]

I agree that keeping a history of each post would probably require a significant reconfiguration of the database setup.  It might be useful to stop a angry player from 'vandalizing' or 'sterilizing' their prior presence, but even that unless you keep quite a few copies of revisions, it likely becomes very difficult to truly prevent it.