The Comment You Couldn't Take Back

Last week I fixed the sign-in link on the blog's "Join the build" box. It was dropping people into the main app instead of back to the comment they were about to leave.

A reader tried it right after, to make sure it actually worked. It did. Then he asked me two questions I didn't have good answers for.

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The two questions

First: what name shows up on my comment.

Second: can I go back and edit it.

Neither is complicated to ask. Neither had a real answer in PodGlue.

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Why the name was stuck

The first time you comment in the Build Room, PodGlue grabs a name for you from whatever you signed in with. Your email metadata, if there's a real name in it. The part before the @ sign, if there isn't.

That name gets written once, and nothing after that ever touches it again. If it came out wrong, an old nickname, a work alias, a stranger's name because you signed in fast without checking, it stayed wrong. Permanently, with no setting anywhere to fix it.

The strange part is the permission was already there. The table that stores it has always allowed you to update your own row. Nobody had ever built the box you'd type the new name into.

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Why editing was blocked on purpose

The second question had a real answer, and it wasn't an oversight.

Once a comment gets approved and goes public, PodGlue deliberately won't let you touch it again. I built that in a few weeks ago, on purpose: without it, someone could post something reasonable, get it approved, then quietly swap the text for something else once nobody's looking. A moderator approves what's there once. It should still be there.

That's the right rule. It's also the wrong rule for a typo, or a sentence you wish you'd worded better, or a follow-up thought you meant to add before you hit send.

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What I shipped

A field above the comment box: your name, shown on your comments. Change it, save it, done. It shows up on comments you've already posted too, not just new ones.

And an edit button on your own comments. Fix a pending one and it just updates. Fix one that's already public and it goes back into the review queue, same as a brand new comment would, so the rule I built on purpose stays true: nothing goes public without someone looking at exactly what's there now. You just get to fix it first.

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The bug that almost shipped anyway

Before this went out, an automated review on the pull request caught something I'd missed entirely.

Every comment that gets approved adds one to a reply counter and a few points to your community score. That's been true since the Build Room launched. What I hadn't thought through: if editing a published comment sends it back for review, and it gets approved a second time, does it add to that counter a second time too?

It did. Nobody had ever been able to un-publish a comment before, so nothing had ever tested what happens when one comes back around. I fixed the counter to give back what it credited, the same afternoon, before any of this reached a real comment.

That's the kind of bug that doesn't show up in a demo. It shows up three weeks later as a reply count that's quietly higher than the number of replies.

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What's next

If you've left a comment in the Build Room before this, your name field is sitting there empty, waiting for you to fill in whatever you'd rather it say. And if there's a comment out there you'd word differently today, it's yours to fix now.

This is what PodGlue is for, in the small: a place to build the thing in public, with the people actually using it telling you what's still missing before you've noticed it yourself.