Unable to view a post in 'My Drafts' folder
I just attempted to view an old post of mine that was in 'My Drafts' folder. I clicked on it and got sent to a page saying, "Permission Problem You need the Vanilla.Discussions. Edit permission to do that." Does anyone happen to know exactly what is meant by by permission problem, as I'm the one who wrote this draft myself? How can I edit this permission with Vanilla.Discussions? I've never heard of this before, so any assistance anyone has that might be able to help me resolve this permission problem would be greatly appreciated.
Answers
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"Vanilla" is the name of the forum software that's being used by the Community. I don't know if this applies to your case, but I've gotten "permission problem"-type error messages when I was trying to submit a comment on a thread that a moderator had edited in some way while I was writing. Perhaps your draft was a comment on a thread that has since been moved, split, or merged?
If you can't access the text at all and thus can't tell whether the draft is still relevant, you can try flagging your question to ask for moderator assistance. (The flag is not just for tattling. :-)
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I tried to flag it, but as I'm not allowed to see it, there are none of the flag, quote, insightful, agree, like or awesome icons to click on either. Darn. Still helpful info to know as I thought flag was only for tattling, and never considered flagging to get more info. I will be using this the next time I have a question, or don't understand something posted. Thanks Julia Szent-Györgyi, love learning tricks which help me with my research, and simplifing how I do this, appreciate it!
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@cjspry, sorry, I wasn't clear: I meant that you can flag this question to get the attention of a moderator.
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Often what is left if in your drafts folder is a version of something you have actually posted. There is an timed save of drafts while you are writing. I often find what is in my drafts folder is already on the site.
You can flag THIS thread to call a moderator to take a look under the hood at your draft.
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Ok I think I'm the one whose not being clear. On the left side, close to top & under 'Quick Links', there is dir called 'My Drafts'. When I click on that, I can see part of 2 drafts (a few sentences which get cut off, and I assume to view the whole draft, I can click on this partial viewable bit. The only thing I can do on this page is click on the draft, or delete it. When I click on draft is when I get the permission error notification, and oh, ok, Julia Szent-Györgyi I just got what you were telling me to flag - THIS question, right here. I feel so dumb right now.
Thanks to both of you, and I've flagged it then gave them a summary of permission error I'm getting.
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I have sent a request to have this researched. I will let you know when I hear back. Thanks.
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I have a draft question saved which I now want to edit and post. When I try to open the draft, I get the Vanilla Screen of Death.
Permission Problem
You need the Vanilla.Discussions.Edit permission to do that.
I found another reference (only one, a couple of years ago) to a vaguely similar error scenario, but that related to a user trying to edit a post they had already sent. This case is for a draft post. Is there a similar, but pointless, restriction on editing or indeed posting as is, your own drafts after a certain period of time? I say pointless, because my post was about a software fault which may have its origin in coding related to time zones. I needed to wait for about four hours to see if my theory was confirmed. So, I saved a draft and the rest is history.
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Is the thread you were replying to still there, or has it perhaps been migrated/merged by a moderator? If it's still there, and you go to it, is your draft there at the bottom? If you edit it and click Post, what happens?
I don't think it's the four-hour edit window: my still-unapproved comments on suggestions from nearly a week ago now are still there, and still give the "after it is approved" message if I try re-posting.
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This wasn't a reply to anything. It was a new post-to-be in the General Questions category about faults I have found in the community post search functionality. It was created via the "Ask a Question" button. If I go to "My Drafts", I see 2 items. One is this current post (which I haven't saved as a draft, but I understand that) and the other is the one that this post is all about. If I click on the second one to edit it, I get the VSOD screen. So, I can't open it to edit or post it.
I may create another post and save it as a draft, then try reopening it periodically to see if this occurs again.
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Oh, sorry, I missed that you said "question", not "comment".
That does seem to be a rather, uh, odd application of the edit window, but that's the only explanation I can think of. It's probably an unintended consequence of some setting somewhere, one that the admin-types don't even notice, since the window doesn't apply to them.
(Bulletin boards have been around longer than the Internet. You'd think by now they'd have figured out the programming for them.)
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I've created several more questions, saved them as drafts, and periodically checked whether I can open them for editing. They have all been OK for about four hours. After that, VSOD for each of them.
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I can't believe Vanilla was the best open source option FS could find!
Unpredictable need for mod approvals, missing permissions that no-one seems able to fix, pathetic search capability, no ability to filter view on category, error messages that may or may not appear and/or that hide at the bottom of the screen, no ability to describe ourselves despite the presence of a field for it, ...
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It would be interesting to know how many of these problems are down to Vanilla itself and how much is down to the implementation and configuration that would have to be done by FS Engineering, even for a vanilla (small "v") editor. From my own experience, I suspect that a lot of it would be the latter.
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@JulianBrown38 mentioned re community issues:
how much is down to the implementation and configuration that would have to be done by FS Engineering
I agree. Indeed, I wonder how much was FS Engineering and how much the poor so-and-sos in what might or might not be the user/moderator community who were responsible for the categorisation and set-up. I just have this idea from the first appearance of "Vanilla" that the configurers were not FS Engineers. Then again, it might be that was the point at which we lost all sight of who was an engineer, who a mod, who a configuration person, etc, etc.
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This thread has apparently been merged in the last few hours. It had disappeared from "My Discussions"; I think I had also bookmarked it, to be sure, to be sure, but it isn't there either. I only found it again by searching for "Vanilla". Before I started my discussion on March 12, I did a search for "Vanilla.Discussions.Edit" but that only returned one result as I noted in my initial post. The reason it didn't return the February post by @cjspry is because that post has a space preceding the "Edit".
Anyhow, the draft that I saved that was the cause of my post has today miraculously become editable again. Also accessible are the three test drafts that I created to test my theory that there was a four-hour window beyond which drafts could not be edited or posted.
@cjspry, you might want to try editing your draft if you haven't deleted it.
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I tried to comment on this one:
https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/159771
a couple of weeks ago. The comment was not posted, presumably because it required approval, but it popped up in my Drafts:
where it has remained.
I have tried to post it a couple of times over the intervening period to no avail. Now, when I click into it from my Drafts list, the text appears to have vanished, so that I would have to retype it to get it posted (if I remembered what I'd said beyond the chunk that appears on the Drafts list).
Any ideas what has gone wrong here?
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@MandyShaw1 The one where you tried to comment is from Suggest an Idea, where all comments were/are moderated. More changes are said to be coming to Suggest an Idea. I suspect anything pending (not approved and not rejected) might just disappear.
I have one pending comment in my drafts for Suggest an Idea, and it is there in its entirety, but it is short - only 2 lines.
Link to the update from 4 April indicating more changes coming: https://community.familysearch.org/en/discussion/159206/updates-to-suggest-an-idea
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Whenever they change something about the interface, draft messages lose their contents. It's how I noticed that the disimprovements from late March/early April had been reverted: my pending (i.e. probably now lost) comment on a suggestion was still listed in My Drafts, but clicking it gave an empty comment box. (Unfortunately, the link I was hoping to retrieve from it wasn't in the first line that still showed in My Drafts, so I deleted the draft.)
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Thanks both - clearly best to leave this alone until the dust settles!
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