Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

Issue

It is not possible to reset the flow board to a previous state (revision, flow titles, flow summary, flow description), unlike wikitext based discussions.

Proposed solution

• Add a way to restore the content and flags of the board or topics to a previous state.
• In a similar manner to the true database rollback, reset the content / metadata of the database to a prior state.

Note: This is explicitly NOT about rollback. The misnamed mediawiki "rollback" feature only works if all actions are by the same user, and multiple users / vandals can make a flow topic unreadable. An equivalent action with talk pages is editing a previous revision and clicking save.

Every elements on Structured discussion is independant. It is like resetting multiple pages at once. That would require further investigation.

According to Flow/Architecture, as you state, this might indeed be complicated due to how stuff is stored. While in a perfect world a true "reset" would be best, perhaps there is a temporary alternative. There are plenty of actions that it can revert easily. For example, if 50 different people edit the title of this thread 50 times. It would be trivial to simply revert the title to what it was on a specific revision. Currently, undo doesn't even currently work for title changes, so one has to copy the old title and save it as new.

Maybe in the short term, it would be useful to add "undo" to title changes, and maybe a generic "unhide all posts" would be be reasonable, along with a separate limit to how many things a regular user can hide, maybe 3 "hide actions" every 2 minutes or so.

Long term, if a "restore" is implemented this should probably only apply to a specific thread (excluding the board description).