Hello,
I support this request generally but I'd really like to see a different approach to it.
Let me explain what I'd like to see and why.
As I add more more and more sites to my posting routine I see that keeping posts uniform is futile. If I post something like:
Code:
[center][color=#b30000][b]___This is a release name___[/b][/color]
[img]___This is an image link___[/img]
___This is a long, long description of what this post is all about!___
___This is some technical information___
[img]___Just another image for the looks___[/img]
[spoiler]___Some silly text___[/spoiler]
___These are my download links, varying with site___[/center]
[img]___This is an image link___[/img]
___This is a long, long description of what this post is all about!___
___This is some technical information___
[img]___Just another image for the looks___[/img]
[spoiler]___Some silly text___[/spoiler]
___These are my download links, varying with site___[/center]
we would have several things to deal with:
- It starts with the first line: if I use different color tags per site and want to change the text for all at once I will need wildcards / regex to select all those posts
- Look at all those image tags. There are some sites that fetch your image and save it locally, changing your image tag. This is a real problem, since this post now differs from those in the other forums that won't change this part of your post. You can't use it as an "anchor" anymore.
- Download links may differ from site to site - if I want to change them for all sites, how would we handle this?
- Thema Poster can make many different looking posts from one release through forum replacements - it would be good if we could handle all these in a single request in TM
Basically I can think of a solution like this:
Code:
<IDstring>___This is a release name___</IDstring>
<sites>board.example.info|forum.test.org</sites>
<replace>/___This is an image link___/___A new image link___/</replace>
<replace>/[img]___Just another image for the looks___[/img]\n\n[spoiler]___Some silly text___[/spoiler]\n//</replace>
<sites>www.sillyboard.com</sites>
<replace>/.*/$0\n\n___I want to add a footer___/DOTALL</replace>
<sites>board.example.info|forum.test.org</sites>
<replace>/___This is an image link___/___A new image link___/</replace>
<replace>/[img]___Just another image for the looks___[/img]\n\n[spoiler]___Some silly text___[/spoiler]\n//</replace>
<sites>www.sillyboard.com</sites>
<replace>/.*/$0\n\n___I want to add a footer___/DOTALL</replace>
This example would do the follwing for all posts containing "___This is a release name___":
In sites board.example.info and forum.test.org:
replace ___This is an image link___ with ___A new image link___
deletes the 5 lines [_img]___Just another image for the looks___[/_img]\n\n[_spoiler]___Some silly text___[/_spoiler]\n
In site http://www.sillyboard.com:
Add two line feeds and a footer to the posts containing IDstring.
Sites tag is optional, if missing all matches are handled the same way.
IDstring tag is also optional, if you can select all posts you want to edit by the string to replace alone.
Well, how to handle links?
Single links can be handled by a replace tag as shown above.
For link groups I cannot think of anything tricky at the moment, I tend to add TP functionality here (link tag, banned Hosts - link tag and banned hosts configuration should be easily trasferable from TP to TM!) and give TM a full set of links with the text file to replace or leave them if not changed.
I'd only like to bring functionality that is in the graphical interface also to "automatic search and edit interface" - that is "search for a string and replace it". My proposal even extends it a bit since we would have the freedom to tell TM what it should change exactly where to exactly what. It's "Identify items to edit and replace the given strings on the given sites". This is something that the graphical interface doesn't yet allow in this form - I would welcome such flexibility also in the graphical interface- it would be easy, could be the same syntax, not as text file but as an input field in the interface.
Wurstmu