I am pleased to announce that an editing function for entries in the database has been implemented.

If you have been registered with the forum for at least 30 days, and you are logged in, you should see an "Edit" link with each entry that allows you to update the entry directly (version, description, icon, screenshot etc).

Lemme know if you find any bugs so that I can squash them.

As I mentioned before, the general direction is to eventually allow everyone to add entries to the database, and allow some form of group moderation. So view this as a first gentle step towards that direction.

Have fun!

Very good ... I will do my best !

Is it possible for you to show up the actual change in a different colour (red)?
I'm presently updating the versionnumbers, but I can not check if a program runs correctly under Win7 (because I don't have Win7).
So if someone will correct this the app will show up again and the users of the forum will notify the change.

Sweet! This is amazing. I will help Checker too :)

Is there a history of editing (like wikipedia)? Because otherwise you could consider to allow editing only to authorized users, or to create a group of moderators to check other users editing (as you mentioned).

Another correlated note: given that now there are many more updates per day and I'd like to don't miss some of them, can you increase the updates history to 20 or 25 pages? Or find another solution similar to blogging method, to store all news somewhere. Thanks!

@ Lupo73: Very good point !
I did a lot of updating today and no one will see it.

@ Andrew Lee:
Can you make it possible, that every change will create a message in the "portable freeware update"-forum (like a posting) ?
So everyone can see who has done the update and what has been changed.

Interesting feature, thanks.

However, updates are shown in the RSS feed too, and there are a lot of them. I mean very much, about 20-30 per hour, and it is a bit annoying imo.

Don't forget this will die down! See how often Checker updates the forum maybe 4 times a day if that?

@Checker & @Lupo73 - I agree having a system of knowing who updated the entry would be a good idea. Also Checker needs to hit his 1000 posts which he might not hit for 6months because of this awesome update system!

My statistic says it's 1.something/day ;)
I think I will still use the forum to report an update, because there is a place to post major changes (change-logs etc.).
With the new system (if Andrew will not indicate changes by colour) the application will show up as new (even if you only change a typing error).
I'm no programmer, but I think the posting-idea could be realized, because all datas of the change are available (they are also sent to the database).
This will help users to see what has been changed ... is it a versions-update or did I only insert a missing point at the end of a sentence.

Another point:
The update function (for everyone) should be limited to let's say version-numbers only.
See how fast I updated hundreds of apps within a very short time.
Now imagine the situation, that one frustrated guy used this to delete all page-links. This will cause a great damage to the database.

I like @Lupo73's idea limit the amount of users who have access to editing the database, perhaps the 30 days membership is not enough? And @Checker brings a valid question I have...is there way to revert to previous versions like in a Wiki for example or can changes be reverted back to the last update of the database?

My doubt is that limiting users only to a 30 days membership means that if a user create an account, after 30 days of completely inactivity can login and remove lots of texts in few hours.

ps: another doubt is that sometimes software updates are no longer portable, so an user could update it in the database but the new release may be not fully tested in its portability. This may make PFC less reliable. So in my opinion the best solution is to allow editing only to authorized users (even if makes a hierarchical system is not so good). The only other solution is a wiki-like mechanism, but I think too storage expensive.

Suggestions and Opinions

I also think that the editing function should be limited, or controlled, or at least supervised.

I also think that a version tab might be a good idea, ie a tab for the last known and approved version of a listing.

Further I think posters that do not have the ability, skill, or knowledge to check updates for portability should be restricted in what they may post to the listing itself.

?Possibly a version update might be included in the Synopsis as a Special notice, maybe even with a corresponding post (automatically) generated.

I really like the tab idea personally.

I think the way to check if a person should edit more than version numbers would be to check posts for info such as registry entries collected on submissions etc. (This criteria would disqualify me.)
Just my Opinions & Suggestions.

I share the concern that a mere 30-day time limit will avoid vandalism. Someone may have created an account a few months ago only to ask a single question, but today if they visit the site and see an edit button, they can do plenty of damage.

I'd suggest limiting it to users with more than 50 forum posts, if that's possible.

Otherwise, it's a great idea, except that I seem to have a large task ahead of me: sorting through these 150 update posts to figure out which ones I already downloaded. I suppose there are worse problems to have ;)

Cheers.

hello everyone,

this maybe a little OT, but with the editing function implemented, there is a great possibility for an official TPFC updater, because updates would be more community-maintained, and furthermore, we can invite the software authors to update their portable applications themselves in the database, i think this would improve TPFC community as a whole, bridging the gap of developers and users.

cheers

I'm considering to implement this support to the Lupo updater. The problem is that adding the checking for new updates is easy, but implement a feature able to correctly extract and update a software is many more complex and may needs to store software on PFC in a standard package.