Character Revision History

So here’s a way to do this: Each time the character gets saved, a new row gets written to the table. All other rows are considered to be history and the row that was just posted is the actual character to be shown on the site. There should be a last modified date already in the table. The one with the most recent date would be the one that gets shown on the site for public viewing.

Caveat here:

The field that we use (datestamp) to perform the above trick must not be one that is auto-updated when the row is changed. I may need to go into the DB and manually edit one of the rows. If the date is automatically bumped to the current time, then we will have a real mess. So the datestamp column must be written with CURRENT TIMESTAMP and then frozen at that date.

So when the GM or other admin goes to a new editor, they will see each of the versions of the character that was posted and its corresponding date.

This is the cleanest and simplest way to do this, but it puts a lot of the burden on the person who has to check each version and see what changed.

The only way to do this better would be like doing backflips with regular expressions, and i’m not sure I am capable of this. Maybe if I had time to just fiddle around with perl’s regex engine, I could figure out how to simply show the differences from one version to the next.