First, thank you for helping us beta test!
Keys: we take the same security precautions on steemitstage.com that are in force on steemit.com. We don't store users keys anywhere, ever. The attempt to login with your active key on steemit.com would lead to the same security message you experienced on steemitstage.com.
As far as the interface being faster, this is mostly a result of the new technology in place that we're implementing. A low server load will also cause a bit more responsiveness, but keep in mind we also utilize auto-scaling technology on steemit.com and at times of heavy load additional instances automatically become available - so instances being bogged down shouldn't be extremely common. This technology will make those instances even less bogged down and we'll be able to support even more users with less (or the same amount) of infrastructure.
As far as the ability to edit posts more than a week old - yes this is an item on the official 2017 roadmap and as far as I know we haven't made any plans to not move forward with that piece of the roadmap. With that being said, it's also a change that would require a hard fork of the blockchain and is not a simple front-end interface change. Most likely this will (if witnesses and the community agree) make it into a future hard fork. Just because something has not been implemented yet does not mean it's not going to happen, or that we've forgotten about it - we just need to first prioritize what's necessary for steemit to scale to millions of users.
The biggest priorities right now are scalability (both of infrastructure/software and creation of user accounts), a mobile app, and communities. Development of these items is rapidly happening across multiple teams at Steemit.
Hello, Justin,
Thank you very much for your comprehensive response to my comments and concerns.
I'm glad to hear that the newly brisk response on steemitstage.com is primarily due to improvements in the software technology. I will continue to experiment with the new setup and pass along any additional observations and questions as they occur.
While I understand and appreciate the need for prioritizing resources, virtually all content creators with whom I have discussed the need for perpetual edit access are on the same page. As authors, we really need the ability to access our own work for correction and update purposes. I've written extensively about the necessity, and perhaps most comprehensively in this article:
Your comment that this change would require a hard fork is somewhat surprising. I'm not disputing your remark. The reason for my surprise is that all other sources (prior to yourself) have indicated that the necessary changes were already implemented in recent hard forks.
As a life-long coder myself, it seems quite mysterious to me that enabling post editing would be at all difficult. Editing used to be allowed for a month, and has now been restricted to a week. The fact that it is enabled at all and that the time window was changed once seems to strongly imply that changing the time window again ought to be almost trivial?
I will admit that my coding experience has not recently included network programming, and that I have as yet to try my hand at interfacing to a blockchain, so please do not mistake my questions as in any way being arrogant. I am just curious.
In any case, I'll close with a request. I would tremendously appreciate it if you could use your influence to make perpetual editing available at the earliest opportunity.
Thank you again, sincerely, for your kind response.
My apologies, I did some digging and it looks like the feature is actually listed in the changelog for 0.18.3. I'm not a blockchain developer so it's sometimes hard to keep up with individual changes to the back end (steemd). It was designed to require an active key to prevent defacement of accounts who's posting keys may have been compromised. So, this could be implemented in the UI but may require a little thought as to how to implement it with best user experience in mind.
No apologies necessary, my friend! Very kind of you to do a little digging! Thank you.
I care not a whit for "best user experience" at this point... I would gladly accept any means of access, no matter how byzantine.
And so, please correct me if I'm wrong, but:
If I am understanding you, it would be possible right now (given the right tools and documentation) to write a standalone utility that would give me the ability to edit any or all of my old posts, provided that I supply my active key as part of the process?
Yes.
There are several blockchain features that condenser could but does not yet support: things like escrow, delegating your Steem Power to someone else, powering down to a different account, powering down less than 100% of your steem power (we're close to releasing this one), editing old posts, et c.
Some of these will make it in, some won't; we're working on several huge projects right now and have to choose our battles for the moment as we scale up the team.
Thanks for commenting and reaffirming that this ability already exists, apart from a necessary UI tweak. And, it is a tweak, isn't it? Or is there some hidden complexity that makes this change way harder than I imagine it could be?
The extremely frustrating thing for me is that the promise of edit access has been dangled in front of me for six months now, but still remains out of reach. :O
My friends behind the curtain: if there's any way to work post editability into the mix sooner, rather than later, you'd have at least one wildly cheering fan out here, thanking you profusely.
We're working on it, but you don't need us to do it. Anyone can build this tool or UI.
Thanks...
I guess I need to learn how to code for blockchain access...
Can you give me any pointers to how to set up a simple, basic IDE or build environment and what coding tools to use for accessing the Steemit blockchain?
Any basic Steemit development article references?
TIA...