Particularly, in addition to the WMF use case there was a user on Twitter recently who accidentally posted something sensitive or embarrassing and was frustrated they could not remove it. This can't fully put the genie back in the bottle (emails will already have gone out, for example) but can limit the damage in some cases.

I support this conclusion overall, thanks for thinking through it.

Yeah, I think this does a reasonably good job of balancing all the concerns here.

I think the biggest downside is that the upper-right corner is starting to get a bit cluttered. We could put "Edit" and "Remove" behind a single "Removedit" link, but the dialog would be a bit odd (e.g., have three buttons?) and it would be less obvious that you could remove the comment. Separate links doesn't feel too bad to me, at least on web: for non-admins, they only show up on your own comments, so it's not like there's a wall of text or anything.

Oh, yeah I would just have three buttons, or two with a "delete" checkbox floated left.

Also, the button says "Edit Comment" as the action, which sounds weird after you've edited. Maybe Save Changes or Save Comment?

Maybe a little row of remarkup looking buttons (pencil, x, quote)

Let me take a quick shot at that and see how it looks...

Normal case:

Worst case:

We could also make the content source an icon (small phone, mail, etc.) with the caveat that it used to be and users flipped out. However, that was ages ago on a different design.

A single "actions" gear/dropdown would be better future proofed and usable on mobile.

(Better match style of PropertyList Actions List)

I dig the gear version, though the vertical line in v1 just before it made me clean my monitor then squint. The v2 version is better. Does it look terrible with no vertical line at all?

I like that a lot better visually, and like that we don't have to do anything special for mobile, and that we can label the actions. Some possible issues:

1. The right edge will be ragged since not all transactions have actions (or, many transactions will have an empty/disabled menu?).
2. There will no longer be any top-level visual indicator that a comment has been edited.
3. Our dropdowns aren't accessible and I don't currently have the expertise to fix the ARIA stuff, or a copy of JAWS to test it.
4. "Quote", which is primarily a convenience, will end up buried in a way that's probably less convenient.

Not sure how bad these are. For (1), I'd guess that a ragged edge will look bad but disabling the menu would make it OK again. Once we have Quote, this menu will almost always be available (only disabled for logged out users or some kind of future locked object we might build, I guess?).

For (2), we could maybe use a different menu to indicate an edited comment? Feels kind of overloadey. I don't know that this is really all that important, but it feels bad to bury "edited" even more heavily than we already are. We could also put a separate "edited" icon in grey, since these are very rare.

For (3), I don't think this is a blocker and dropdowns need to get fixed in a general way eventually.

For (4), it might hurt the feature a lot. We could have two buttons (quote, all other stuff), but then (1) gets bad again.

I think we can still list "edited" copy. Quote will be the only action for most comments and it's just there for convenience.

Okay, how about we do this:

• Land this as-is, if there are no technical issues.
• I'll build quote as a followup and we can land that as a clutter-link for now too.
• Then I'll fix this into a dropdown and move all the clutter into it at once.

On T4944, I agree with your comment in T4944#4.

I'm not, like, wildly opposed to rendering "edited" textually as a footer in comments, but that seems pretty noisy/loud. I think the loudness of the marker is about right right now: it's there, but it's not too in your face.

No need for migrations. Explanation is good enough for me and if you want to get fancy about it to help the next guy class constants should do the trick.