Could I allow untrusted users to propose changes?

[mark-wiemer]

We are kinda trying to recreate a wiki-like experience for our community, but we want to ensure we don't get spam. Is there a reasonable way to configure this tool to allow untrusted users to:

1. Click a button at the bottom of an article on our site
2. Be taken to a Pages CMS editor for that article
3. Make and save changes within that editor
4. Submit their changes

And have some GitHub bot then submit those changes as a PR on the user's behalf? Or is this too crazy of a setup for a tool like this? Thanks in advance :)

[hunvreus]

Not an issue I think, but requires a bit of thinking:

• Are users all going to be GitHub users or do we want to allow them to just use an email address?
• If they're a GitHub users, do we effectively get them to create a fork or do we create our own fork for them to submit changes? If so, it may be easier to use branches for that?
• Do we automatically detect edits made to the fork/branch and automate the creation of the PR or do we still expect the user to manually submit it?

Happy to have a quick chat with you to discuss that. I'm genuinely interested in making it easier for people with documentation websites for example to let their users easily edit content.

[mark-wiemer]

Great reply :) I'll have more energy later today and definitely after the holidays to discuss this further. In short:

1. Email address should be sufficient for users, we ideally will limit them to users authenticated through a third-party system that we use, not GitHub but something else, we'll take care of that outside Pages CMS
2. I think we'd opt for user branches instead of a fork for simplicity, yes. e.g. branch name mark-wiemer/patch-1
3. Ideally we'd have automated creation of the PR, yes. If that's not done in Pages CMS we might create some custom GitHub action to workaround that. Again the goal is to make the editing experience as smooth as possible, with as much tedium as possible automated away.

Thanks for your consideration :) happy to chat, but probably after the holidays, for now happy to continue async discussion :)

[hunvreus]

Email address should be sufficient for users, we ideally will limit them to users authenticated through a third-party system that we use, not GitHub but something else, we'll take care of that outside Pages CMS

Just in case you're not aware, Pages CMS allows you to invite users by email (without using a GitHub account) as of 1.0.0.

Ideally we'd have automated creation of the PR, yes. If that's not done in Pages CMS we might create some custom GitHub action to workaround that. Again the goal is to make the editing experience as smooth as possible, with as much tedium as possible automated away.

If it's on a branch it'd be easy enough to automate the PR creation.

I'm adding a way to add buttons to the Pages CMS interface that trigger GitHub Actions, which would allow for a lot of bespoke behaviors.

[mark-wiemer]

Awesome! Don't expect much from me during this holiday season, just wanted to get our conversation started early. Ref luanti-org/docs.luanti.org#69 for upstream tracking :)

[jhancock532]

I'd also like to make a site that accepts community edit contributions & this would be an awesome feature.

As a stop-gap measure you could use a GitHub based comment section like https://giscus.app/ for page feedback (requires a GitHub account, feedback is shared publicly)