I used to be able to replace the current guide with a previous version when somebody made a mistake, however, I'm no longer seeing the button to do that.
For example, I'd like to revert the Philips Wake-Up HF3520 Power supply repair guide to revisionid 218692. After that version, the user "FarmYard Gaming" had some well-intentioned but careless edits that caused more harm than good.
If you don’t meet the reputation threshold, the “revert to this version” button won’t appear.
If you are the guide’s author, you can revert to a previous version without needing to meet the reputation requirement. However, the resulting change won’t appear in Patrol.
For guides you don’t own, if you meet the reputation threshold, you’ll see the “revert to this version” button. Pressing it will allow the guide to revert without going through Patrol.
2 Comments:
Good to know, it was a little unclear (and why I brought it back to a state @hackberb9 could work with, without the concern they're working with multiple bad revisions).
by Nick
Thank you, Kris. I think I understand now: Reverts are locked down because they are pushed immediately. Right? Is that intentional or simply because it would be difficult to queue them up for patrol?
By the way, as a user, I'd prefer to have seen the "Revert" button and have it inform me why I cannot use it. This would be like when I edit the "Details" section and it prompts me to patrol first since there are pending edits: clicking on patrol tells me I can't do that yet. That sort of feedback is helpful for me to learn how this site works and understand what the "reputation" score is good for.
by hackerb9
I brought it back to the state it was in prior to those edits, rather then at any point it was touched to make sure any new edits aren't tied to a broken version of the guide. That said, here's how you do it for yourself (if you can):
5 Comments:
Thank you, Nick, for doing the reverting (and merging) for me.
In the last step, your screenshot has a button labeled "Revert To This Version", but that's missing on mine. Is it a disabled operation for normal user accounts? That would be odd since a normal user can do the same thing manually, it'd just be more laborious and error prone.
But, I presume iFixit has good reason for its policies, so if that is the way it is supposed to work, then you may want to change the documentation as it currently says, “View guide changes over time, with the option to replace the current version with a snapshot from history.”
If an account doesn't have the ability to revert, then the message should say something else, like, “Your account is not allowed to revert to a specific snapshot from the history. If you need to do that, please post a request on meta.ifixit.com and someone will fix it for you.”
by hackerb9
@hackerb9 @krisrodriguez any idea?
by Nick
@nick @hackerb9 Looks to me like it's just a result of the reputation threshold for editing, since running reversions through the patrol system would be.. tricky
by darth mango
For a person without reputation, wouldn't it just add the revert as an edit that needs to be patrolled?
by hackerb9
@hackerb9 AFAIK, you never had an issue with the edits because it went to standard patrol, but it may be the revert is an admin-only thing, or at least you have to meet the minimum reputation threshold, which can be adjusted.
(For example: I set my minimum editing threshold for my current guides and full rewrites to 25k, but my old guides can be anything because I adjusted it as I built my reputation). It's just how I avoid bad edits from being pushed immediately, and it's varied with time and it's varied a lot over time, some of them being at set to 10k, which went up gradually until I settled on 25k, and I haven't changed it past 25k. I also generally do not adjust it to 25k until I do major revisions (as I did with the T420 guides. Those were running on ~10-20k, the standard I used from ~2014-2019), even minor edits.
The conundrum is that you, as an outside editor, cannot see what someone picks for this—it's a private number.
by Nick
2 
27 
1