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Empty entry in post revision history
The post history of a particular question has edit number 4 showing as empty. Should this be possible?
Notice that the arrow to the left of "#4: Post edited by..." is pointing down, showing that the entry has been expanded, but has nothing inside it.
Should there be something showing here, or should an empty edit have been prevented? If an empty edit is ever accidentally allowed, should this result in no entry in the history, or an entry that is labelled as being empty so it is definite rather than looking possibly broken?
2 answers
It might be related to the bug where the system thinks you've made a change but haven't. See Saved text not cleared when posted. I'll add a link from that post to here as being possibly related.
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Should there be something showing here, or should an empty edit have been prevented? If an empty edit is ever accidentally allowed, should this result in no entry in the history, or an entry that is labelled as being empty so it is definite rather than looking possibly broken?
Empty edits don't make any sense to the end user. Maybe it does to the software, but we're humans, not code interpreters. So under no circumstance should empty edits ever be accepted.
I don't think we should be optimizing for cases slipping through the cracks bug nests hiding in the pores.
Ideally, it should look broken if such a bug happens; we want users to report it, not think it's normal and move on when they notice it. You could of course add text asking users to report it as a bug, when there's an empty edit, but... that's a lot of effort for something that shouldn't even be an exceptional case of program flow, even (I mean, sure, database reads can fail. But that's an exceptional case of program flow).
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