So my lovely mom @snook came to me with what I thought was a simple request, as she often does. How can I see what this comment was before the edit? You can see that on hiveblocks.com I said, here let me show you.....
But wait, it seems you can't! (anymore?) I'm not sure if I am gaslighting myself, so I reached out to @thecrazygm - am I crazy? He too thought this used to be easier to do, available in hiveblocks. I spent about an hour going through timestamps and PAGES of txs to find.... something. But this comment was edited many times, and maybe even there was more than one comment.
At the end, I pretty much gave up. I said to @thecrazygm, there has to be a better way to do this! Couldn't we make a simple tool to scrape through the blocks and find all these edits?
Yes indeed, we could - and we did! Check it out here: https://magnets.infinitexlinks.com/lookup
This is a new tool to 'Lookup Edits' to any post or comment on the HIVE blockchain. This is an easy to use tool for detectives or just interested users thinking - hmmm, I wonder what they said initially?
Just get the permalink, and you can see the whole history of the post or comment, like this story that was deleted to 'save readers time'.
One cool thing about developing and working on blockchain is that everything is there. But if its hard or even possible to find, what is the difference?
The difference is that by developing tools we can bring what is available to the fingertips of ordinary humans looking to use these new technologies and all of their possibilities.
We have hosted this tool on our partner project @magnetbank site - read more about magnet bank on its blog. Because of this some users may experience this message, thank you @snook for pointing this out:
I can assure you that there is nothing to worry about, and if you are worried than just don't click any links, just use the look up tool. We may make a second page for just tools to avoid this issue in the future, since the powers that be do not like torrents, but for now - it is what it is.
We are open to all of your feedback, comments and celebrations - leave them for us below.