Deleting dance named in program gives incomprehensible error

[dcmorse]

I'm sure we can do better than this! :D

I'm interested in a short-term way to fix this - just give an understandable error message! - or a long term fix: do something awesome. What would something awesome be?

Keep in mind that the dance owner may or may not be the program owner, so if we let them pick a substituted dance, that's a moral grey area.

[djpohly]

Proposal: if a dance owner deletes or makes private a dance that other users hold a reference to, each such user is given a private duplicate and the reference is updated. (What currently happens if a public dance is made private?)

If the owner holds other references to the dance, only allow it to be made private and not deleted.

Maybe? (Would this satisfy dance owners' reasons for deleting/withdrawing dances?)

[dcmorse]

I like this. For public -> delete this is totally reasonable. Maybe automatically add append a note saying what happened. Maybe allow the deleter to enter text in that note.

Note that if the dance is made private, we already bend the rules and make the dangling reference comprehensible:

[djpohly]

Hm... I'm not sure how I feel about that dangling reference. I really wouldn't want to make a program for an evening, then have a sequence disappear on me when I try to pull it up on stage. I think it'd make sense to have both deletion and unpublishing make copies.

I really like your idea for deletion (or withdrawal) reason text. Seeing "this dance was broken" or "I'm disowning this choreography" or "I made this public before it was ready, please delete it" would let me know how to proceed.