Posted by Katy Darrah in Proposal: Allow Editing of Posts

Posted by Travis Good in Proposal: Allow Editing of Posts

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Proposal: Allow Editing of Posts
Posted by… suppressed (5) by the Post Ghost! 👻
We on TECH have recently received renewed interest from multiple people regarding changing the site software to allow editing of posts by ordinary users. This is something that comes up occasionally as a suggestion, but we have not acted on it in the past, because editing posts is something that was not previously allowed under the old system, and we were primarily focused on making sure that Exodus was an adequate replacement for the old system. We’re now starting to shift focus away from that and towards having more nice new things (something that I’ll write about in more detail in a TECH report soon), so we’re revisiting a series of these decisions that were made before.

Allowing ordinary users to editing posts is another one of those things where, from a technical perspective, it’s pretty easy to allow, so we’d ordinarily just change it, but from a social perspective, it’s kind of a big deal that affects absolutely everybody. So, we don’t want to act on this without really knowing what approximately everyone thinks first. We also don’t have a firm solution in mind, as many different ways of doing it are possible.

Problem: Right now, there is no opportunity to edit a post after it is written by the author of the post. This is something many users find frustrating, because they often notice after the post has been made that there is something wrong with it, e.g. that there is a typo of some sort that they didn’t notice while drafting. There is no way to correct these posts right now, aside from making another post or asking the next person who will post to edit the previously quoted posts.

Proposal: We suggest that it is possible to add an option to a post, to allow the author to edit it after submission. This might take the form of an “Edit” button on the post detail view that, when clicked, would re-open the posting form with the post in it, and allow changes to existing the existing text to be made. Pressing the “Submit” button on this form would update the existing post instead of creating a new one, and advance the posting time associated with the post to the time of the edit.

Discussion: The benefits of being able to edit your own posts are pretty obvious: you could fix typos and maybe even take back something nasty you said before someone else read that you said it.

There are a number of potential downsides that I see, which I think require thought before choosing to allow this. People could do more than edit a typo, substantially altering what they wrote and changing the meaning of what it is they said. Some people I have spoken to find the possibility of something like this extremely disturbing. As of right now, there is virtual certainty that whatever is in the post is exactly what the author wrote at the time that they wrote it; that would no longer be true if we allowed anyone to edit anything they ever wrote at any time.

We could mitigate that by placing restrictions on the edit function, so that a post is only editable for a short period of time after it is made. Like, five minutes. Or, it is only editable as long as nobody has replied to it. Or as long as nobody has read the post. Or some combination of all three. Or any other criteria that you guys can think of that is possible (the site isn’t going to start checking your blood alcohol level before deciding to let you edit :P ).

TECH is not going to do anything with this proposal except just listen to what you all have to say for now. We will not make a decision on what to do until this discussion runs its natural course, and if we decide to act on it, we will announce what the action is to give people a chance to object before we do anything. If no consensus emerges, the action we will default to is to make no change here at all. I personally will not argue for or against the proposal, but I am happy to clarify what things are technically possible.

Thanks for your attention and whatever feedback you guys have,

Joe

My thoughts:

1) If the feature is added in some form, I think there should be an indicator that the post has been edited (perhaps with a timestamp of the most recent edit).

Right now, the time stamp on the post always automatically advances to whenever the row in the database is written to. If we leave that the way it is, the time displayed on the post list would always be the time of the most recent edit. Is that OK? E.g. that we do not track the creation date independently from the time of the last write?

We would probably have to add something to indicate that a post was edited, but that’s pretty easy.

2) With that in mind, I have no issue with an author being able to edit their post before it is replied to. I think it become a bit more problematic to edit a post after it is replied to - especially in an RP setting - because, as Joe has pointed out, you can do a lot more than change a typo, with isn’t fair to the person who replied to the post.

-Daniel

I agree with Daniel.

Travis

Everything makes sense to me so far.

As a part of posting forums where there were defined groups and moderators over those groups there was the ability to edit one’s own posts and the moderator (in this case say the CO) to do the same with all in that group. It worked well.

It is possible to implement a similar scheme here if we want. Though, I don’t know how comfortable we are with people other than the author doing edits. I’m curious as to what other people think about that.

I could certainly see a editable time limit in there. Many of the posts i see that are doubled up are simple things - they forget a line or more often they forget to sign off. It would be nice to correct that inside a time frame.
- Gene

Like, an hour? A day? 5 minutes? Having a timeframe is easy but I’m not sure what the right balance is between being forgiving of error and allowing total re-writes.

(Having a timeframe does not mutually exclude also preventing an edit before a reply, by the way. I imagine it is beneficial to have both, for different reasons).

Some people do not know that they didn’t sign off correctly until someone points it out or they do not recheck their post before finalizing it and again, would not know until 5 days later or if someone points it out.

I think having the post be editable by the user who posted it makes sense until there is a reply. After the reply the error would be in multiple posts anyways, not all of which the original author could edit.

Would TECH be able to have access to the original version of a post if needed? I could imagine situations where a post has objectionable content and the author changed it after several people complained about it, but it might be so bad that further punishment would be in order even though it was deleted.

Adam W.

I had not thought of something like that, but something like that could be done. We could add a form of auditing to see what edits are made, which is similar to other forms of auditing we already use for the admin portion.

Joe

Travis

Reading everything, I have an idea.

Posts are editable for 5 minutes, or maybe 10, this isn’t super important. CO’s have the ability to put in for an edit revision. So let’s say Ensign Z posted, changed his post (more than a minor edit of typos) and then it made no sense/screwed up the plot royally. The CO of the ship can petition TECH to revert the edit. If TECH agrees with the reasoning, it’s reverted. In the meantime, the edit is hidden (it reverts to the previous version for display) I don’t know if this last part is possible.

Alternatively, have a field that’s mandatory to be filled out for edits that’s labeled “Changes made”. This field is viewable by the Command Team (CO/XO/GM of course) with the click of a button.

Capybara

I’m a favour of KISS. Edits up until a reply, an indicator that there has been an edit if people have already read it, with some type of time stamp.

If a post has already been replied to, you can still “edit” your posts afterwards by what we do now with a correction post.

There’s no need really for a time limit - whether it’s five minutes or 10 mintues or 10 days, if no one has replied to it, it can be edited provided there is an indicator that it has been edited and when. There’s really no need for a CO to request a revision or reverse the edit in those circumstances.

Let’s keep this simple, and remember that there are alternatives.

Daniel