Posted by Dave Eads in Proposal: Allow Editing of Posts

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Proposal: Allow Editing of Posts

Posted by Admiral Joe P (Librarian / TECH Chairman) in Proposal: Allow Editing of Posts
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

Since this started falling off the board, I want to summarize where we are right now, and maybe ask a few other questions.

By my reading:

• Everyone has said they want to have some form of editing their own posts
• Nobody has said we should not have this feature
• Everyone seems to agree that the use of it should be audited in some way to prevent abuse, with several different ideas on how to do that
• Nearly everyone agreed that posts should not be editable once they have been replied to (one person said they didn’t really care).
• Some people thought we should have a time frame to limit when an edit can be made. Other people thought a time frame would be arbitrarily restrictive, needlessly complicated, or simply unnecessary. It seemed like more people were in the latter category.
• A suggestion was made that a post should visibly indicate if it has been edited, which seemed to be agreed with.
• A suggestion was made that there could be an ability to “delete” a post within a timeframe to prevent thread splits and other posts by mistake. Nobody really commented on that yet.

If anyone disagrees with the summary above or if I’ve missed something, please do speak up.

With that said, what do people think about people being able to “delete” a post that they make by mistake, in the way that Kevin suggested? (It would not be actually deleted, but instead marked as hidden, because we never delete anything around here).

There were a lot of proposals for auditing schemes and tracking revision history. I’m going to think about those for a bit because that could get really complicated.

Joe

I don’t think I ever weighed in on this…
A. I think a Delete feature would be nice. Some of us drink. >_>

B. I tend to agree with the “Post stays editable until a reply” party. I worry (Probably needlessly) about someone changing a large portion of their post to reflect an entirely different thing… but again, needlessly complicating things is silly. We should just deal with that if and when we get there.

Overall, I like the proposal.

-Dave Eads

To me deleting isn’t any different than editing. If someone wanted they could edit their post and remove all the content. Which would be just like deleting, only more confusing for someone else trying to read the post. Deleting should have the same rules as editing and I’m fine with it if there is a way to access the deleted post if needed.

For me I think one of the best benefits of the ability to edit a post is being able to fix formating so that it looks right. This change I expect will be an improvement.

Adam W.