Posted by Rob Jones 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

“Apologies this is going to be the short version as the long version accidently got deleted because I have fat fingers”

I think it would be great to edit posts, in the past I have made loads of spelling mistakes and thought of a neat little extra sentence just after clicking submit. What if the system only allowed for the most recent post in a thread to be editable and only by the person who posted the reply (like me only being to edit this reply when I post it until someone else replies and then they can edit) and then CO’s having the ability to reverse an edit and view an edit with Tech being able to do full edits anywhere. that way there would be an avoidance of abuse (not that I’m sure anyone would abuse it but you get my meaning.

Rob

P.S Hi everyone, I’m back

Welcome back :)

Having COs be able to reverse edits might get complicated, depending on how it is done. But I kind of like the creativity there and can imagine a way we could do it if we want to go down that road. I’ll probably have to think about how feasible it is.

TECH already has the capability to do full edits anywhere. We generally don’t edit anything unless there’s a Terms of Service violation, and then we usually just depublish the post instead of edit its content (though on a low technical level, depublishing is actually still editing). This happens like, once a year or two.

Joe