Is there any way to edit a post you have made?
Short of asking a mod and having a very good reason, no.
The mods are happy to make any fixes for you, within reason.
I sure wish they would allow editing. The excuses not to seem pretty weak. Other sites manage fine. Some have time limits, like a day, and even that seems unnecessary.
The only official “good reason” I’ve seen admitted to is either a broken link, or a link to a “non- work safe” (i.e., risqué) site.
There is an edit button, but it’s labeled “preview post”. As soon as I click it, I’ll be able to edit anything in my post. When I decide that spelling, punctuation, and everything else is a-ok, I hit “submit reply”. At that point, the editing feature is removed and I am obligated to own-up to whatever foolish things I might have posted.
I know preview is my friend, but proofreading your own writing is not always effective on the first pass - I don’t think it would harm to allow editing within, say a ten-minute window of posting - I’m pretty sure the board software could be configured that way.
Also… If I make twenty posts and preview each one, correcting a mistake in one of the twenty, that’s more server load than if I make twenty posts without previewing and have to edit one of them afterwards.
Yes, mi fangers make soo manny mishtakes.
Yes, vBulletin can be configured to provide a time window for editing. However, SDMB administration is steadfast about not enabling the edit function, as are many of the old-school posters. Recommendations that involve any vBulletin configuration tweaking, upgrades or plugin mods are not likely to be considered. Avatars, new smileys, editing, inline images, new subforums, upgrading vBulletin to 3.6.*, upgrading the server … not likely.
Oh come on, you know that’s not fair. There’s been a new server just sitting in Jerry’s office waiting to be installed … since the middle of October or so …
Oh. I do see what you mean.
I don’t quite understand the “good reason” you’re quoting, but the main problem is that we have some pretty heated discussions in several forums. In the early days of the message board, when we did allow people to edit their own posts, we’d have situation of people not just doing minor edits (spelling, punctuation, etc) but thoroughly revising – even to the point of changing the content. That caused some pretty angry feelings. Person A posts something, Person B responds, then Person A revises the post; Person B angrily accuses Person A of changing her initial wording; Person B says she just made her initial wording more clear; and so it went.
Allowing editing within a five or ten minute limit doesn’t get around the problem, because we can find half a dozen responses within a ten minute limit. So, we don’t allow people to edit their own post.
If we could find a way to allow editing of spelling, grammar, punctuation, stuff like that, but not allow content change, we’d be happy to implement it. As it is, the only way we’ve got that allows for such editing is to ask a Mod.
By the way, one happy result of this is that people tend to be more tolerant of typographical errors. In the old days, every time someone had a typo, there’d be a nitpicker to point it out. Now, with no self-editing, the nitpickers tend to be a little less eager to point the finger, since we’ve all had typos.
For some of us that is NOT a happy result.
I miss those days, all right. There were also pictures for a while, I think until someone posted a motorcycle picture and scandalized the board management with fears of copyright infringement. Like a cycle company would complain about someone posting their bike’s picture. 
I think the A edits and B whines scenario is worth having once in a while to permit all the other thousands of posters to do normal edits. And by the way, I usually side with the A posters in those setups. Whiners don’t need a mod’s placating, it’s why they came, they like to complain and that’s probably the most fun they will have all day.
But I’m not asking for or expecting changes.
Once something enters the board rule book it never comes out.
“A edits and B whines” is an interesting oversimplification. How about “A posts a provocative statement, B replies indignantly, and A rewrites his post to make B look like he’s over-reacting”?
Example:
A posts: “Women are inferior and should not be allowed to hold public office.”
B responds, with some heat, “That’s a stupid and obnoxious thing to say.”
A’s post then suddenly changes to, “Everyone should be able to vote regardless of race.” Ensuing posters jump all over B for being a racist, for opposing universal suffrage. Would you say that B is “whining” when he complains about an about-face on A’s part?
When we did allow editing, we had incidents not unlike that. People would post something controversial or confrontational, others would jump on them, and they would “edit” their post to completely revise (or eliminate) their initial statement. We prefer to let a few typos go uncorrected, rather than open the door to such drastic revisionism.
And, BTW, what’s so horrible about emailing a mod and asking them to make any corrections that are really annoying?
Actually the reason we stopped allowing pictures and graphics can be spelled g-o-a-t-s-e. People just love that shot and would not stop displaying it, though they were asked repeatedly to be more considerate of others.
Yes, it’s the actions of a few jerks that affect the multitude of great users but under the circumstances what can you do?
And there have been changes in the rules; this board has had a zillion changes over time as appropriate. Mostly we’ve tried to give the users as much rights and etc. as we could without jeopardizing the use of the board (we used to allow html, for example, until people used it to break the board, then we didn’t allow it anymore); policies change as usage evolves.
Well… no. We dropped the rule on using the T-word in the Pit, for instance. We pretty much dropped the rule about zombie threads in Cafe Society. As TubaDiva said, we try to be as flexible and loose as we can, giving people as much freedom as possible. Our main concerns are spammers and hackers and potential legal violations that could destroy the boards. Other concerns have to do with trying to build some sort of online “community” and hence prohibiting things like hate-speech, personal insults outside the Pit, etc.
We started with the simple rule “Don’t be a jerk” but we’ve needed to expand and clarify from there as various individuals cause problems. It’s not different in society at large: my father-in-law talks about learning to drive in the days before traffic lights, when everyone “just got along.”
One way to do it would be to allow edits until a subsequent post is submitted. So as soon as someone responds to your inflamatory post, you’re stuck with it. Whether VBulletin can actually do this, I do not know.
How much of a problem is that, really? I don’t understand why you couldn’t handle people who abuse the edit feature like that in the same way you handle people who break any other rule now: you warn them, and if they keep doing it you ban them. Seems like a no-brainer to me; you allow some sort of limited editing ability, say a ten or twenty minute window and anyone who abuses the feature gets warned and ultimately banned if the abuse persists.
Not really.
On other boards, what some people do is “quote for truth”. When someone makes an inflammatory statement, the user responding quotes the original message. That way, it’s preserved, even if the OP makes edits or changes.
Really, a three or five minute editing window could reduce the problem of someone editing inflammatory posts. How much really happens in that time?