I’ve been around long enough to remember not being able to edit at all.
Now that we do have the 5 minute edit window, I don’t know how I posted coherently at all before.
I’m more of an impulsive poster, and I do try to proofread my posts before hitting submit, but, hey, apparently I’m not a very good proofreader. Also, when I post a more lengthy or technical post, sometimes I’ll re-read it, find glaring errors in grammar and spelling, or I find I used a wrong word, or a confusing sentence construction that I’d like to go in and edit to make my thoughts and intentions clearer.
5 mins is fine for most things, however, being the stream-of-consciousness clunk that I am (and I assume I’m not alone… YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE!), a 10 minute edit window would be very, very nice and not an unreasonable amount of time, I believe, to renege or abuse the feature in debates and such.
Any interest to run this suggestion up the flagpole?
It’s been argued here before, of course. I also argued for a 10-minute window. IIRC there seemed to be a general consensus among many who responded, that 5 minutes was fine. Like you said yourself, 5 minutes is fine for most cases. So there was no groundswell of agitation to make the change.
If you want to read the earlier thread(s) on it (there was one fairly recently – what, about a month ago?) – I’ll leave it as an exercise for the OP to search it up.
ETA: I suppose I could search it up for you and put a link here, but I’m sure I’ll run out of the 5-minute window by the time I find it.
Since there are at least two other ways to make sure your post is the way you want it before hitting submit – working in a Word document or using preview – there’s not a lot of interest among the staff in extending the edit period on an often fast-moving board like this.
I would really appreciate the edit window increased to 10 minutes, though I have a different reason: smartphones.
I read the boards on my phone probably 90% of the time*. Posting takes more time on a phone and editing doubly so. 5 minutes is no problem when I’m on an actual computer, but I’ve had times where the edit window expired when I was trying to finish it as quickly as I could.
Er, that is, 90% of the time I spend reading the boards, not 90% of my time.
All I can add is that a 10-minute edit window would drastically decrease my post count, as I often re-read it after it’s posted and go ‘crap, forgot something’. Then it’s too late, and there I am adding another post.
In an ideal circumstance, have unlimited edits but with timed diffs. that would stop anyone from pretending that they have been misrepresented, but equallly it would allow anyone to correct their own meaning.
In any case, and I appreciate I may be an odd ball here, I often 36 hours after a post on a message board come to rethink it, regret it and want to sort it out. Not certain if that’s ever happened here but it’s definitely happened in ones that I post on more.
Going to more than 5 minutes will create more problems than it solves, as you greatly increase the chance that someone has quoted you and responded. Then the readers who come along later will be confused until someone corrects things.
If you miss the edit window, just quote your post and correct. If you change your mind, do the same. Problem solved.
If you find yourself being embarrassed later by something you posted… well, learn from that and think before you post.
Just not fluid enough, I like using WYSIWYG markups, and such.
Like I said, I post more or less impulsively from my Mac, my iPhone, my iPad. And the last two probably more than on my Mac. I’m gathering more and more posters do the same.
Also, I had to fire my editor due to budget cutbacks. That, and he never cleaned his own dishes.
I hardly think an increase to 10 whole minutes would create major problems. Hell, that reasoning was why we didn’t even have 5 minutes to edit before. Clearly it hasn’t brought about the apocalypse.
Or, possibly a helpful compromise, we should be able to edit consonants for up to 10 minutes, but the vowels, digits, and punctuation marks for only 5 minutes.
In fact, when I write a post that I think will be a longer one, or requiring some thought (what a thought!) or that will involve a bunch of cutting-and-pasting pieces, then I compose the post off-line in a local PLAIN TEXT editor window (gedit in my case, but whatever floats your baudot), and then finally cut-and-paste the whole thing into a new post text window.
For this, I must manually type in all the BB codes I would like, cut-and-paste any links, hand-enter all the smilies, etc. I keep a handy hand-written cheat-sheet of these nearby. (Obviously, this works best for fixed-base operations. No phone-in posts for me.)
That, and “Preview Post”. Works for me often enough that I can live with it. I argued earlier for a 10-minute window, but it only happens now and then that I really need it.
