A Small Suggestion or Request

About This Message Board
1

About four years ago, I became unhappy with my experience on this board and it seemed to me this board likewise became unhappy with my participation here. So, I left and did not post here at all during those four years. After returning a few days ago, I made a few posts and based on my experience at some other TV and Movie message boards, I would like to make a small suggestion or request regarding the five minute time limit for making edits to a post. I’d like to suggest increasing that limit to 15 or 30 minutes.

I’m guessing that other people may have also made this suggestion and TPTB may be unhappy to read yet another request. I tried to search for other requests along these same lines. But it had been so long since I did that, I was unable to figure out how to make a thorough search. So I apologize if this request has been made several other times and if it may seem like I’m spamming you with this request. Sorry.

My only defense is that I’m making this suggestion based on my experiences with other message boards. Many of them have no time limit at all for people to edit their posts or at least, limits that are seriously larger than 5 minutes. It seems pretty clear that very large limits are a very large problem because when someone has a disagreement with the mods and decides to leave the board and decides to be nasty about that, they can then go back to all the threads in which they have ever made posts and edit them all to contain just a few characters - effectively deleting all their posts from the board. I have seen this happen on other boards and the effect is very harmful to the board because threads then make no sense when people reply to posts that are no longer present or people waste time searching for some post that is referenced but no longer exists. So it seems clear that some kind of time limit is def required. However, I would consider the time limit in terms of how much damage someone can do to this board given they have made the decision to leave and they know how to damage this board in a way that falls within the rules. Seems crystal clear the admins here understand that and are not willing to experience that kind of damage again.

But, I would really like to see the five minute time limit increased substantially because I recall several occasions where I made a serious mistake in a post and had a strong reason to repair that post but was unable to do so because of the five minute time limit restriction. I would seriously like to suggest that limit be increased to 15 minutes - possibly even 30 minutes.

I would guess there must have been considerable discussion and debate on this board that resulted in the decision to make the limit 5 minutes in the first place. I have experienced making mistakes in a post that I could have repaired myself if only I could have edited that post some time later. The alternative was - unfortunately - to receive a warning for something that I wanted to repair myself before it ever rose to the level of a problem requiring some moderator intervention.

So, I thank you for your consideration and I hope you will consider this change could reduce problems for both the members and the mods. It is so easy to make a silly mistake that results in being given a warning from a mod but which could have been avoided if only people had some time to fix their own mistakes within an increased time limit instead of waiting for a moderator response.

I understand the most common objection to this request is that people are given many chances or warnings before anything bad happens to them. But for people who have been here for many years, those kinds of warning are not difficult to accumulate.

One possible alternative might be like the kind of warnings given on driver licenses in some jurisdictions. If drivers get a number of points but then do not get any tickets for a specified number of years, all the warning or the history of tickets are wiped from their file. Perhaps you might consider something like that as an alternative to increasing the time limit?

2

If you need a post edited after the 5 minute window, report your post with the correction you need and request a mod to fix it. In general, depending on the specifics of the request of course, they often will be able to help.

3

OK. Thank you ITD.

4

This question is raised again maybe every six months. As you remark, there has to be some limit on editing. We have concluded that five minutes is an adequate time to make changes, while not causing too much disruption. If you’re really concerned, get in the habit of previewing your posts. You can also quote your post and make a correcting. And as ITD says, if there is a serious error that results in changing the meaning you can ask a mod to change it for you.

5

I modded a board that had no limit on time changes (only once did we have the problem Charlie Wayne notes, where a disgruntled poster went back and deleted all their content), and currently mod one that has a 24 hour limit. My personal experience is that those less restrictive rules work fine.

But, that’s not how it’s done here and it’s pretty clear from past times this has been raised that the 5-minute limit is a permanent fixture of this place. And that’s fine. One could even argue that the rule contributes to the character of the board.

6

How large are the boards? How many posts per day?

One of the problems in fast moving discussions is that a poster will quote someone, and then find the poster has edited the post, so they are commenting on something that the poster no longer said. I sometimes encounter this problem even with the five minute limit. It would be less of a problem with a less active board.

7

Later modifications are good for typos, formatting problems (e.g. missing a bracket on a tag), indexing or adding useful header information to a megathread (you’ll see this on the Something Awful boards – we have fewer threads here on the SDMB where this makes sense.) I’ve asked mods to fix formatting problems. Even for other posters’ posts if the broken tags render them difficult to read.

Where it’s not so good is if a post leads to continuing conversation, and the edit removes the context for that. Heated threads often have rapid response times. I don’t know how rapid. But I wouldn’t go much longer than what we have here.

8

In that case, I will quote the post that brings my attention to the mistake, acknowledge the mistake, and correct it.

9

Both are/were much smaller than here - about 100 people actively posting in their heydays. However, some discussions moved in almost real time; the small community meant that people really knew each other and that we cared about the same topics. (And we were mostly in the same time zone as well, which promoted fast-moving conversations.)

Anyway, I wasn’t trying to suggest that SDMB adopt similar rules. I get that this place has an adamantine devotion to the 5-minute limit. While I think the dread sometimes expressed over the effect of a rule change is unwarranted, likewise the negative effects of the current rule can be overstated as well.

Communities adapt. As long as we are all operating under the same rules, and we all know what those rules are, it’s all good.

10

I’m curious under what circumstance 15 minutes would be enough, but 5 minutes wouldn’t be. If you make a post, the thread reloads, and you see your post in the thread (with a mistake), then 5 minutes is enough. If you don’t notice it right away, then you’re probably going to close the thread, and not open it again until a good while later, probably more than 15 minutes, when you expect there might be more posts replying to yours. And when it is long enough that you expect there to be replies, that’s where you start getting the unintended consequences we’re trying to avoid.

11

Or a less contentious one. There are enough “gotchas” around here without people trying to change history. In short, I like the 5 minute limit here.

I do post on a hobby board that has, I think, a 24-hour limit for posting. There’s no problem because there are darn few arguments or even debates.

12

If you are multiplexing, as most of us are these days, you might get distracted. For example: you’re just finishing up a post when a co-worker asks you a question or the phone rings, so you quickly hit “submit” to move on to the next matter. You end up chatting a while, then look back at what you wrote, and … oops.

There’s no magic to the number 15 in the above example; it’s just an illustration of why longer edit windows can be of value to people with no nefarious intent.

13

50x timeouts.

14

Well if you make many typos, you often don’t notice until later and as the board will sometime get the 502 hiccups rather bad, the 5 minute rule is often insufficient.

I doubt the edit window can be set by forum, but if it could be I would say leave GD & elections at 5 minutes and change the rest of the board to 15 minutes or more. But that is a big if. I recall it being a global setting.

15

Yes, that is the only time I’ve been frustrated by the 5 minute timeout. Especially if my finger bumped the “Submit Reply” button in the middle of typing. Then I have to post a reply apologizing and redoing my post.

16

I wouldn’t say there’s an “adamantine devotion” to the rule. It’s more, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” When editing was permitted, 5 minutes was chosen, and no one has really offered a compelling reason that more is really necessary.

17

A common type of thread on Reddit is “Ask me a question, let me answer and then edit your question so I look an idiot” type threads.

18

Timeouts is one( caught me out a couple times last week ). But more than that I’m just a really shitty typist and self-deluding editor. I edit heavily on the fly and often leave the wrong word in or do things like drop conjunctions. I’ll do that multiple times in a post and catch many, but my mind does this weird fill-in-the-blank thing when I’m double-checking my posts quickly. It will add in the conjunction or whatever that I meant to write but didn’t and I’ll only catch it on a further re-read a few minutes later.

I actually really would prefer 15 minutes( but not 30 )if it were up to a vote. That said I am also perfectly fine with the five minute edit window.

19

I belong to a board where unlimited editing is permitted. It’s a big PAIN in the ASS. I can’t tell you how often I am reading a really useful thread (this is a knitting forum so there’s lots of practical information) and suddenly in the middle of things there are three or four posts that have been deleted. Like, gone. I really hate this. Completely leaves one hanging. Sometimes, the OP has been deleted, and it’s clear from the following posts that it was up for a good long time. Maddening! (And with regard to the size of the board, it’s a pretty big site with several million members from all over the world. Not everyone posts in the fora but still.)

20

The main situation I run into with the 5 minute time limit is when I’ve already edited to fix something, get it exactly right, and then notice another mistake right afterwards. For that second edit, I may run out of time.

The fixes, BTW, are often in the form of figuring out that something I said might be misinterpreted and fixing it. So they take a bit longer than a typo to actually fix.

I also do run into the timeouts, where it take too long to actually get the edit to submit or even open.

Those are the two reasons I can see for allowing a slightly longer time limit. Timeouts rarely last long enough that 15 minutes wouldn’t be enough, and it’s long enough for two edits where you have to think how to fix them.

That said, it doesn’t happen that often, and, when it does, I post a follow up post, and people seem okay with it. Mods even (usually) accept when you correct something that may have come across as an insult. And people understand the timeouts.