Ok I tried a search and could find no results on edit or edit posts. So can you guess what my question is going to be? Why can a moderator (not that this has happened to me) censor (Edit) a post and the user who made the post cannot. Really this is what I find confusing not being able to edit my own posts. If your going to have the feature displayed then make it accessible to the poster or piss it off. Just gets so frustrating when oops you know you’ve forgotten to include something but too late.
This is brought up by newcomers a lot, and the answer is that allowing people to edit their posts would (1) put more strain on an already overtaxed server* and (2) open up the possibility of people posting inflammatory statements and then deleting them after getting flamed and trying to claim that they never made them. Basically, editing will not be allowed here. Posters are encouraged to use the preview feature and not to obsess over simple typos. You can always post a follow-up if you forgot something important.
Moderators edit/delete others’ posts in cases of violation of the rules (spamming, offensive links, and extreme trolling, for example), not because someone has offended their personal sensibilities. Their board, their rules, their prerogative.
Another common complaint. In a nutshell, this is the best the Chicago Reader (our kind host) can do, and it’s pretty good, considering the price of posting here ($0). Most Dopers find that the community/content here is worth waiting for slow page loads once in a while. I surf elsewhere or do deskwork while I wait. Once you get used to it, it’s no big whoop.
Actually the price of posting is not the point this being one of many boards I post to and none of them charges anything either and all are faster. Yes I live approximately 700 miles(Not Km) north of Montreal and I am on dial-up. No broadband anywhere near here so let’s not get onto the subject of slow dope cause that would really annoy me. I can understand the draw backs of letting people edit posts, but these can be handled in a much more professional way, I managed BBS services in other countries before finding a quiet place to settle down, I know the nature of the beast. Maybe if you had a mods panel and removed the edit icon from users view then these questions would go away. I really love this board for the intellectual content but there are a few things I believe could be done better. Though I don’t intend to raise every issue as this would be counter productive and pointless. Just those two things, the edit and speed really do get to me.
For speed, one attempted search last week took over four hours to return a refusal to connect and most searches return useless results unless I use wildcards * but I have only ever had one search with a wildcard return a result everything else has just failed to connect. Just needed to vent I guess my ISP doesn’t acknowledge any fault at their end but argh frustration.
Even without malicious abuse, post editing can be confusing. I spent some time at a forum devoted to puzzles and riddles, where editing was enabled. I never saw it abused, but there were many cases where someone would post a riddle, a half-dozen replies would discuss some error in the statement of the riddle, and the OP would then edit the original. This made for some rather disjointed discussions, as people would then be discussing things that weren’t there.
Dangit, I knew I should have previewed before posting in an hour-old window! Your suggestion of making the edit option only visible to moderators does have merit, and there are some things already which can only be seen by mods (the options to move or close a thread, for instance). However, I strongly suspect that that’s not the sort of thing that can be easily changed. The administration of this board occasionally makes minor changes to the board, but changes which are too large, in addition to being difficult and trouble-prone, can also make it much harder or impossible to get tech support from Jelsoft, the makers of the board software. You might want to suggest that to the programmers as a feature in the next version of vBulletin, but you won’t see it implemented here until then.