Yeah, this would be one of my major SDMB pet peeves. Ninety-nine percent of these posts are absolutely useless to me because I never noticed the error the first time - editors get paid the big bucks because it’s hard to see these errors, folks. And I knew what you meant by “teh” anyway.
I’m not gonna dig up a cite, because I’m lazy, but it’s been pointed out that the text that went around was not very highly scrambled; it’s not the first and last letters but the shape of the word that matters, and if the word is sufficiently scrambled it definitely slows down reading, even though in most cases it probably doesn’t impact comprehensibility.
Typos are fine, everybody does it. Just don’t accidently misplace the apostrophe in “y’all”, or all hell will break loose, and you’ll be forced back into semi-lurking. :rolleyes:
I don’t know of any commercially available software that does it, but another board I was on would save an unedited version of your post if you made significant changes to it, with a link to the unedited version at the end of the post.
I don’t know what heuristic was used to define “significant changes”, but it was some combination of the total difference, and the proximity of the differences.
So, you could fix a bunch of scattered typos without triggering it, but if you had a bunch of typos in a row, it might look suspicious. Or, of course, if you were cutting out whole paragraphs and rephrasing sentences… that’d trigger it, too.
After a while the link to the unedited version would go away, with still the note “Edited by <user> at <time>” on the bottom- like many boards have. It worked pretty well, since other users could completely quote the unedited version if people were trying to be sneaky… and you couldn’t edit other users’ posts.
Personally I like to see people post pointing out their own mistake(s) in a previous post. Makes them seem more human.
And at worst, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.
The reason I hate posts that point out typos is that even though I may not have seen the typo, or may have seen it and then forgotten, if you have a post that says “Their=They’re and teh=the” I find myself rereading your post LOOKING for the typos. That wastes my time. OK, so the real problem is on THIS side of MY monitor, not on your side of your keyboard, but if they are simple everyday words, don’t worry about it.
I don’t hate them, but I don’t bother correcting any of my typoes (unless they complete screwed the meaning, which is rare). I figure the people here are smart and can figure out what word I had in mind.
I hate typos, and I almost always notice them, in my posts and in others’. Unless the poster has a history of idiocy (in which case I tend to hold their typos against them), I usually think, “Damn. Poor Friendly Poster must be sitting on the other side of the monitor smacking him/herself in the head and thinking ‘how the hell did I miss that?!’ and feeling foolish, like I always do.”
I do agree that “standard” typos, like teh, adn, tehre, and my own personal bugaboo, * becasue*, should be left alone. If, however, the typo creates a funny word (see: earpugs and my very own toung in place of young) or if a qualifier such as never, not, etc. is inadvertantly left out, it’s perfectly OK with me if the poster corrects him/herself or mocks him/herself in an additional post. If you’re so attached to a thread that you get excited when someone responds and are terribly disappointed to find nothing more than a correction post, I would venture to suggest you take this stuff a tad too seriously.
*LifeOnWry remembers to preview and knows, deep in her heart, she’s gonna post this with a typo in spite of that. *
This board has higher standards than anything else out in internet land, so it stands to reason the members are going to keep on their toes as much as possible. This includes correcting themselves before they get torn apart by the semantics police. It just looks like sweating the small stuff to me, but so be it.
And Sean Factotum, I refuse to correct my typo. Neener neener.
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