SD forum and many others out there prohibit editing a post after N minutes after it is posted. Instead of, let’s say, permitting editing at all times but making it easy to view all versions and a text diff between them and then relying on forum etiquette to discourage edits of those types that the community may wish to discourage.
Is there a profound philosophical reason for this or is it the case that nobody has bothered making an appropriate plugin for vBulletin, phpBB and other such popular forum scripts?
It’s a philosophical tradition, methinks. For years we didn’t allow editing posts at all.
I don’t see how the board would be impoved by what you seem to be suggesting (that edits be allowed indefinitely with the ability for every user to see what has been changed). That’s just going to make threads harder to read. If you wish to say, "I misstyped in this earlier thread, just say so.
The Admins are reluctant to make major mods to the vB script, and for good reason. When new versions come out, the mods have to be re-applied, and might not work anymore. Also, any modifications not tested or supported by vB are an invitation to disaster and costs to fix.
I wouldn’t say it’s profound, but instead just practical. Having to check previous edits over an indefinite amount of time on a board like this one would I think be time consuming and confusing. And then you have the possibility that people might quote various previous versions of a post, leading to still further confusion.
It might be worthwhile being able to see previous edits on, say, a technical board with a small membership where there might be some archival value in preserving various versions. I hardly see it as being worth it on a fast-moving, “conversational” board like this one.
I thought he was asking about vBulletin in general, not so much just this board. While this board’s reasons are useful, they aren’t the only ones.
I alos know some boards that don’t restrict edits at all, and just rely on the fact that, if someone does something wrong they’ll report it, and it’s easy to check what the post said just prior to the report.
I also know others that will not let you edit after you’ve been quoted. There are many ways to deal with this.
BTW, OP, am I right in suspecting that you are trying to think up job/business ideas with all these questions you ask?
I’m with BigT, I don’t think this question was intended to be about SDMB specifically, but rather was asking about the technical aspects of forum software limitations.
As I perceive it, the comparison is being made to wikipedia, where there is a main article page that anyone can edit, and there is a history log with all previous versions save. Anyone can replace the article, and anyone can refer to an old version or revert to an old version.
I think the answer is more of a philosophical difference between something like a wikipedia article vs a message board. A wiki is an article or a presentation of some information. It is intended to be a collaborative effort, but the end product is one coherent description or presentation.
A message board, on the other hand, is a conversation. It is a back and forth exchange of ideas, not a modification of a shared record. The intent is a different kind of product, so the format and tools are different.
And from a practical standpoint, I would think the server space for this would be a) much larger given a new copy of each thread each time someone posts, and b) greatly redundant. There’s no need to keep 587 and counting copies of the same conversation that differ by the inclusion of one new post per copy. That’s ridiculous.