The 5 minute edit rule is the worst and most annoying thing on this board.
I fail to see the logic in forcing people to look like total dumb asses thanks to a post with a spelling or grammar mistake. Everyone gets a good laugh at the posters expense and its all thanks to the ill advised 5 minute edit rule. Most posters are squeezing in posts during short breaks throughout the day. We’re a bit distracted. Its not easy creating a perfectly correct post and then trying to edit it within that 5 minutes.
30 minutes would be a reasonable time frame to edit. IMHO
If we make it a surprise random duration, but no longer than 5 minutes, it won’t be possible to edit at all, because if the edit window closes in the fifth minute, it will no longer be a surprise. Similarly, it cannot therefore close in the fourth minute, because the fifth minute has already been eliminated, and so on…
Another vote that the current way is far better then the old no-edit way, and that 5 minutes is plenty enough time. I often use up all my edit time, but more time would just encourage more tinkering. Better to use preview & post right the first time.
If I’m going to make a long post, I write it out in a word processing program, reread it, edit out the things that sounded stupid, rinse and repeat. It often takes more than five minutes, but hey, you know what? I have as long as I want.
Then I put it in preview and post. At that point, five minutes is usually enough to fix the errors that seemed just fine in emacs but look stupid when actually posted.
…Okay, maybe I’m a little obsessive-compulsive, though.
I think a 10 minute window would be better. The way things sometimes go, that 5 mins has come and gone before you know it.
Another site I go to recently changed from no edits at all to allowing edits within an hour, and it hasn’t caused mass chaos. They also have a limit of 5 edits to any individual post, but that doesn’t really affect things, IMO.
I don’t think this is true. I’ve made plenty of simple mistakes on this board, especially before the 5-minute-edit came in, and I’ve never got the feeling that people thought I was a “total dumb ass” because of it. People might make good-natured jokes about them, but there are two good things about the SDMB:
(1) people care more about the substance of what you say than about trivial mistakes; and
(2) if you do make a mistake (either trivial or of substance), and you acknowledge that it was a mistake, others think more highly of you rather than treat everything you say as worthless because of a few acknowledged mistakes.