I don’t think I have made a post here and after a few min wanted to edit it, mostly for spell checking.
Other times wanted to add another related sentence to tag on, after a few min of overview.
Even when I really, really look at what I posted, I seem want to reword parts of it slightly pretty soon afterwords.
You’ve got a couple minutes after you hit the Submit button. You miss that window and c’est la vie. If it’s critical to edit or augment your earlier comments after the window expires, you can always quote yourself and re-submit.
I often try to fix problems and find that I took too long. I do use preview, but that doesn’t help when I hit the submit button instead of the preview and my post is still all messed up. By the time I edit it properly the edit is blocked. Instead I then do a quick edit a couple fixes at a time hoping to get as much fixed as I can before the edit is blocked. An extra few minutes would help with this, and they could reduce it down again if they find people are changing their posts to win arguments , which was the reason giving originally for no editing.
Here’s the problem with longer edit time: our boards tend to run on a real-time basis, and in many threads, there could be ten posts after yours in that 15 minute interval. Allowing so long an interval would be allowing people to re-write history, changing what they said when others responded (say) negatively. So there’s a potentially huge risk on the downside.
And there’s not really much advantage on the upside. If you’re talking about minor spelling/grammar edits, my suggestion is: don’t sweat it. One of the things the internet has taught us is not to be so picky about spelling and grammar, we all make such errors. Seems to me that’s a good lesson in tolerance.
If you’re worried about major goofs (say, you typed “not” when you meant “now” or you mis-typed a link), you can always email a forum mod (or REPORT your post) and we’ll be glad to fix it for you, even after the five minute limit.
In short, I think I speak for most mods when I say that we see potential for major abuse and no significant advantage in such a change.
“Preview is your friend” has turned into snarky shorthand (not that I think Gukumatz was being snarky) – but it’s also a good reminder.
If I’m writing anything more than a couple of paragraphs, I’ll generally hit “preview” – up to a half dozen times, sometimes. Even then, I’ll often find a typo or the ghost of a rewrite (a missing or extraneous word where I’ve rephrased something) only after hitting submit, at which point I’m darned glad we have “edit” at all.
(And of course, if I’m writing a very long post, I’ll work in Word and then cut and paste it over – and still preview a couple of times to make sure all the coding works right.)
If you’re still thinking through exactly what you want to say and how you want to say it, use the “preview” button like mad – there is no limit (that I’ve discovered, anyway) to the number of times or the amount of time that you can use it for.
hits “preview,” reads, notices a mistake, fixes it, hits “preview” again
You both may have been lurkers before but I notice your registery dates as being fairly recent (like in the last year).
Post editing is actually a fairly new feature we were given. For a long time and many years we weren’t allowed to edit our posts at all. And so there would be scores and scores of topics in this forum asking “Can we please edit our posts?” 1, 2, 5…I lost count.
Now it’s “Can the edit time span be extended?”.
Well, put me in the group that says five minutes is a hell of a lot longer than we used to have. :dubious: I’m happy we have it at all as opposed to the 2 or 3 years I was posting here when we didn’t.
Back in my day we could edit our message board posts all we wanted. We just pulled the thumbtacks out of the corkboard, took the posting down, made our changes, and put it back up (of course, everyone else could edit it, too).
You damned kids and your electronics. Get off my lawn.
I frequent a forum, a rather popular one I gather, where a preview is mandatory. It doesn’t seem to make much difference. Participants make a lot of mistakes they regret and go straight to suggestions to ask for an edit option.