That makes a lot of sense to me. Especially, as elmwood says, it’s easy to ensure that the “problem post” can’t be erased by the originator.
And the other reason I’m not fond of the B’s of this board is that they are actually the ones that start fights, not the “controversial or confrontational” (sic) poster.
That person C K DH cites as saying “Women are inferior and should not be allowed to hold public office” may not be PC, but is certainly expressing a widely held opinion (not mine) that will probably cost Hillary the nomination. It hurt her during her other elections, after all.
So where does my problem with B arise? Well, A is always, except in targeted pit threads, addressing an issue that is inherently impersonal. B is always without exception asking one person to fight, namely A. This changes things from a debate into a smear campaign. To my mind, IMHO, and not trying to change anything . . . Let’s just say if I were king, the B posts, anything expressing outrage and converting general discussion to personal, would be deleted. But that’s me. And while that putative I’m king , I would extend the policy to TV smear campaigns.
Oops, I need to revise that previous post. The mods are allowed to edit, remove, and even make posts disappear, whether or not it makes sense for the consistency of the thread. Or even remove the whole thread.
So A posts something controversial, B responds heatedly, and then A goes back and edits the post? So fucking what?
On every other message board I’ve seen, edited posts have a little notice on the bottom that says something to the effect that THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED BY…
If A edits the post so that B’s response looks like some kind of numbskull overreaction, why can’t B go in and edit said numbskull overreaction in response?
Or is it assumed that we members are too stupid to figure out that someone whose post has been edited, and whose post says so, maybe changed what he said?
I can appreciate people who sanctimoniously come out and say there’s an edit function it’s called preview. Yes indeed. And of course the submit and preview boxes are in exactly the same places on every single message board so a person would never, ever get them confused and hit one by mistake when they meant the other one. No.
On every other message board I’ve seen, once one becomes a member, however that is defined, the member can edit (or in some cases remove entirely) the post. Oddly enough, on all other message boards where I am a member, becoming a member did not entail the exchange of money. Maybe that’s the difference.
I post on another message board that allows editing. It is unbelievably frustrating when you go in to a thread and the first two pages of posts are slamming someone for something they’ve said on page one. Problem is, that person has deleted their post entirely and no one else who comes in a bit later has any idea what the heck is going on.
What about a forced preview? The poster hits “submit” and is then presented with his post exactly as it will appear on the page. They then have five minutes to read and revise and then they hit “submit” again.
Morbid curiosity made me look that up. Thank you, thank Og, and thank all who contributed to keeping this off the SDMB. I now need a gallon of Brain Draino to remove that image.
I’ve done the ‘quote for truth’ on other message boards a few times. It works fine.
Agreed - the only instances I’ve ever seen of dishonest editing happened after a much longer period of time - usually, it happens after the person making the post has made several whiny attempts to backpedal and justify, and has eventually had their ass handed to them by several respondents.
For the record, I used to think the absolutely no editing policy was the best way to be, but I have changed my mind - I really think a five-minute edit window would be best. I wonder if it really is still the case that most members want absolutely no edits - I completely appreciate that the management of the board will do whatever it sees fit, of course.
I think use the the [ img ] tag might be pushing it for the very conservative SDMB administration, and can usderstand why it’s not allowed here. On my site, which deals with the built environment, allowing images is a must. However, there’s a “no leeching” rule; you either use your own Web space, or a service like Imageshack or Imagpup. Leech, and you’re suspended for a day. Why? Because the webmaster of the site the image is being leeched from can redirect it to a NSFW image. Goatse, Tubgirl and Lemonparty are bannable offenses, whether intentional or not; a strong incentive for users to ensure to make sure they have complete control over the image they hotlinked.
Your arguments are all interesting, but frankly they’re all hypothetical and theoretical, the way you think things would be… or the way you think things are on other Message Boards. Our rules are all devised because of our actual experiences; we forbad self-editing because of what happened when we allowed it.
Some quick responses to your comments:
Asking everyone to quote the post they are responding to (to ensure there’s no back-pedaling) means (a) lots and lots of quoting and repetition. Think of some of the reallllly lonnnnng OPs, you gonna quote everything every time? Sheeeesh. What a long borrrrrring slowed down process. And (b) if you do quote the post, then the typos will be preserved in the quote, so why worry about them?
The little “edited by X” notice doesn’t indicate whether the change was just fixing a typo or was totally revising the content. “You changed the meaning!” " No, I didn’t, I just fixed the speling!" “Yes, you did!” “No, I didn’t!” … wasn’t fun. We don’t need more of that.
Moderators do NOT edit content. We’ll fix a typo for you if it’s important to your self-image or if poses a problem with understanding (“Oops, I typed now when I meant not”). We won’t revise content.
We only cause posts to disappear when they’re put forth by socks or unlawful returnees. It’s frankly the only way we can hope to discourage such people. Yeah, it does sometimes disrupt the flow of a thread, but why blame the mods? These people knew what would happen when they were caught, they’re the ones trying to disrupt the board. Hey, when the cops stop a drunk driver, that sometimes halts the flow of traffic. Do you get angry at the cops? You should be getting angry at the drunk driver, who knowingly violated the rules. If you want moderated boards, then that’s one of the prices you pay. If you want unmoderated boards with multiple socks and no penalties for misbehavior (allowing returnees to return as often as they like)… well, that’s not what most people want here. At least, that’s our impression. I dunno, I guess we could vote; it would certainly be a helluva lot easier on me personally if I didn’t have moderating duties.
I personally used to be anal about fixing typos too, even back in pre-wordprocessing days when fixing a minor typo meant retyping the whole damn page. I got over it, at least in some areas – like, if I know the person can’t correct it.
Basically, every time we discuss this, we conclude that there are no real problems caused by minor typos, and such discomfort as some people may feel is insignificant compared to the problems we used to have when we allowed self-editing.
As is a situation where someone posts something controversial, gets a slew of angry responses in a few minutes, and backpedals to change the message within a two to five minute edit window. Usually people don’t post something, and reload constantly right afterwards to watch the fallout. The concerns of the administration are legitimate if there’s unlimited editing, but not if there’s only a five minute edit window. Yes, it’s technically possible in vBulletin, even in older versions like 3.0.6
Oops. You’re right. There are no other message boards. Certainly none that allow post editing.
I’m not asking everyone to quote the entire post. I appreciate it when they limit it to the cogent point.
But it does indicate the post has been edited. The poster can’t deny that. And we have these discussions anyway. “I said this.” “You did not, show me where you said that.” Post is quoted. “It doesn’t say what you think it did.” On and on. It is tedious. But since it happens whether we have post-editing or not, then why not?
Yeah, well why not put that there was a thread removed? When somebody’s double post is removed we can see that and we can see why. When some sock’s post is removed it might be helpful to see that there was a post, not necessarily whose post it was.
Oh, so it’s either/all. Either no moderation to speak of, or moderators and edited posts. Sorry, I didn’t understand that.
But say–why not vote?
Well of course anything the paid members feel has to fall to the opinions of the staff.
Yeah, but when a typo is embarrassing, there’s often a pile-on, and it derails the thread. Sure, you could email a mod to make changes, but should the mods really be working on editing typos, or should they be ensuring threads remain civil?
I’d find this a bit less patronising if you just said something like “look, we (TPTB) revisit this decision quite frequently and we think the choice we made is still the best one for today”, or even if you just said you’re not changing it and that’s final, so there, but you’re basically saying that a decision based on circumstances - what, a decade ago? - is still entirely relevant and appropriate today. It may or may not be.
If you guys don’t mind cleaning up my coding mistakes (which is the one thing I’d really like a 2-minute editing window for), then that’s what I’ll do. In the past, I’ve been reluctant to do so except in the most extreme cases, knowing that the mods are plenty busy as it is. But if it doesn’t bother them, I won’t let it bother me.
Doing that would be a lot simpler, though, if we could report our own posts, the same way we can report others’ posts. What’s the deal with that?
Because right now, part of the impediment is the number of steps involved: open the main page of the forum, click on a mod’s name, click on the “Send a message via email to mrormsmod” link, copy the email address, paste it into one’s email utility, and THEN finally compose and send the email.
This is exacerbated by the board’s chronic slowness in loading pages: each of the three steps involved in alerting a mod that involves loading a SDMB page means an opportunity for timed-out errors from the web browser. I don’t know about other posters, but when I run into a sequence of these, I go do something else. And when I get back to the SDMB an hour or three later, I’ve often forgotten that I had a problem I wanted to ask a mod to fix.
And here’s where I get to defend the SDMB policy for a change.
I was in charge, briefly, of a message board that allowed editing and deleting. It was a fucking nightmare.
The demographic there was maybe a bit different than here and we had some much younger posters but even so, it just took one edit to set of a cascade of “what did they say” and other retro-edits. The worst part is that the software I was using didn’t preserve the originals so you’d look at it in the morning to see a mess of posts that didn’t make any sense and lots and lots of bitching. The thing is it would be fine for long periods and then it’d all kick off and I’d threaten to remove the edit feature and it’d calm down for a while and then all start again.
Even a three to five minute edit feature wouldn’t help that much – look at how fast some threads move around here. And given the fairly steady trickle of trolls we get through here it would just give 'em another tool to use. Add to that the stated policy of no non-standard features and it’s just not going to happen.
Really, you don’t need an edit feature, is it a typo or borked coding that big a deal? It’s pretty obvious what people where aiming for most of the time. In my, somewhat informed, opinion an edit feature is far more work than it’s worth.
I apologize, I certainly didn’t mean to sound patronizing. I did conclude by saying:
I thought that was pretty much the same as “We revisit this decision from time to time and we think the choice we made is still the best one for today.” I’m not going to say that we revisit the decision “frequently” – I don’t want to pretend we think about every month. However, the last time the mods discussed it was August 2006 and the time before that was January 2006 then before that in January 2006, Nov 2005, April 2005, etc… So if “roughly every six months” meets your “frequently” definition, then there ya go.
And RT, the mods all agree: we wish that you could report your own posts, but that’s just not in the system.
Fair enough then - if it is actually reviewed every once in a while, I’ll trust that TPTB are capable of making the right decision in light of any new data, behavioural trends, board technologies etc. Thanks.
The previous version of vB did have the ‘report post’ on everything - it looks like this was changed as a ‘fix’ - there is a plugin to make it optional; I know the board management has avoided software ‘hacks’ in the past, but I’m not sure if that includes ‘plugins’.
, I would extend the policy to TV smear campaigns.