I accidentally pressed “Submit” instead of “Preview” on a post that wasn’t quite ready yet in GD, and when I asked a mod to fix it, tomndebb informed me that he wasn’t allowed to modify posts on user request, at least for my specific request.
I’m just looking for clarification: Is it the extent of the changes that matters? The complexity? Or is this a new rule forbidding any changes by mods (which seems unlikely)?
Tom deleted the erroneous post after sending me what was there in a PM. At first I thought I’d lost the coding, but when I pressed “Forward” on the PM the coding was there, which was very nice (well, I had to wait an hour or two until the “Database Errors” went away, as this was early Monday morning).
I have no complaint about how Tom handled this situation in this case, which worked out okay in the end, but I’m just wondering if this relates to some rule I wasn’t familiar with or, as indicated above, it has to do with the complexity of the required changes?
The only changes I’ve seen the mods make are: editing titles for clarity, breaking links, removing excess quoted material, removing personal contact info. The basic content as posted is left untouched.
There’s a period when you can edit a post after you’ve made it, assuming you realize you’ve made a mistake and can make the changes within five minutes.
There is no technical limitation, but there’s a philosophical one.
The edit window Santos refers to is there because editing of posts in an active thread makes it difficult to follow. People are responding to text that’s no longer there, or that’s phrased differently. It breaks the flow. Once you’ve said something, it becomes “published”; a part of the history of the board.
If all you had to do was say, “hmmm. I didn’t say that right. I’ll have a mod change it,” it would be defeating the spirit of the edit window. It would also turn the mods into your personal secretaries and turn moderating the boards into drudgery.
If you make an incomplete post, and it’s too late to edit it, why not add a post to the thread saying something like, “Sorry, I hit Submit too soon. Here’s the rest of what I meant to say: …”?
The window has to close at some point and it will always be arbitrary. And I don’t think it defies the spirit of the “published” thingamabob. It is a short window to correct embarrassing typos and other minor things, not to rethink the post.
ETA: You don’t want to have a post changed after the poster has read responses to it. 5 minutes is short enough to accomplish that and long enough to allow a reread and fixing minor things (like adding this)
Would you be a dear and run and fetch me some tea?
I don’t see anything wrong with the author re-thinking a post within the edit time-frame; sometimes you realize something is a bad idea as soon as you hit “submit.” I think the idea here is that the author is the ONLY person who can re-think a post.
For what it’s worth, I think most posters here would be pretty understanding if someone followed an ill-advised post with an immediate reply of “Sorry, I just realized what I said was stupid” or something to that effect. What gets under people’s skin is when someone won’t admit they’re wrong even when they so obviously are.
My apologies. I was attempting to handle ambushed’s request in the manner that I thought would work best for him while following my understanding of the rules and a combination of real life distractions and bad keystrokes resulted in SNAFU.
Ambushed’s request was that a staff member tack a block of text (sent via PM) onto his post while deleting the end of the existing post.
By my understanding of staff rules, that would have involved a lot of finger gepoking to his text that is outside what we are permitted to touch.
I copied his original post onto Notepad, then deleted the original post and attempted to send it back to him via PM so that he could put all the text together in the manner he saw fit. However, I ran afoul of the 5,000(?) character limit on PMs, so I had to break it in two and ship it in separtate chunks. Somewhere in the turmoil, the second block got sent to me, instead of ambushed, and I had to forward it to him after I returned to my puter from my other tasks.
All of the post should be in ambushed’s PM boxes: the two sections of the original post in his inbox from me and the final section in his sent mail box to me.
Since all the text that ambushed was asking me to touch originated from his keyboard. I will run it past the staff to see whether I was too cautious.
(I will note that we really do not want to take on the roles of “post fixers”–partly for a lack of time and partly to avoid accusations that we changed something in text we were asked to fix. However, as a once in a great while request, I will let the staff argue the point to clarify our position.)
IIRC, a lot of the hoopla over the instatement of the edit window at all was directly related to being able to modify posts after they’ve been responded to, hence my ‘defied spirit’ comment.
Yeah - I think this is a really bad precedent to set up. There are some posters that are really obsessive about their posts to the point of never wanting to admit they were wrong - and I could see them dogging the mods to change posts in lieu of simply saying, “Whoops, here’s what I meant to say.” The thought of admitting an error is as horrifying to them as the thought of walking into my mother’s bridge club without any pants on is to me.
tomndebb acted cautiously here and I probably would have done the same. ambushed asked one of us to edit the post about 15 minutes after it was submitted, which is not very long, but we have no way of knowing if someone is reading the post and responding at the time. He was asking us to add about 450 words to a post that was about 500 words when he submitted it by accident.
If you hit submit by mistake, it’s better to hit Edit, copy all the text, change the post to ‘oops, hit submit too soon’ and finish the message before posting it separately. We’re willing to go back and fix things like coding errors that can make a post hard to read, but we’d rather keep our edits minor.
I also want to echo the fact that it’s no big deal to finish a post after you’ve posted.
And I’ve done the stupid thing a few times, and I’ve never caught flack from that I knew of (though, if I get emotional and say something controversial I have a tendency to avoid the thread for a bit, at least until I’ve cooled down. Sometimse this means I forget about the thread altogether, and I’m sure I miss stuff.
As I said in my OP, I didn’t have a complaint. I just wanted clarification of the rules, a clarification that’s still unclear, but thanks to Marley23’s Post #14, I have an answer as to what I should do if this happens again.
Thanks to TubaDiva, tomndebb, and Marley23.
The scolding from the excessive conformists to pretty much anyone who dare post in ATMB is quite tiresome, on the other hand.
Yes, I am aware of that. But no small amount of gobbledygook resulted from a bad cut and paste that clobbered my meaning was there to be fixed, and there was plenty of as-yet unchecked content to fix in the small amount of time left. It simply wasn’t possible.
Oh, jeez… “The Self-Important Philosophy of the Edit Window”? Was that Hume or Kant or maybe Quine? I mean 10 out of 10 for bombast, but not very high marks for pragmatism.
The problem with twisting the mundane into an Overarching Philosophical Treatise is that it totally ignores the actual specifics of the mundane. Didn’t you read my OP? This wasn’t about any attempt to “turn the mods into your personal secretaries” or “hmmm. I didn’t say that right”, oh Wise Theocratic Professor, it was about a 50% complete post that I accidentally hit “Submit” instead of “Preview”. Leaving it as it was would vastly increase the confusion, which “makes it difficult to follow”. “It breaks the flow.” Once I accidentally posted something half-finished, “it becomes ‘published’; a part of the history of the board.”
The mundane specifics must be judged on a case-by-case basis. Absolute Philosophical Rules have no place in the real world, and certainly not a message board! Such ego! This is a message board, not a Grand Grotesque Museum of the Permanent Display of All Errors, Verbatim.
Because what was there was the result of a bad cut & paste that made no sense and hadn’t even been read yet, let alone checked. It would be a garbage post in a thread in which I was already being called names and verbally abused. Not something I wanted hanging around to provoke further abuse!
Oh, jeez. There were no responses! I accidentally hit “Submit” it in the wee hours with no active green signals of presence.
Please read the post 18 on that whole “spirit” / “philosophy” versus real-world specifics. Philosophy and “spirit” are fine in some contexts, but very, very stupid in others.
