Could the admins please give some thought to allowing ten or 15 minutes for edits, rather than just 5? Five minutes is not long enough to look up and fix what you did wrong with some BB code tag, and since the tiny windows for composing posts don’t lend themselves to proofreading, it’s very often not even long enough to fix simple typos in a post of any length.
I understand the rationale for not allowing someone to change the substance of his post after being challenged on some point, but I doubt that would happen within ten or 15 minutes very often, and in any case the edit time would be noted. I think the small chance of lasting harm done is far outweighed by the convenience of allowing people to read and correct a complex post before it’s set in concrete.
You can use “preview post” (available in “post reply,” or if you start with “quick reply” by clicking on “go advanced”) to see what your post will look like, check your links and coding, etc. You can use the preview button as many times as you want/need to; the clock doesn’t start until you hit “submit.”
You can make the tiny window for composing larger by clicking on the little arrowheads at the top right just outside the typing field, above the smilies.
They don’t really look like six dots. Look at the actual box you type your replies into. Bottom right-hand corner there’s what looks like two little horizontal lines (it’s actually six dots). Click and drag that just like you would a window in Windows.
I was confused by the “six dots” thing, too. They don’t show up for me in Opera or IE; I had to load the page in Firefox to see them. Here’s a screenshot.
I think the dots are a Firefox 6 thing. They showed up on all text entry blocks on web forms after a fairly recent FF update. They are not specific to the Dope (I never knew about the arrows, though). Knowing FF, the dots (or something that does what they do) are probably an HTML standard now, but that does not mean that browsers other than FF will have implemented them (they are not there in IE 9 64 bit).
Despite this, I would like to second the OP’s plea for more edit time. I am a lousy typist and sometimes even make new errors in my corrections through rushing them.
