I’d like some clarification about the issue of using the 5-minute edit window to substantially change a post.
I just wrote a lengthy response to someone’s post, but upon previewing, found that they had changed the post I was replying to. Their post does have the automatic “edited” message, but the poster didn’t describe the changes that they had made.
It’s not an important subject, and I’m sure the poster in question did not intend any kind of malfeasance, but I’m frankly a little annoyed to have put in the effort to respond and then find that my response doesn’t make sense.
I had quoted the original post in my response, and I thought about posting it anyway explaining that my quote was the entirety of the post that I was responding to, and that the other stuff had been added later. But I didn’t want to get into a she said/she said over something as trivial as the matter at hand. And I didn’t want to report the post because I realized that I wasn’t entirely clear on the rules here.
We really do prefer that people not use the edit function to materially change what they’ve said before – one of our objections to granting the use of the edit function is exactly the situation you’re in right now.
Without knowing exactly what went on here there’s not much we can do. Can you send me an email and give me the particulars of this situation? And we’ll look into it.
What I’m really looking for is some sort of “official ruling” on the general issue.
As I said, this particular instance wasn’t that big of a deal, but it occurred to me to think “In the future, should I make sure that at least 5 mintues have elapsed before responding directly to any post?”
If you reply to the post so it is quoted, you capture the original. This has happened a few times in very fast moving threads where people like me type quicker than their brain actually works.
I should have been clearer. The original post was a single sentence. That sentence was still there, but other sentences were added that changed the post enough that my response was rendered invalid.
So if I had posted what I had written, it would have looked like I pulled that single sentence and ignored the rest of her post. I actually did add a note explaining that the quoted sentence was the entirety of the post at the time I hit the reply button, and that she had edited it for content later, but I deleted that along with the rest of it for two reasons:
I didn’t want to call her out over it. Once this is clarified, I’m going to shoot her a PM pointing her to this thread.
I realized that since there wasn’t any kind of official statement on this, I could be wrong about the guidelines for using the edit window. Then I really would have looked like a jackass. So I started this thread to try to get clarification.