It has exactly zero to do with copyright law. The policy of not changing posts had to do with integrity, reliability, credibility, etc.
A nice trick-fuck. I liked the addy, too.
Lastly… I just got your “location”. :smack:
I ain’t no lawyer, I only know what I was told by READER legal staff when we got the Message Boards started. It does have to do with the legal issue of who bears responsibility for a post. As a hypothetical example, if someone posts something defamatory about (say) their landlord, by name, then they can be sued for libel. If board moderators commonly edit posts, then Board Management can bear legal responsibility for the content of the boards. Because we do NOT allow moderators to edit posts, Board Management would bear no liability – it’s a public bulletin board where anyone can post what they like.
Yes, I misspoke when I said we can’t do substantial editing. We can’t do any editing other than very, very minor corrections.
Could we edit in a reason for the addition of spoiler tags? Sure. In the “Reason for Editing” slot. Could we summarize what’s been hidden in the text of the post? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t.
That would have been a good idea. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it.
Not to be confused with the exceedingly rare reverse Rickroll, where Rick Astley tricks you into watching a video of yourself singing.
Warning: major spolier ahead.
Google started doing this, I dunno, like a year or two back? And it’s really annoying.
I believe the purpose is to see how often people who did a given search clicked a given link, so they can refine their search results. (That’s why they’re long, not short – the link probably references both the result URL and the search used to find it, which would naturally need a huge huge identifier because it’s referring to a record in a colossal database somewhere in Googleland.)
Before, they just served up a plain link but that would give them no way to determine which links people actually clicked. But it’s really frickin’ annoying when you want to link to a search result – you have to go to the extra step of opening it in a new tab, even if it’s a page you’ve already seen and don’t need to see again, and then copy-pasting the contents of your URL bar.
The guy may just not have noticed that he’s copying these irritating Google links instead of real URLs.
Huh. I never noticed those - turns out that RedirectCleaner add-on has been shielding me from them.
Interesting conundrum, thanks for the explanation. This does seem a bit dubious, mods already add mod notes to posts. Things like adding a link to Cecil’s column, with a Mod Note that the link was added. I don’t see why adding a mod note in brackets that states “[mod note: spoiler applies to previous post]” would not fit the same level of involvement. It is not changing the intent or wording of the message, just clarifies the moderator action.
Exactly. And even if the rule was that you cannot even do this, then that’s a really stupid fucking rule. Putting a note, in brackets, preceded with “Mod Note:” cannot possibly be construed by even the densest of morons to be changing the meaning (or even intent) of the post.