Yes, as it turns out, the edit tag was not set to show if no reason was given. Whether or not someone had accessed the thread prior to the edit was irrelevant.
The issue has been fixed by TPTB. 
The obvious solution to completely eradicating editing abuse is to allow the editing, but to show us the differences in text.
Sounds like a task for vBulletin.
HA! Didn’t stop me in Middle School.
Word. That’s currently not possible with vBulletin (or any other messageboard software I’m aware of). It’d be a cool feature - a “history” of edits like a wikipedia page - but something like that could be fairly resource intensive on larger boards.
What I meant was that would be too much of a hack to do at the SDMB level, but a programming exercise by the dudes at Jelsoft, makers of the vBulletin software. It could lead to an option in future versions.
The Mods will have a record of everything and thus if someone deliberately misquotes someone, they can punish the malefactor.
I imagine they will be delighted to police “Did too! Did not!” :rolleyes:
At any rate, being able to edit will help my typos.
They will? This hasn’t been my experience with vBulletin.
And that’s what I was saying too Musicat. 
must…test…new…feature…
that edit button is huge (in comparison)
Says who? :dubious:
Tee hee.
Not automatically, no; there is no “audit trail” or anything like that.
However something really blatant will doubtless be captured by attentive and vigilant Dopers and brought to our attention … . like this thread.
We are hoping that the convenience offered to our members with the use of temporary edit will not be killed by abuse of the system. It’s a matter of trust.
It helps a lot that the vBulletin programmers were competent enough to base the clock on the time of the original post, rather than at the time of last update.
Dag NAB em! There could have been holy hell to pay, if only they’d screwed up.
They made me start it! It’s not my fault, honest!
:eek:
Edit function is cool!
Will this put a big strain on the [del]hamsters[/del] server?
I was going to point out that there are timestamps on both the edit and on the new post, but then it occured to me that the timestamp on a post only shows when it was posted, not when that person read the thread. So, if the edit is after the quote, then we know who changed what, but if the edit is before the quote, then we still wouldn’t know for sure, and it’d be a case of “he said, she said”. Now, granted, it’s often pretty easy to decide who to believe in such a situation, but I still hope it doesn’t come up.
And while I’m here, I might as well test some things, too… This last paragraph is subject to editing.
Depends on how people use it and how they were using the site before. Editing isn’t any harder on the server than normal posting, and I bet it’ll actually ease the load on the server to some extent.
Say I mess up some word in one post out of every ten I type. On the old system, I would make it a point to preview every time I posted to make sure I didn’t miss anything. That’s ten extra pages loaded. Now, I can just quickly read over what I wrote in the actual thread, and on that one time out of ten I can make the edit. That’s just one (or two techinically, counting loading the actual thread after the edit again) extra page load.
Oh, whew. I just tried opening the edit window before time was up, and waiting, and thankfully, it does count the time when it’s submitted, not when the edit is started. If anyone’s curious, the error message is