I recently TRIPLE-posted in GD (in a very odd way, though I’ll spare the mundane details.) As I am a regular on other message boards, including one that operates and looks exactly like this one, I figured “Oh well, it’s not that bad, I’ll just edit the second post.” I click “edit”…won’t let me edit the post. Says at the bottom of the page, I’m not allowed to edit the post. Now I’m sure nobody wants to see what I have to say, no matter how lucid and insightful, three times.
One would think that they would allow us to correct that problem when it occurs. Instead, I just have to sit back and feel like a frickin moron, unable to spare others from seeing the mistake and consequently say “Man, that Rex Dart is a FRICKIN’ MORON!! I’m never going to listen to what he has to say again, because he’s a FRICKIN MORON!!! How dare he come into our board and TRIPLE-POST like some stupid newbie?? I bet he’s 12 years old and entertains himself Friday nights by whiffing empty kerosene containers and watching Dark Angel!! What a stupid idiot, I’m never gonna listen to him again, where’s that squelch list at??” And all of this could have been prevented if I’d been allowed merely to click the stupid little “edit” key and eliminate the text on the other posts. It’s the responsible, adult thing to do, and the board WON’T LET ME DO IT.
You don’t look like a friggin’ moron. You look like the rest of us, a person who didn’t feed the board hamsters before submitting a post. It happens.
But the real reason why they don’t allow editing is so that you don’t make the rest of US look like friggin’ morons. Say you say something inflammatory and we all tear into you, and then you withdraw your comments or change them. Nope. Not gonna happen. This place puts your lunacy on display and makes sure everyone else sees it, and it’s better that way. It kinda keeps everyone in check, IMO.
But seriously, it happens. Sometimes whether you like it or not. We once had a week where EVERYONE triple posted every time they hit submit. Don’t worry about it.
There is quite a bit of debate on this board, and it often gets quite heated and quite technical. There is a legitimate concern that debate would be hampered if a) people could change their posts and b) people could accuse people of having changed their posts. (i.e., there is an “edited by” message because you fixed a typo, but SuperFatHeadPoster uses that to accuse you of getting rid of where you called him a Nazi, and soon the whole thread is derailed)
You don’t post much during normal business hours, do you? This board is provided as a free gift by a for-profit business (The Chicago Reader) and does not have the fastest server in the world. They have kindly upgraded it several times, and Jerry the Tech God has invented new forms of math in his quest to optimize the hampsters, but with every increase in capability, we all start reading and posting twice as fast. If people could edit their posts–and we have some serious perfectionists here–the boards would almost certainly be even slower.
No one thinks you are an idiot for triple posting. We are a pretty laid back bunch. I mean, you found the Shift key, so we’re happy.
You don’t look like a friggin’ moron. You look like the rest of us, a person who didn’t feed the board hamsters before submitting a post. It happens.
But the real reason why they don’t allow editing is so that you don’t make the rest of US look like friggin’ morons. Say you say something inflammatory and we all tear into you, and then you withdraw your comments or change them. Nope. Not gonna happen. This place puts your lunacy on display and makes sure everyone else sees it, and it’s better that way. It kinda keeps everyone in check, IMO.
But seriously, it happens. Sometimes whether you like it or not. We once had a week where EVERYONE triple posted every time they hit submit. Don’t worry about it.
Welcome to the boards, RexDart.
Might I suggest looking through the ATMB forum as there are bound to be some threads with official explanations as to why we don’t have that capability here on this board.
I doubt that people would actually change their posts around to make. Someone would just point out the edit date on the post and whoever edited their stuff would look like a fool.
Wikkit, I’d be more inclined to support your position if I actually caught them playing games with their posts. I have seen one or two occasions where they straightened up their own typos, but I do not ever recall one of them changing the text (and meaning). (And I have seen one or two of them put out some bone-headed statements that i’m sure they wished they could erase.)
Unfortunately, among the thousands of posters who have visited this MB, we have already found several who would have tried that stunt (as witnessed by their behavior on other message boards where some of us also post).
It is true that the change date indicates that they have messed with the text, but that does not stop them from claiming that they only corrected a typo–and the battle rages.
As frustrating as it is, the current rule serves this MB well.
I admin a board that has a much smaller membership but a vastly greater percentage of complete assholes, a handful of whom began abusing the edit feature. I promptly disabled the function in much the same manner that they’ve done here.
With the number of trolls and various peckerheads the SDMB attracts by virtue of its size, the occasional multipost fuckup is nothing compared to the chaos that would ensue if any dipshit could do a drive by flame-and-erase.
One of the boards I’m on allows you to modify your post within some small amount of time (5 minutes? an hour? I forget), which allows you to clean up double posts, misspellings, bad coding, etc., without allowing for cheating in debates.
The software running this board allows that option. You can set the time in minutes to whatever you want, and only allow editing in that time. Something like, say, 3 minutes would be (IMO) reasonable. Catch your typo, correct a double post, whatever, but not really have much time to gather any replies.
While it would be nice to go back and correct tpyos that we caught right after submitting I would think that it wouldn’t be that good of an idea simply because this board usually runs slower than molasses. Seeing how many people on this board regularly make typos and would therefore attempt to edit their posts, on top of normal surfing and searching, I imagine that we’d all be able to maybe read a post a day.
