Allow editing of posts for longer

I didn’t implement the forum software, but I think that the restrictions are in place because of users that do not have nice intentions.

Thanks for replying.

The logic is usually that later replies in the topic may not make sense if someone edits a post.

Hmm – I’ve seen plenty of posts deleted by moderators (not necessarily here) without attempting to correct the context below.

I also believe that the need to allow responsible users to edit for the reasons I stated above outweighs the rarer cases when someone wants to edit an earlier posting for any other reason.

As a relative newcomer to WP, I have spent hours now wading through threads full of misdirection, red herrings, suboptimal solutions and dead ends where a simple edit at the top could provide a short cut to the solution.

Stuart

p.s. Apples do not cause autism, but I’m unable to edit my original post to correct.

I’m going to reply and odds are you will disagree with me. That’s fine as reasonable people can disagree. Just don’t make me the “Bad Guy” cause that’s not what this reply is about.

a) the replies from moderators were condescending “should be long enough for anyone”

b) or puerile “don’t put it on the Internet”

c) the thread is closed to new replies.

Try not to assume that someone’s being condescending when they’re being factual, OK? Just like you, the moderators here are all volunteers. Ascribing bad intentions is at a minimum passive aggressive. At the worst it’s insulting and I’m sure that wasn’t your intention.

1) We, as humans, make mistakes – we therefore may include information in posts (e.g. info. in code snippets) which we’d rather was not public domain. It does not take too much imagination to see that the consequences could even be serious.

Posts have been edited at the discretion of moderators before but it really needs to be more than “My post is on the Internet and showing up in search engine results.” That’s just not a good reason to edit posts.

There are 7,749,554 posts in the database going back 12 years. In the past when someone asked it was done. That was 6 years ago and it became a fully time job.

I’m sorry but that’s a waste of a volunteers time to edit posts for that reason.

Now there have been cases where someone had a legitimate reason that was not related to SERP. Hey guess what? We’re human too just like you. We considered those ramifications as did what was necessary.

That does not mean we’ll always agree with you. Some people have outright lied about “extreme circumstances” and when they repeated the behavior two things happened. One, they were blocked and two, their topics were not edited.

No one likes their good will being taken advantage of.

No, I am not going to list what those reasons are for having a topic or post edited. This isn’t “If I say A then I get B” and each person needs to make a case before a post will be edited. That case does not have to be public and there are ways to contact moderators. The #forums Slack channel is one way.

Slack

That doesn’t mean that mods could not have access to an audit trail if needed for outlier cases such as when a dispute arises.

That’s a great idea but this is not a health care, legal aid or advice, or anything like that. Having audit capabilities would be nice but at the end of the day this is a community support forum. There really is nothing here that could be or should be used in any legal discovery.

In the next version of these forums (the date for that is in flux) there will likely be notes to posts and topics that only moderators can see. That will permit some sort of explanation for why something was done or not done regarding links. But a full on audit trail is not planned for.

For instance, did you know that eating apples has now been proven to cause autism? [N.B. see later reply to this thread]

That would be deleted and the account posting that repeatedly would be blocked. That’s a different problem.

p.s. Apples do not cause autism, but I’m unable to edit my original post to correct.

*Drinks coffee*

Humor is fine and good but if you want to be taken seriously then try to avoid that. Using a nonsense case for editing posts is not making your case.

You can alway reply with “I made a mistake above, here’s the correct information”.

Edit: As you did with your P.S.

Just a bit about this:

As a relative newcomer to WP, I have spent hours now wading through threads full of misdirection, red herrings, suboptimal solutions and dead ends where a simple edit at the top could provide a short cut to the solution.

I would consider letting the original poster edit the thread title for a longer period. This should prevent people clicking on topics that are no longer related to the original issue.

I don’t agree with moving the solution to the top. Even if this was implemented in a more automatic way, the discussions in a thread are very important to the solution. You can learn from a lot about debugging the issue from the discussion. I would also say it’s rare that people come across issues that match the original poster’s solution.

Hi Jan,

Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful reply. I don’t think you’re the bad guy ??

I just want to correct a possible misunderstanding which I may have caused and then I’ll move on. I’ve made my point.

I’m not arguing that members should be able to demand or even easily request mods to make changes whenever they like. My point is rather the opposite, that members should be able to edit their own posts to correct such things.

The existing approach presupposes that this would lead to some form of chaos. I’m not sure what the policy is designed to prevent really, but my argument is that the damage done to the usefulness and accuracy of the forums under the current policy is worse. This is particularly the case for use of threads as a retrospective resource found through search. With respect, this may not be as apparent to moderators or dyed in the wool. As someone on a shallow learning curve trying to search and read rather than just post previously answered questions, it’s very apparent to me.

My point about audit trail was that where a member edits their own post, the history would be retained such that in the event of an issue, the original could be reinstated or the information used for moderation/disciplinary purposes.

There seems to be a presumption on this forum’s part that member posts belong to the forum. Whilst there may be something in the membership agreement about that (I don’t know), surely there are questions of moral ownership and trust here?

As a member wishing to post to help others, I’d like to know that if I foul up by posting some information which I’d rather wasn’t public, that I can remedy it.

To be honest the tone of your reply puts me right off as I really don’t fancy having to make a case to a moderator to correct something (e.g. inadvertently including sensitive information in a code snippet) I wrote. It will be easier to just avoid helping.

Sorry you don’t think that humour can help in discussing such matters. Something else we’ll need to disagree on no doubt.

Thank-you for taking the time to read and respond.

Stuart

p.s. I’ve placed this in a p.s. as I don’t wish a ping pong around one point to get in the way of something more important, and it’s not that big a deal but…

a) the replies from moderators were condescending “should be long enough for anyone”

Condescending = “having or showing an attitude of patronizing superiority.”

I’m not giving the definition to be condescending, but merely to emphasise that the example I quoted could very reasonably be interpreted as condescending. By stating this, the writer seemed to be implying “…including you.”

It presupposes that the writer has considered all possible valid reasons for someone needing more than 60 minutes to realise that they needed to edit something and has in their superiority discounted them.

@andrew

Thanks

I don’t agree with moving the solution to the top. Even if this was implemented in a more automatic way, the discussions in a thread are very important to the solution. You can learn from a lot about debugging the issue from the discussion. I would also say it’s rare that people come across issues that match the original poster’s solution.

I wasn’t suggesting moving anything, but it would be possible to put a note in a post to say “Just a note that I subsequently realised that this was [not the most helpful answer/wrong/insecure/etc] and there’s a much better solution at the end.”

In the absence of any way to rate or mark a solution, it might be helpful.

Was just a thought.

Stuart

Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful reply. I don’t think you’re the bad guy ??

Thank you, I appreciate that. ??

I’m not arguing that members should be able to demand or even easily request mods to make changes whenever they like.

Good.

My point is rather the opposite, that members should be able to edit their own posts to correct such things.

Here’s one scenario that happened a few times.

User A reply: You’re a [ Expletive Deleted ].

User B reply: That’s uncalled for, I’m reporting you. *Gets moderators*

User A: *Edits post to read “Why do you think that? Come, let us reason together like rational human beings.” within 35 minutes*

When the moderator catches that a figurative should tap happens and someone gets a good warning. When they keep it up the tap gets applied with brick. Figuratively speaking of course.

The case you seem to be making is that users can correct information as needed. If the original topic is less than a year old then they can and do reply to their own topic. If the original post is more than a year old then the topic is locked and no one can reply anymore.

If the topic is more than a year old then the information there may or may not even apply any longer and that’s not really a scenario that occurs that often.

This really is not a theoretical discussion on my part because what you want happens today in the review section.

What about the case where people edit posts for inserting spammy links? It happens with reviews. You can edit your review forever. People insert spammy links, moderators ask them not to, the forum member waits and re-insert the links again. Sometimes weeks later,

I review the reviews. When someone does that repeatedly and after being asked not to then they’re shown the door.

Thanks Jan – clearly at a disadvantage in terms of experience here both in time and role…

All I can do is highlight (as a request) that the forums be built and operated to be as useful to members as possible.

Your arguments, whilst completely valid, argue for controls to make managing them easier/feasible.

I believe that these controls cater for the worst possible scenarios and as a byproduct devalue the forums.

If it did become possible in the future to be able to edit posts, but maintain an audit history of changes, the value could be maintained and the necessary controls could still be used.

In the case of someone rewriting history to remove evidence of a tranrgression, the evidence would still be there.

In the case of a repeat spammer, I’d suggest there is no difference. They can spam on new posts or spam on edited posts. It’s more likely that they’d continue to spam on new posts as the audience is bigger. Either way they can be sanctioned just as easily.

FWIW I also believe that time-closing topics is not helpful either. I find plenty of topics here and elsewhere which are unresolved, but for which I believe I know the solution.

“So what?” you may say, the topic is dead.

It’s once again a question of perspective. I view the forums as a searchable resource of knowledge, not just as a live forum for debate and live learning. I think that’s because I’m a newb, but there are lots of newbs arriving? I would have thought that were to be encouraged to avoid repetitious asking and solving of “done” topics?

Maybe there’s another solution I’m missing. Anyway, I’m probably already getting boring and repetitious here, so if I don’t reply again, don’t take offence. It’ll be me not wishing to obligate you to spend any more time replying ??

Thanks for engaging constructively.

Regards
Stuart

The restrictions are for worst case scenarios, but these are not uncommon occurrences.

From a top level view and in my personal experience, there are more cases for the worst scenarios than best scenarios.

By best scenarios I mean scenarios involving making a mistake in a way that would devalue the information of posts in the entire thread. Rather than the scenario of posting a website address.

To make the forum more searchable, we need more threads with the solution rather than less. I don’t see an issue with search engines returning the solution multiple times. A reason why searching for a solution is difficult can be explained through the concept of symptoms.

When someone asks for help, they will explain the symptoms of the problem. This could be an error message that might point to specific lines of code in files, but still this is a symptom of the issue. Unless work is done to debug the symptom, the underlying issue will not be found. People’s environments are different. The same symptom does not mean the same solution for someone else.

It isn’t impossible that your issue is exactly the same as someone else’s, but it is unlikely.

Dismissing the symptom, the way we find out the underlying issue is through a 21 questions game. It doesn’t usually get to 21 questions, but these questions are very important to finding the underlying cause. For example, deactivate plugins and switching to a default theme. This is what I expect when someone posts for help. Sometimes volunteers know the answer outright, but a lot of the times they need to ask some questions. I don’t believe these discussions to be unvaluable information or that they cloud the solution in the thread, even if they are unvaluable to someone reading the thread.

The best way to receive support on the forums has always been to create your own thread.