EDIT BUTTON!!!!!!!!!

[PrimeMover 0]

Lots of forms have edit buttons for typing-impaired people (like me). I think it would be a great idea, and allow for some more free time for Betsy, if this forum had one. Please?

[Betsy Speicher 0]

Lots of forms have edit buttons for typing-impaired people (like me). I think it would be a great idea, and allow for some more free time for Betsy, if this forum had one. Please?

There was so much mischief committed with the Edit Button on another forum that my late husband Stephen and I decided to start our own forum -- this one -- and we have never allowed members to edit their own posts. Only Admins can and only for a very, very good reason.

But fear not! Like you, I am typing-impaired but I know that the Preview Button is my friend. I just keep previewing and reading my post until it looks exactly the way I want it to. I suspect so do other members and the result is very high quality postings by everyone. That's the way Stephen and I wanted it.

[Oleksandr 0]

Yeah, I like lack of edit button for that reason despite its drawbacks. It does make these forums much better.

[PhilO 0]

I understand the rationale but I still think it would be beneficial for the vast majority of legitimate cases to permit a limited context for edits, along the lines of:

- A post could be edited (including deleted) if there are no responders, and less than a short period of time has elapsed (say 15, or 30, minutes)

[Paul's Here 0]

I understand the rationale but I still think it would be beneficial for the vast majority of legitimate cases to permit a limited context for edits, along the lines of:

- A post could be edited (including deleted) if there are no responders, and less than a short period of time has elapsed (say 15, or 30, minutes)

If an error was so egregious in such a case, why not just repost with a note to ignore the first post?

[ewv 0]

Yeah, I like lack of edit button for that reason despite its drawbacks. It does make these forums much better.

Or ask Betsy to delete it. Use the "report" button.

[Carlos 0]

I am also against the edit button. The lack of one encourages poster responsibility and places the authority of the website on the admins, where it should be.

[piz 0]

In almost 20 years of participating in online discussion groups, I have seen exactly one case where I think an edit function on a discussion forum makes sense: I participate on a forum where programmers who use a certain programming language share ideas and code. In many cases, a developer will post his code as the start of a thread. Then, when he issues updates to the code, he will edit that initial post to make the new code available there (as well as include any release notes he may have) instead of in a new post at the end of the thread. This makes it easier to follow the release history of the code. Of course, that could just as easily be accomplished with a separate web site for the code, but it's still not a bad use of the edit function.

Every time I've ever used an edit function on any discussion forum I mostly fix spelling or grammar errors and I've been very careful not to alter the meaning or even usually the wording of my posts. Imagine the chaos and furor that could result if, say, someone were to respond to a post in a way the poster doesn't like, so he goes back and changes the original post so the reply no longer makes sense. (IIRC, that is in part the kind of thing that led Stephen and Betsy to create this forum, along with overzealous moderators editing and/or deleting users' posts.)

So, I vote NO on the edit button thing. (Not that I have a vote, seeing as THE FORUM is, rightly, not a democracy or even a republic. )

[ewv 0]

Editing of posts and why it is not implemented has been discussed here on the Forum previously.

[Lady Brin 0]

Lots of forms have edit buttons for typing-impaired people (like me). I think it would be a great idea, and allow for some more free time for Betsy, if this forum had one. Please?

There was so much mischief committed with the Edit Button on another forum that my late husband Stephen and I decided to start our own forum -- this one -- and we have never allowed members to edit their own posts. Only Admins can and only for a very, very good reason.

But fear not! Like you, I am typing-impaired but I know that the Preview Button is my friend. I just keep previewing and reading my post until it looks exactly the way I want it to. I suspect so do other members and the result is very high quality postings by everyone. That's the way Stephen and I wanted it.

I am so dumb and naïve. It would never have occurred to me to muddle with some one's post. One of the Porsche forums allows you to edit your typos. I read, spell check, re-read, but I still manage to screw up quite often - as I'm sure y'all have noticed.

[PhilO 0]

If an error was so egregious in such a case, why not just repost with a note to ignore the first post?

Because every reader for the rest of time will then first read the post with the problem then have to read the followup, a situation that could have been initially fixed in many cases. In most cases it isn't worth bothering Betsy to fix, say, a typo, yet there it is, even if you missed it the first time with preview - or maybe you accidentally pressed post instead of preview. None of the board software that I know about is smart enough to impose the restrictions I mentioned, though it's not a hard problem - I am not suggesting that it be an unlimited ability to edit.

[JeffT 0]

Another problem with editing posts is that users who are monitoring the thread by email are not made aware of the edit. They have the record of the post in their email, which is no longer consistent with what users on the web are seeing. Also, they are not even notified of the edits via the notification that a new post causes, nor by a highlight on the thread when browsing the forum section, to see if anything important was changed in the edit.

What baffles me beyond comprehension is that virtually every major web forum software makes no record of edit revisions, not even internally, visible to the administrators. The new edit completely erases the old version, right in the database.

It would be a relatively straightforward improvement to split out the post content into its own database table with a one-to-many relationship between the "post" and the "text version". Ideally, all users of the forum with such a system would be able to view the full edit history of any post, and users editing their own posts could never make a prior version inaccessible. However, moderators could make individual prior versions inaccessible if needed, to hide inappropriate content or for other reasons, while still keeping those versions accessible to moderators and administrators.

The forum software vBulletin now has such a functionality. I hope the makers of the other large forum softwares (including Invision) follow suit with this very important functionality. I'm amazed that for this long, this feature has been neglected in favor of other trivialities.

Such an "edit history" feature would provide the benefits of legitimate editing, while preventing most opportunities for abuse because users and moderators could check the nature of an edit. (For example, forum owners could disallow edits which change the meaning of a post, or set rules for exactly what is allowed in an edit and what is not.)

Until and unless edited versions are kept, I favor keeping this forum as it is--no user edits at all. That's the way Usenet and email discussion lists have always worked, after all. Editing posts is a very recent (and strange, IMO) phenomenon in Internet discussions.

[PrimeMover 0]

Lots of forms have edit buttons for typing-impaired people (like me). I think it would be a great idea, and allow for some more free time for Betsy, if this forum had one. Please?

There was so much mischief committed with the Edit Button on another forum that my late husband Stephen and I decided to start our own forum -- this one -- and we have never allowed members to edit their own posts. Only Admins can and only for a very, very good reason.

But fear not! Like you, I am typing-impaired but I know that the Preview Button is my friend. I just keep previewing and reading my post until it looks exactly the way I want it to. I suspect so do other members and the result is very high quality postings by everyone. That's the way Stephen and I wanted it.

I completely see what your saying.