Quote:
Originally Posted by kindlekitten
and sometimes some of us have been in an altered state of mind whilst posting and going back later and seeing what we have written has caused some remorse. I know when I was recovering from knee surgery and highly medicated I came out with some real zingers  |
Aww, but those types of posts are my very
favorites. I now want to rewrite Billy's lyrics..."I'm in an altered state of mind".
I don't have any issue with the Edit button being there, and I use it constantly to fix errors in my posts. Sometimes I add an EDIT addition too, to clarify, unless I have to clarify because of a response to my post further on (in which case I'd just do so in-thread).
I agree that major edits such as the examples can cause problems, but their presence is very rare. In conversations of a more "debating" type nature, Harry's suggestion can be a good one. I'm just not sure that disposal or limitation of editing is a necessary technical alteration against the minimal presence of those problems.
However, perhaps a minor alteration to Guidelines briefly suggesting responsible use of the EDIT function would help.
To add to this, and I don't think non-Mods have access to this feature, if someone edits a post we Mods can click on the "Last edited by" bit and see what the changes were (it looks a bit like the wiki article History comparisons, if you've ever used them). Now to give you an idea of the scale of this problem, I've only just discovered this feature. But it's certainly something we can make use of if the EDIT function is ever used for, let's say, disruptive reasons. As is often the case, the Report Post button becomes a convenient course of action there.
Right now I'm going to look see if the Guidelines already say something about editing your own posts, and blush with embarrassment at my Moderator deficiencies if they do.
Cheers,
Marc