Timeframes matter, too. Someone who pulls a variety of things over the course of a month or two is different than someone who crosses the line once every 3-5 years. We all lose our temper and post in anger on occasion. The problem is when the occasions get quite frequent.
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Yeah, if you adopted my suggestion, you would have to ban me. I can’t write without rewriting several times. And when one post drives me up the wall, my first version of my reply may reflect that I am up the wall.
I complained about dangerous safety signals, in a thread for complaints, and at least one poster suggested I wanted other people to die.
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when I see my initial posts, I often think-- wow, did I just write that? There’s a spelling errow in line one. Or, I get really paranoid about my word choices, and think that I should change the ratio of pronouns to nouns…
But, sometimes I edit for content-- which means that people end up liking stuff that was missing, or undeveloped in my rough drafts… Oh well. Sucks to be them! I’ve been in forums which close the editing window after 15 minutes. Which, admittedly doesn’t cater to my hyperactive, ten tabs in each of three windows web browsing style.
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i make edits after the fact from time to time but when i do i always try to leave a note at the end of the text which starts
“edited to . . .”
and then briefly summarize the nature of the edit(s). if most of us would adopt a similar practice that, along with the “edited” sign at the top of the comment would probably deal with any difficulties in editing.
edited to trip the edit sign as a demo.
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but i don’t see the edited symbol i’m used to seeing.
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I personally don’t think the doubling idea is that great. It’s overly logical for a human situation. I think that what is nice about it is that it feels fair. I think there are other ways to ensure consistent application of rules.
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Right, but I’m not a fan on a rigid timeframe for resetting the counter (if there is one). Otherwise, someone can easily rules-lawyer and be abusive 1 month and 1 day after their last offense as opposed to an even month, for example. The timeframe, as well as whether or not the person has learned their lesson, definitely calls for human judgment.
Maybe not doubling, exactly, but something along those lines. I’m a big fan of a warning, then a brief timeout if the behavior continues, then a punishment if it continues further, then a bigger punishment or ban if they still somehow haven’t learned their lesson. This way, there will be no punishment for the first couple infractions, and no bans longer than a year unless the user makes a habit of being a pain in everyone’s ass.
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What edit sign?
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There’s a little orange pencil glyph in the upper right of a post, to the left of the post time. It appears when a post has been edited after the initial grace period, which @Cynical was demonstrating.
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Wish I knew who that was. I don’t think I’ve ever run into that practice myself. But if I did, even if we don’t have user-viewable edit histories, the mods can view them. Calling this behavior out to a mod should result in them checking out the situation, seeing the shenanigan in question, and applying consequences accordingly. Simplicity itself.
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Here are the relevant settings for editing posts, if anyone is interested:
So, you have 5 minutes to edit your post before it is marked as such, and 60 days to edit the post before it is locked.
Both of those are the defaults. What isn’t the default is whether editing history is public, which is to say that currently it is not public. Here is the post where I mention the post that I mention turning it off:
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I care how polished my comments are. I edit because (contrary to popular belief) I care about how I represent myself to you guys. You can’t see how impeccable my shirt is today, how clean my teeth are, whether or not my rug is on straight. Here, my words (and my crappy MSPaint illustrations) are all I have.
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For you, there may be. For me, such glyphs don’t work with my font settings, and being able to read websites is a useful accessibility fix.
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Yes, but do you change your comments after the fact to say the total opposite of what you said originally?
Spelling/grammar edits are perfectly okay IMO. Clarification is okay too, preferably with an ETA tag. Otherwise it’s just disingenuous.
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I’d be happy to have a conversation, in another topic, about how you are configuring that to see if there are any options that would allow the functionality in a way that is more accessible to you.
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No, of course not. And those that do are ones who need their behavior brought to the attention of the mods. A community this size, as opposed to the old place, I don’t imagine mod workload is all that onerous yet.
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It isn’t a high workload, nights excepted. We have two main moderators handling the workload with additional coverage from admins as needed.
That said, it’s hard to schedule meetings for staff because of timezones, work, and life in general. This is why community is key, from creating guidelines to alerting via flags and PM.
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I have seen it on another discussion board I was on. Whole threads would morph so no one after the fact could figure out what the hell happened, except that two people got into it. It is a big problem with an edit function. I like how Discourse shows the edit history.
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I dunno, I just haven’t seen the kind of behavior here that would warrant keeping the edit history visible to all and sundry. It would probably be different if we were all, like, 12-year-olds or something. As it is, I’d rather not live in a forum that encourages us to be paranoid of each other, sifting through edit histories looking to datamine something to support our he-said-she-saids. I fully approve of having mods able to view those histories in the uncommon event that something like this becomes an issue. Pretty soon it’ll become obvious what behaviors are too irritating to the community to be tolerated.
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