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A couple tiny suggestions

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  • You can send other forumites messages from their profile. I haven't tried it yet though. It's probably also on lock down.

    If that doesn't work, let me know. It should.
  • Just tried it and it doesn't allow it. :/
  • Apreche said:

    Cremlian said:

    typos, major factual errors that you notice, information that is now obsolete that could be misleading if someone new reads the thread (like contact info, DS codes or game codes you've given away).

    For example the entire introduce yourself thread :-p

    If you make typos, you should fix those immediately, not an hour later. If you don't notice a factual error or typo after an hour, you should suffer for your wrongness. For the other things, read a new post. It clearly says the time of the post on the comment. If someone uses a friend code from years ago, that's their problem. Also, don't use the forum for that!
    What if it's not actually a factual error within the hour?

    For example, I post a study in a discussion about science. That study is discredited a week later. I remove the link to the study to prevent accidental dissemination of invalid information (which is now more possible because of a working search function).

    Or how about when content moves from one host to another? Or a a link you need to make a post work goes dead well after you post it.

    There are plenty of valid reasons to edit after an hour.

  • Wasn't it only 20 or 30 minute window for editing on the last forum? Would you all like to go back to that instead? Huh?
  • If you edit the original post, the conversation that follows it will no longer make sense. Also, you are actually destroying information and trying to erase history. It's better just to make more posts. Then it will be an interesting thread about this study and how it turned out to be wrong.
  • Well, you can do what most people do and add EDIT: to the post to add new information. I'm pretty sure you do that with your stuff sometimes.
  • Apreche said:

    erase history

    It's a sign I've been coding too long that every time someone talks about "erasing" or "re-writing" history, my first thought is "git rebase"?
  • edited November 2013
    Guys, Scott isn't going to bend on this except on sub-24-hour edit times, maybe. We should have learned last time, you're not going to convince him. Hassling him will only make him more steadfast in his position.
    Post edited by Churba on
  • I agree with Scott on pretty much all points on this subject. Crazy.

    (Don't hit me.)
  • I dislike any capability to edit posts that are in the past. The date of the post is embedded, so it's a snapshot of a conversation that happened at a certain time. The context may be different now for a similar conversation, but the record of the conversation as it happened in its own context is important and noteworthy.

    Think of old posts like old photographs or letters. They're a historical record.
  • If text posts are like photographs, posted on a public bulletin board, does one not have the right to take down their own photos? I know that expecting privacy on the Internet is insane, but don't we have the right to change anything that we created?
  • edited November 2013
    Yea Rym, you only see the good old photographs and letters. They threw out or burned or hid the ones they didn't want you to see.
    Post edited by Cremlian on
  • If text posts are like photographs, posted on a public bulletin board, does one not have the right to take down their own photos? I know that expecting privacy on the Internet is insane, but don't we have the right to change anything that we created?

    Nope.

    They're photographs posted on someone else's bulletin board. You don't get to say what they remove or not.

    Our policy is to never remove anything ever (unless it's spam, or we get a court order from a US court).

  • Rym said:

    I dislike any capability to edit posts that are in the past. The date of the post is embedded, so it's a snapshot of a conversation that happened at a certain time. The context may be different now for a similar conversation, but the record of the conversation as it happened in its own context is important and noteworthy.

    Think of old posts like old photographs or letters. They're a historical record.

    I think the problem is that we have the old "If all you have is a hammer" issue. We don't have basically what amounts to a "Community scratchpad"; a central location for all of us to put long-term, editable notes, so we over-rely on the forum.

    I dunno. If I set up some sort of a wiki/wikia type thing, would people use it?
  • Neito said:

    I dunno. If I set up some sort of a wiki/wikia type thing, would people use it?

    Probably for about a week and then never again.

  • I understand that I'm a pretty casual user of the forum, but I do have my own community forum that has a 20 year history (much of it lost to forum resets now), and drawing from that experience, I think y'all are being slightly melodramatic about the contents of a chat forum as a pristine and important historical record.

    That said, getting a bunch of agita about something you posted last year? Silly. If anything having it stay up there "etched in stone" as it were might be an incentive for better behavior from participants (not that this seems to be a huge problem here, but one could argue that this is one reason for that.)
  • Whatever mechanisms keep the GeekNights archive up for the next 50 years will also keep the "stone" copy of the forum available for posterity.
  • (This coming from someone who'd like to delete all of his own steroid-fueled insanity from every message board on the internet.)
  • edited November 2013
    Rym, I may one day have to scrub some of this forum due to a Presidential run. Note that my assassins will be just as uncompromising.
    Post edited by Cremlian on
  • That red edit text, though... that shit's gotta go. Urgh.
  • muppet said:

    That red edit text, though... that shit's gotta go. Urgh.

    I like it because it encourages you to get it right the first time. Spend some time proof-reading your post before you click post. Maybe click preview? That's a thing.
  • Apreche said:

    muppet said:

    That red edit text, though... that shit's gotta go. Urgh.

    I like it because it encourages you to get it right the first time. Spend some time proof-reading your post before you click post. Maybe click preview? That's a thing.
    Well, the one instance where this reasoning sorta falls down a bit is that you guys prefer people to edit their last post rather than post immediately below it when something new occurs to them or they find something else to contribute to a discussion, but nobody else has posted yet.

    This red brand of fuck-up sort of discourages that. People may be more tempted to "double post" as I've often been lambasted for here, or just keep the new info to themselves which would be a detriment to the thread (to varying degrees).

    Meh, I think the red text sucks.
  • If you're posting so quickly about an emergent thing, then you either need to accept that you might have further things to post in short order, or else wait until you know what you think you need to know.
  • I'm sure when we look back on this thread historically there will be a lot of meaningful things we were glad we kept static in time.
  • Rym said:

    If you're posting so quickly about an emergent thing, then you either need to accept that you might have further things to post in short order, or else wait until you know what you think you need to know.

    I think you're reaching to justify just using a default template and minimize support effort, which hey, is totally understandable, but also totally what you're doing. :)
  • People will say, wow, what would this forum be like if they didn't preserve the artful rhetoric, the witty repertoire, or the sorrowful musings that stood the test of time.
  • And others will reply "Much the same, really."
  • O tempora o mores!
  • Let's go to vanilla hosting. You will have not crappy search Scott said. Little did we know Scott would use the occasion to further shield himself from all things forum modification related.
  • Dr. Timo said:

    O tempora o mores!

    Really? We're going to compare Scott to Cataline? Isn't that a bit extreme?
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