The ability for users to edit their own posts is potentially quite handy.

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But I had a case last week where a user edited his post six times, making trivial changes, and it went to the group every time – really annoying, especially as you had to look really hard to see what had changed. And when you multiply the time wasted deciding that there’s nothing to see here by the 7000+ members, that’s a lot of wasted time.

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So I chided him and suggested that editing a post to remove trivial mistakes so it’s good for the archive is fine, just don’t send it to the group again each time. But he came back to me yesterday saying that according to groups.io support, only moderators have the ability to edit without reposing.

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Is this actually true? If so, I think I’ll have to remove users’ edit rights.

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By the way, thanks to groups.io for a great service. It’s such a relief from the misery that was Yahoo!

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Richard King

And now I can answer my own question, as I’m not a moderator on this group and there was a typo in my initial post (‘reposing’ instead of ‘reposting’, quite accidental I assure you!). Indeed I can edit it but I can’t save it without it being posted to the group again.

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This strikes me as very non-optimal. If a poster makes a silly mistake like mine, where probably most recipients wouldn’t have any trouble understanding what I meant, I can see the value in fixing the message in the archives but no reason at all to send the whole thing out again, though an additional post pointing out the problem could be helpful.

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I would see edit-and-repost as only being useful when the author has made a major cock-up (for example leaving out an important section), such that leaving it in its original form in the archive could be misleading. Even then my preference would always be to reply to the original post pointing out the error, and then maybe editing the original message (but not reposting it) to indicate that the next message in the thread should be looked at as well.

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Anyway, it is how it is and I shall now remove editing rights from all my users.

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Richard

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Er ... I did think about it actually.

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It’s non-optimal because if users can’t make minor edits to their posts without reposting the whole thing, then either the ability will be abused and annoy the hell out of the group (which was exactly my case) or the feature will be disabled, as it seems to have been for many groups and is now for mine.

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And I don’t agree at all about Mods needing to be able to edit other users posts. Delete them occasionally, yes, if they’re really beyond the pale or illegal or whatever. One of the groups (/g/twsapi) I recently transferred from yahoo has over 35000 posts in its archive: I’ve been moderating it for 10 years or more, and I’ve never once felt it necessary to rewrite or edit another user’s post. I have better things to do with my time!

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Richard

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I’m no longer sure what we’re debating here, or whether we’re actually pretty much in agreement.

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Let me summarise my position:

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1. Moderators do need to be able to delete messages entirely, for those rare cases when someone posts something that is totally unacceptable, or their computer turns into a spambot.
2. Moderators do not need to be able to edit past posts from other users. If a message isn’t dire enough that it needs to be deleted, then it should be kept exactly as the author wrote it.
3. Where a user feels a need to correct something such that the correction may be of significance to other members, they should post a further message specifying what was wrong with their original post, for example: “I wrote ‘land of the free’ but I meant to write ‘police state’”.
4. If the original post was significantly in error, the user should be able to annotate it and point out that a correction has been sent out, without reposting the original message. This might just be as simple as being able to set a ‘deprecated’ flag on the original post and displaying it on the website with a big red cross though it or something similarly arresting.
5. For those who absolutely have to ensure that their posts are preserved for posterity in pedantic perfection, with no misplaced apostrophe’s and full compliance with there grammatical rectitude, then it would be nice to allow them to do this without the message being respoted and in the full understanding that their changes will not be disseminated to the group.

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So my complaint is that item 5 is lacking in its implementation because any change is always sent out: there isn’t even the option for the user to inhibit this. And it’s precisely this that renders the whole facility useless (for non-moderators).

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