Reactivating expired edits

[Donald_Petersen]

@codinghorror

But yeah, if you’re strictly mired in glass-half-empty here, then no point in continuing. But you’re still 100% wrong

Way back when, your first answer to the question of why edit revisions were visible was this:

@codinghorror

Revisions are visible so you can’t post something offensive, then edit it away before a moderator notices. They are also nice for tracking changes to a post if you refine or enhance it over time.

And when Rob B was asked to weigh in, he had this to say, in part:

@beschizza

we’d like to make it so that it’s publicly visible if a post’s been edited, and the time it was most recently edited. But we’d like to hide the actual edits, so only moderators can see earlier versions of the post.

The five-minute grace period for ninja edits takes care of most problems. And people who want to make a Permanent Record Of Your Comment will do so anyway with screengrabs, or simply by quoting you in their replies. But that seems enough – we don’t need to encourage mistake-mining by making them permanently accessible.

Sometimes it is best to let hot-heads revise their thoughts later, without it drawing attention to the specifcs of whatever they said. It’s good to know they’ve edited it, but faciliting access to misjudged remarks or badly-composed posts will just fuel embarassment and hostility.

And ending with this reasonable touch:

@beschizza

If hidden histories turn out to be a problem, encouraging trollies or whatnot, we can always just expose them again!

Has there, in fact, been any problem whatsoever with keeping edit histories optionally hidden since then?

Have we, as a community, actually missed out on any halfway-tangible benefit by being denied access to the edit histories of any of our fellow community members?

Or has this policy just generally worked out pretty danged well? Even if it just keeps Nervous Nellies like me (and @ficuswhisperer and @d_r and @stephen_schenck and @grumblebum and @fireshadow to name those who chimed in) happier about our level of control over what we contribute to the discussion.

I think BBS’s policy reflects the relative sophistication and maturity of the BBS community. Ninja-editing offensive comments would surely be a concern in many other online fora, but hereabouts we’re not all 12-year-olds.