Yeah. Still don’t like it.
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I love @Donald_Petersen like a brother from another mother, but he is wrong in this particular case: hiding edits isn’t protecting anyone in any way that matters, other than as a placebo.
That said, placebos work. The experimental data tells us this.
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OK, try this. Every so often, when you’ve had a bad day, rather than go home and kick the dog you instead go online at a white supremacy website and trolley under the handle “goebbelsismycopilot”. You sign all of your posts, “ReichMinister Out!” One day, while you’re on BB - where you don’t hide who you are - you’re engaged in a nice thread about puppies, and you accidentally sign a post “ReichMinister Out!” 10 minutes later you realize the mistake, and edit it out. A few days later someone notices your edit, and out of curiosity looks at your edit log. They post, “Dude, WTF, why did you call yourself ReichMinister?” Now this is google searchable, and one of the skinheads on that other site, while trying to find out who their trolley is, finds the post, and then figures out who you are IRL. They then phone a SWAT team on you, and the police come and kill your dog, as they are wont to do.
Long story short, open edit logs kill pet dogs.
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It has worked for me, at least. I don’t feel like I’ve been walking around the commons with my medical history and all my rough-draft essays from eighth grade printed on my t-shirt for everyone to peruse and critique. And it’s nice to maintain that small measure of control over what I present to the world.
It’s hard for me to imagine many instances where publicly viewable edits would be helpful or desirable other than wiki posts.
On t’other hand, have there been many (read: any) instances over the last couple of years wherein people hereabouts have actually abused this forum’s lack of publicly viewable edit histories? I remember one of the selling points of the viewable history was as a defense against shenanigans. Have we seen any evidence of that problem arise?
Well, for example, I put “DH” in the post above when I meant to write “DP”, which is getting-your-name-wrong dumb. So the edit history would show my mistake. But so what? I am a human. I make mistakes. I embrace this. And I feel other enlightened human beings do as well.
But that’s beside the point. Sure, everyone makes typos. But there’s a reason we fix them. Several in fact: to clarify meaning, to prevent misunderstanding, and also to not look like an illiterate tool or hamfisted klutz. It’s somewhat akin to the reason we get dressed in our bedrooms with the shades drawn, rather than down on the sidewalk. The end effect would be the same (don’t I look fabulous?), but nothing is gained by giving the general public an eyeful of the process. Remember when Harlan Ellison sat and wrote in a storefront window? It was interesting because people just don’t do that.
I suspect you have a buttcrack that is, in most aspects, functionally and aesthetically interchangeable with my own. Neither of us really has anything to be ashamed of in that department, I assume. Doesn’t mean either one of us would gain anything by me examining it to be sure.
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Bit of a severe difference, though; one can learn from seeing the writing edits of others, just like you could learn by watching me work through a mathematical problem by trial and error.
The edits are part of the story, and an important part. Communication is a true lifetime journey.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-its-just-writing/
“Coding, after all, is just writing. How hard can it be?”
Talk about severe differences. What’s anyone gonna learn from an edit history of forum posts? Other than mining fuel for arguments, that is.
And you can learn a lot from other people’s buttcracks. Ask any furry household pet.
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Well, it’s like open source software – which has been rather successful! Turns out you learn a lot from other people’s mistakes, and your own, when the process is transparent. Including the ugly hacky bits.
For example, from my own edit you could learn “Huh, Jeff gave enough of a shit to go back and fix his post because he got someone’s name wrong. That’s thoughtful / conscientious / necessary.”
But yeah, if you’re strictly mired in glass-half-empty here, then no point in continuing. But you’re still 100% wrong 
(Also, it is incredibly important to note the 5 minute grace period where edits are not recorded. So if you make some simple mistake, it’s never immortalized. That’s been built into everything I created since 2008.)
As a mathematics professor, let me just say that trial and error is rarely a good way to solve (or teach) mathematical problems.
[quote=“codinghorror, post:30, topic:78803”]
For example, from my own edit you could learn “Huh, Jeff gave enough of a shit to go back and fix his post because he got someone’s name wrong. That’s thoughtful / conscientious / necessary.”[/quote]
I think nobody is going to care very much about this kind of minor error correction.
How about keeping the log private for 5 minutes or until someone replies to you, whichever comes later?
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You ain’t wrong; another perfectly reasonable argument to make is “nobody cares about these edits”, which I count as a point in favor of my position – there’s no reason to hide the edits when virtually nobody is gonna care about your edits in the first place.
This is a message board. Not a wiki. Not a source code repository. Not evidence in a court of law. Not subject to strict government oversight or regulatory authority. There’s no important need to maintain a public history of edits (I’m perfectly fine with mods having access to this). There’s no integrity to be lost. Every other message board I’ve ever used will inform that a post was edited and when (and sometimes why) – and I think that’s fine. That’s enough of a warning that “things may be different than before.”
It seems like requiring an edit history to prevent trolling is just creating a solution in search of a problem and in the 22+ years I’ve been using Internet message boards and dial up BBSes I have seen an exceedingly small amount of instances where someone dramatically edited a post to completely change the context. Hell, even on Reddit this isn’t really a problem. If people are going to be assholes, they are going to be assholes. They aren’t going to retroactively go in and change their posts days/months/years later to completely change the tone of discussion – and if they do, it’s doubtful anybody would even notice or care. The payoff just doesn’t make it worth the effort. Trolls aren’t known for playing the “long con.”
I don’t personally have a problem with locking posts so that they can’t be edited after a set amount of time (and if you really needed to edit for some reason after a very long period of time asking a mod for help seems sensible). I am very much opposed to keeping a public record of every edit that was done to a post.
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Nobody cares about minor edits, like spelling corrections and minor fact-checking. For remorseful edits it is a different matter. Making the problematic part of the post stay public forever feels a little strict and punitive, like the Puritan scarlet letter or keeping someone on the sex offender’s list for life because they peed in public once. “Permanent record” is meant to be a cautionary tale or bogeyman for schoolkids, not a positive policy to be embraced.
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Thanks for capturing in a few simple words the exact reason why the whole thing feels so icky to me.
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Strawman argument. Nothing is stopping you or anyone else from withdrawing a post, deleting it entirely, and posting again. If it’s so problematic, just remove it.
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In all seriousness BB does it right. There’s an option that you can use to opt-in/opt-out of having your revision history public. If it were made mandatory, I would be genuinely “disappointed with BoingBoing”.
Also there’s some irony in you being such a defender of the idea of a public edit history yet yours appears to be hidden. 
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Then why have any editing window at all?
I wonder if this is a generational thing. From his posts I think ficuswhisperer and I are roughly the same age (I’m 60 FWIW, though might change that in the edit window).
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Making it opt-out is bullshit (that was actually a community PR, we did not build that particular boolean checkbox). If anything, it should be opt-in, meaning you should have to disable the ability to see your edits.
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Opt-in/opt-out, I personally don’t care. I’m just glad the choice is up to the user.
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