Why are edit revisions visible?

meta
22

I am not sure what to make of this response. We can edit our own comments, not anyone else’s. So if something… uh, “untoward” happens (by which I assume you mean our comment mysteriously changes into something somewhat different than what we ourselves typed), that can only happen when someone with moderator privileges (or, I suppose, someone logged into our own account) has edited our post for us.

So, absent a publicly viewable edit history, are we meant to live in fear that sinister mods with axes to grind might be sneakily editing our posts to make us look bad or something? Is this supposed to be a defense of the publicly viewable edits?

Slightly before I noticed this particular thread, I noticed that you had edited one of my posts in the Amanda Palmer thread (I think it was). I wondered what had changed, so I looked. After I’d quoted something, my next paragraph had come out a smaller font size. I had tried briefly to fix it, then gave up. And then you edited it to fix that font size. And I thought that was a decent thing to do. In the Disqus forum, I was used to Antinous occasionally making edits where someone had put in too many spaces or line breaks, though I don’t think he ever made actual text edits without plainly labeling them thus on the post itself. Since your adjustment fell into the same category of essentially typesetting, I thought it nothing more nor less than perfectly appropriate.

So. I take it the viewable edit log is a protection against evil mods who might take it into their own hands to perform more substantive (and wholly unattributed) edits to our posts.

Is this even a credible danger?

23

That’s one of the things it is good for, yes!

It’s also good for posts that get edited a lot naturally to refine their … position. As well as wiki style posts where you’re announcing an event of some sort and say the schedule changes, people can see the revision adding the new schedule if they want to, and track the changes to the event over time.

It’s also good for the case where I call you a frotzed bimblefoot, then later decide to sneakily edit it out and pretend I didn’t do that.

Or, if I call you a gopi pobit, and then it gets flagged as inappropriate by the community, which hides the post automatically and sends me a very friendly PM inviting me to edit my post, then I edit it voluntarily to do the right thing and it’s unhidden as revised. Evidence of me doing the right thing is plainly visible.

In general, you want to bring public light to public discourse. In my experience, people’s behavior is always more civil when they know their peers can see them.

But more generally – when you post something to the Internet, it is naive to expect it to be permanently redactable. So why not embrace that rather than pretending otherwise?

4 Likes
24

By design or otherwise, you seem to be squeezing the BoingBoing discussion forum into a shape that’s substantively different than what it was before. Some of the protections you list above seem better-suited to a forum aimed at 12-year-old videogamers or some similar unruly gang of reprobates. To the extent that the BB discussion punchbowl has been pissed in by foulmouthed clods, ad hominem attacks, or other standards-defying acts of ungallantry (which, compared to the cesspool that is the internet as a whole, is a relatively minor extent), I don’t believe it ever required a particularly firm policing hand by the mods.

In all the examples you cite above, having the edits visible to mods (yet invisible to the common users, except the indication that a given post has been edited in some way) serves the same purpose. If someone flags a naughty post, even if the offender hurriedly changes it before the mod sees it, then the mod can still see the edit (though the rest of us can’t), and tender whatever admonishment is necessary. If nobody sees the offending post before it’s changed, then nobody flags it, nobody’s offended, and no mod action is necessary. And as for tracking changes to event dates and such, that’s wholly unnecessary. If somebody needs to edit the date or time or venue or other circumstances of some event, they’ll no doubt label their updated post as “UPDATED!!” Who would need to know when the event used to be scheduled for?

In my experience, people’s behavior is always more civil when they know their peers can see them.

That doesn’t follow in these circumstances. It’s a public discussion; people already know that whatever they post is visible to everyone. If they feel like posting something actionable, are they really going to refrain because, if they stop and think, they’ll realize that somebody out there might actually read what they wrote? Wasn’t that the point?

Now that paragraph I just wrote is relevant to intended comments, that is, ones that say what the commenter actually intends to say (whether constructive or destructive) without typos or other errors that the commenter later wants to fix. The other comments, the ones with mistakes or that end up requiring further clarification or other adjustment, may not be actually representative of what the commenter was trying to say. As we leave our mark on the wall of the digital society, we want that mark to accurately represent our voice insofar as we are able. The comments form at, say, KNAC.com does not allow commenters to edit their comments at all, which is annoying to a relatively mature commenter (as I flatter myself to be), but it’s also just as well: it’s KNAC.com, a website devoted to the music played by a long-defunct Los Angeles area heavy metal radio station, and the quality of the discussion there is… well, I don’t really bother to read or post there much, and I’m a huge Iron Maiden fan. The site probably shouldn’t have comments at all, since the discussions get obnoxious and sexist (though surprisingly rarely racist) pretty quickly, and insults and invective fly back and forth all the livelong day. But BoingBoing is a very different place. Since we are rightly permitted to edit our comments, we can tuck in our shirts and straighten our ties and wipe away the boogers and, if desired, modify our positions in our posts.

Yes, anyone can take a screenshot or view a previously-cached page to view a pre-edit comment. Well, almost anyone. I can’t. I honestly don’t know how, short of photographing my screen with an actual camera before somebody edits something. But having a permanent record (just one click away) of all the times I left out a preposition or misspelled February or even belatedly realized I was mistakenly upbraiding the wrong person for saying something that he or she didn’t actually mean? That strikes me as a simple case of The Powers That Be looking over my shoulder and saying, “Watch what you write. We’re keeping an eye on you.” It feels weirdly like being tracked by our browsers and ISPs; it’s just a few bytes of more data to be potentially used against us.

You guys run this place; it’s your space, not mine. You can moderate it all you want, and I fully expect mods to be able to keep an eye on such things, largely because as a condition of using this forum, I have to submit to the idea that the mods know all and can act with relative impunity regarding my presence here. And I have to trust them not to abuse this power, and I have no problem doing so. But giving full and easy access to the edit history to everyone else around here is creepy. It assumes that we’re all potentially bad apples who might abuse the system, and it expects users to keep a suspicious eye on each other, and the idea that “if you’re doing nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide” should be self-evidently sinister.

when you post something to the Internet, it is naive to expect it to be permanently redactable. So why not embrace that rather than pretending otherwise?

Just because Google and the NSA have instant easy access to everything I’ve ever done on the internet down to the last keystroke does not mean a place like BoingBoing should “embrace it.”

25

It appears I misunderstand my role/responsibility when it comes to participating in the BB comment community. From my perspective, my only “job” is to post the best comment I can. Beyond that, I can push back against the sentiments of posters I disagree with. And, I suppose – if said sentiments rise to a certain level of offensiveness or clearly violate spam regs – I can formally complain via a flagging action, although I try to avoid doing so. My only goal is to engage in amusing/intelligent conversation with the quality posters found here, and my only reward stems from same (plus warm fuzzies/social currency from “likes”).

From this vantage point, of course the onus for moderating is on the official moderators. That’s their “job,” not mine.

… if you make “cover my footsteps except to mods” default, certain people will find ways to abuse it.

I am perhaps blinkered by my own approach. I do assume that most BBS participants are after the same goals as I am. That said, I understand that some are more interested in nit-picking, shouting down, and scoring points than in simply having a spirited-but-honest debate. I also understand that someone, faced with that sort of aggressive blowback from their initial comment, might be tempted to go back and alter it. But here’s the things(s):

  1. I suspect that people who would deliberately try to rewrite their comment history probably make up a vanishingly small percentage of BB BBS users. Ditto for people so bent on winning that they’d fabricate a quote and then claim it had been edited away.
  2. In such a case, the other party knows what has been done. The manipulating person just comes out looking like a loser. If you see me stealing a cookie, I can deny it. I can even go to the length of altering the cookie jar surveillance footage. But you still saw me do it, and neither of us can un-know this fact. In the case of a disputed quote, the adversary has already been paying attention. They called out the infraction in the first place. In an extreme case, a “mods only” full edit history would facilitate a formal settling of the disputed quote.
  3. Please enjoy the above optimistic assessment of human nature because it’s rare, coming from me, and should be cherished like a fine wine :wink:

I join @Donald_Petersen in admitting that I can’t provide a personal example of abuse. This probably partly stems from the fact that I rarely try to stir hornets’ nests with my comments, and therefore rarely put respondents into a scorched earth mood. If I did, I’m certain that innocent edits for clarity or style could be used against me as “proof” of deceitful intent. People are already prone to misreading final comments, so I don’t see how we could avoid misreading edits. Opening that extra level, it seems to me, just increases the options for jumping to conclusions. Examples may also be hard to come by because most people are not aware of the edit tracking; I’d posit that once this becomes common knowledge, it will be more frequently used as a weapon.

Lacking specific “proof” doesn’t really negate the concern, in any case. We can look to the recently killed Amanda Palmer thread as a hypothetical. In that case, someone voiced an opinion of AP that angered several posters, who quickly escalated to accusing the OP of driving trollies and/or being a sockpuppet/sockpuppeteer. The latter accusation was based on nothing more than a (possibly sloppy) interpretation of the OP’s posting history. It’s easy to see how adding the layer of a full edit history could have derailed that discussion much faster and increased the general level of paranoid hysteria.

Speaking of paranoia, I’m hardly the sort of person to go nuclear when say, a post doesn’t immediately appear (HOW DARE YOU CENSOR MY SPEECH I CAN SEE THIS SITE DOESN’T BELIEVE IN FREEDOM!!!) or otherwise assume bad motives, but seeing an unexplained, mysterious moderator edit on my post was very disconcerting. Perhaps a stock notice on future mod edits could alleviate some of that natural response (e.g. “The Moderator has made a formatting edit. Your content has not been changed.”)? At the very least, it would spare you guys the task of constantly answering this question.

26

I’m with you pretty much 100% percent on these sentiments. Well, 110% when including the straightening our collective ties bit :wink:

I especially appreciate your expression of the idea of a public comment existing in (roughly) two points in time, a concept I really wanted to address but was having trouble formulating. Edits for clarity – in my mind – are similar to how IRL conversations circle back to previous points, but with improved wording or a slightly different emphasis. In theory, the underlying argument remains unchanged. Meanwhile, the person you are debating will recall your original statement, and will call you out if you seem to have overly (or deviously) altered it. Assuming that both parties are reasonably self-aware, a tape recorder is not necessary to prove that one resorted to a dirty trick. It’s just a known thing, from the point of the revisionism forward.

And honestly, I suspect that those who would be most tempted to abuse the editing function are probably too caught up in the ongoing back-and-forth (“you’re a peepeehead”/“no, you’re a peepeehead”) to even remember that it’s a possibility. That’s just my hunch, though, as someone who would never consider it anyway.

27

You say this as though BoingBoing themselves had no input in this. I wager that when they went with Discourse, they knew very well what they were getting into, as Jeff’s page and company make it very clear what the features are in the product.

Maybe BoingBoing themselves decided that the comments were becoming acerbic and wanted something that was more moderated. (Even community moderated, which is what Discourse run sites turn into in the long run… remember, this IS the guy that made StackExchange… with better rep comes more responsibility.)

28

Good thing those edit revisions were visible …

Yeah, except that I couldn’t figure out what the edit revisions were. As has already been explained to me, certain types of edits (such as format edits by mods) are apparently invisible. So, I could see that you’d done something, but not what. Did this make me feel weird? Yes. Do I appreciate the explanation? Of course.

Do I think that some people are going to immediately go to their most paranoid/worst case red alert, when seeing a similar moderator edit notice, rather than just pondering/asking about it like I did? Oh, youbetcha. That’s why I’m suggesting an automatic disclaimer regarding content. Or alternately, making format edits by mods invisible in the edit indicator count?

I mean, if part of the stated goal of visible edit histories is to streamline mods’ workload, I imagine that you won’t be wanting to placate hysterical people all day, correct?

30

This is one of those situations where every approach has serious upsides and potential downsides, and it comes down to the general “vibe” a particular community wants to have.

With that in mind, 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.

In return for giving our hamfisted, meatbrained commentariat a hidden edit history, perhaps we can punish them with a more prominent indication that “This post was last edited at XX:XX”, say, as copy text under the post.

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

5 Likes
31

This is what I’ve seen elsewhere - “last edited XX:XX, edited Y times”, in small font at the bottom of the post.

32

I don’t mean to lambast any other sites but if anyone spent any time on Reality Sandwich in the early days you will very carefully appreciate the edit revisions function of this space.

33

This seems like a good, commonsense solution.

34

Thank you, Rob. This solution makes me feel ever so much better, and your explanation of the reasoning behind it was sensible and (unsurprisingly) refreshingly briefer than my windy attempts to articulate my concerns about the situation.

35

Sounds good to me! @neil can you add that to your list for next week? Perhaps an admin setting named edit_history_visible_only_to_staff or something similar.

Just so everyone knows, you can already see “was this edited” and how many times it was edited at the upper right of each post, like so:

The pencil will be redder if the edit was recent and the total count of edits.

That part won’t be changing, it just won’t be clickable if you are not staff (or the owner of the post, I guess).

3 Likes
36

Ok, it’s on my list.

37

Thanks, guys!

40

Post edit history is not visible to everyone anymore. I added a new setting today, edit_history_visible_to_public, and it behaves as @codinghorror describes.

1 Like
41

Archiving this for now, since it is resolved no point leaving it open

43

I think we should revisit this decision, in light of the finally-implemented Leader ability to edit topic titles:

Note that this improved title (which I completely approve of, by the way, and is an excellent example of a trust level 3 ability used well) is not the title that the topic started out with. You can see that there was an edit via the pencil at the upper right…

… but you can’t actually view it, because edit visibility is disabled:

Pasted image1215×293 25.1 KB

You also can’t see that I edited the category to Meta from Dizzy, because that’s another revision that is hidden from your view.

One thing we could do, but it might be overly complicated, is only show public revisions in the case where someone other than the author edited a post.

But I have to say, I personally think this is over-thinking it. Public revisions hurt nobody (or at least nobody can show me an actual case where there was a problem rather than a general vague concern), whereas hiding public revisions is … kind of actively dangerous in my opinion.

3 Likes
44

Now that’s just embarrassing, because now everyone can see I originally made a typo when I wrote “@theSplud”.

1 Like