I don’t think I’ve ever changed anything except typos outside of about a fifteen minute window. Often, the change just involves adding paragraph markers to shorten the display length. A day would certainly be plenty for me.

I edited this post twice since I posted it.

Some thoughts on what y’all have written…

I really only find myself disagreeing with Tom, on the subject of leaving the database completely open to edits. Ain’t gonna happen. At the end of the day, as curator of a decade-long conversation, I am duty-bound to prevent edits beyond the reasonable and restricted-time boundaries we’re talking about.

Just to review, under the long-standing and oft-reiterated terms of service, when you post you retain ownership of your intellectual property, and grant the HabitableZone a license in perpetuity to share your writing in public. The terms have lately been modified by common practice to include the concept of implied restrictions on publishing, e.g. posting in a closed forum.

I interpret my half of the agreement to include the stipulation that I cannot modify your work, I can only include it verbatim in compilations. That seems like simple self-evident logic to me. By extension it means that I can’t allow my copy of your work to be modified by others while in my custody.

Does it mean that an author can’t go back and edit old copies of his/her work? If you retain ownership, don’t you have that right?

No, not in the official HabitableZone database, because each individual’s post is one small part of a much larger conversation. Every other participant in the conversation has the right to certainty about the record of your interactions. Your interactions create the larger work which is the HabitableZone, and any change to a part is a change to the whole.

The escape clause for any individual is that because you still own your individual contribution, you have every right to edit and continue to work on your copy. Go for it. I have no right to interfere and wouldn’t want to. I care only for the copy that’s in my custody.

On a less high-flying level, we’re going to have some time limit on author editing. Everybody’s complained about short time limits, and I agree. An experienced hand ought to get several days, at least; and even newbies should get a day or so. Sound about right?

There were some casual references to tracking edits, and this software does provide revision tracking. It’s hard to find on the editor window, but the important thing is that the record of edits opens up transparency on this subject. If an edit is ever controversial, we have a record of what happened, and a way to undo changes that are judged out of bounds.

Something I think is pretty important to address is the use of edits to avoid social unpleasantness, like removing an insult written in haste. Bad idea, in my opinion.

Unless you retract your remark within milliseconds, somebody will see it, and toxic exchanges will inevitably arise along the lines of “take that back!” “take what back, I didn’t say a thing” “oh yes you…hey, where’d it go?” “you must be losing it, dude”…you see how the ability to make mistakes vanish can make things worse? Undermining trust won’t make it any easier to smooth things over, for sure.

And on a philosophical level, that kind of thing lets you evade the immediate consequences, but then you have no chance to experience the power of forgiveness. And that’s important when you consider the social health of the community. It clears the air. Remember my recent falling-out with ER? And remember how it ended, with the frank and open exchange of cartoon characters? I wouldn’t trade that for the world.

Better to take your lumps. On balance the reasons to have an edit feature are compelling, but I really hope people won’t abuse it in the ways we’ve talked about here. With power comes responsibility.

I only frequent one other board that allows unlimited edits with no footprint. Personally I like this but I can see where a board with more traffic might need to at least show that a post has been edited.

Most boards indicate that a post has been edited with time and date of each edit.

One board I visited asks for, (but I don’t think requires), a reason for the edit, typo, grammar, etc.

The most annoying edit system I have seen allows one edit only and you have a set time limit to do it. If you leave the thread you can’t come back and edit. If you think about it too long you will be locked out. I am not sure what the time limit is but I completed an edit and then got distracted for a few minutes. When I came back an clicked on save change, it refused to accept the edit.

Very irritating but you get used to it

I have to add that the HZ was a different place back then. It was like an old-time Western bar, where people drank standing up, and it was easy to get into pretty rude fights.

Now we’re more of a lounge. We’re sitting around, it’s too much effort to stand. “Full of shit” is no longer a compliment, and while still thought is about the strongest negative comment made.

Old posts probably should be viewed with that caveat.

I trust everyone here. Its the FNGs I’m concerned about.

I’m still hoping the community board remains a “gated community,” which will help protect things like copyrights and identities from the world at large.

As far as identity protection from each other, after all these years that horse is well out of the barn.

I say we use a short time limit to allow legitimate changes due to grammar or style, or to take back crude or unfair remarks we think better of later. But what gets eventually archived is a permanent record and should not be tampered with.

However, there are copyright issues, particularly for the writers here (I enjoy forcing you to endure my initial drafts before I inflict them on an unsuspecting public.) And there are security issues. And the two do overlap somewhat. At the risk of revealing my paranoia, no one knows how what we say here might come back to haunt us in some grim, but dimly glimpsed future. After years of posting here, we have all left clues that might compromise our anonymity to a determined ferret with infinite resources.

Any major “airbrushing” is going to become obvious when it’s done often, and if someone thinks they need to edit their past that much, it’s their problem not anyone else’s. Hell, how many people go back a month or two to look up posts anyway?

I think this might be a solution in search of a problem.

I forget whether DamnTikiWiki allowed post editing, but regardless, we’ve experienced both systems that didn’t allow editing and systems that do. I think we can see pros and cons now.

I can’t see any pure pro to being unable to edit. We need editing; editing is a necessary part of writing. But how much editing? Too much power to edit can become a con.

It’s ultimately an ethical issue in the context of a discussion community. When does tidying up after yourself cross the line into attempts to alter reality or destroy evidence? I think it’s important that you should be able to trust that the HabitableZone message database cannot be corrupted. But what’s corruption?

Tom once described his own policy as editing a post being OK for a few minutes after posting, but not later than that. Tom distinguishes between possible changes to meaning in that immediate first review period (sometimes we misspeak ourselves), and later changes narrowly restricted to typos and misspellings that don’t change meaning. That’s always seemed eminently reasonable to me. The first drafts will always have mistakes and we’re statistically far more likely to notice them on first reading of the posted text than later. We see the bigger gaffes first and the smaller ones after we’ve cleaned up the big messes. Writing is an iterative, asymptotic, process.

I’ve seen this idea embodied in some forum software as an explicit time limit on author edits. It’s usually short, 30 minutes or so. I’d like to add a limit to this software, but not necessarily 30 minutes. And it might be wise to grant longer periods to senior Zoners based on assumption of better judgment.

This question has been on my mind because the time is drawing close when I’ll import the old messages into the current message database, and the HabitableZone’s amnesia will be cured. I haven’t forgotten about our discussion a couple of months ago about the Zone’s future, and I’m working toward a redesign with a restored message database to relaunch the Zone with a bang. I shudder to think of a horde of people attracted back to the Zone in large part by the opportunity to get at their old posts, with the ability to edit those old posts. Hell no! I have a duty to protect the integrity of those messages.

I’ll put in a time limit on an author’s ability to edit his/her post. I think the same limit should apply to moderators’ ability to edit others posts, because I can’t think of any reason why a moderator would need to edit old posts. If that need comes up, I want you to have to run it by an ubermoderator first, through a public request that everybody can see and review.

My own practice when it comes to editing is much like Tom’s. I think that going back and making substantive changes to my posts is unethical without disclosure and explanation, added to a post parenthetically near the edits. After a short interval I consider my posts closed, and I can live with the typos and awkward language and misspellings. I don’t feel compelled to polish my image to a fine sheen, Charlie or otherwise. My writing is good enough.

Rob, sometimes I “…hold off posting something until it has time to simmer” like you’re suggesting you should do, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a general practice. I don’t want you inhibited and self-censoring. Tom’s rule allows us to be speak when we’re first moved to speak, with the safety net of editing to make it safe(r). The things I wait and ponder are the things I really need to think through, generally things involving people and community issues, where hastily chosen words can wreak real harm (as we’ve seen).

Another reason I sometimes wait is when I know my response is going to be long and complex, and I want to think about how to present in the most compact and readable form. But sometimes that causes me to wait so long that the topic grows cold, and there’s no point. I let the parade pass me by. I think I’m overlooking a strength of this format: I can string together multiple short posts/comments to make up one long essay. I don’t have to get it out in one huge monolithic chunk. I’m going to have to try that technique and maybe end up posting more but shorter posts.

Shorter posts…yeah, that’s a commendable goal, he said here at the end of a long rambling post. Great idea, I should try it some time.

Two factors are at cross-purposes here. The more you work at something, the more you see at the detail level, the right word, the right phrase, the flow and balance and rhythm. But paradoxically, the longer you work on something, the more you lose the big picture, the final impact, the overall impression. The total organization of the piece suffers from over-familiarity.

There comes a point when you need to stop, when any more work will simply start to mess it up. The trick is to know when you’ve reached that point, and to discipline yourself to stop before you go any further.

Most of the stuff I write I go back to reread later and see problems I should have fixed, where I went too far, or not far enough, or where I just got sloppy and lazy.

But there are a few pieces I’ve done where everything seemed to come together just right. Those look and feel like they were written by someone else, I see patterns and structures that I never intended, things I didn’t plan. And sometimes they are wonderful. I see things going on that I wasn’t aware I was doing, things that really work well. Its like someone took over who really knew what he was doing and I was just the fool he hired to pound the keyboard.

That’s the subconscious mind at work. If you can get the subconscious involved, the results can surprise you. He is a better writer than you are, he’s just terribly undisciplined.