1) I do still find the Last Edited line a little offensive... why is it so important to let the global internet world know you screwed up on your first post (or worse yet, make it seem that way when you add info)?

2) If the last line is the majority opinion, then I severely screwed up on my thoughts about Jeremy's dream when he started LQ. Just my

Excellent thought. Does anyone involved in the current discussion repeatedly reread every post to see if there were any corrections? I think not... I know I don't. Perhaps a time limit on edits, or better yet, no edits after a reply has been posted would be better?

Cheers

That's why you put the reason for your edit in the field provided. If anyone honestly cares if another member screwed up a post, they've got some serious issues they need to go take care of.

Doesn't add up. First, this "Last edited ..." tag is saying "we do not trust in you", then, how do you verify the reason I put there is not a lie?

Interesting discussion. Do we trust that members will be honest when they put their reasons for editing down? If we can't trust one another over something petty like this, should we be trusting each other with things like answers? And how far does it go? Can the kernel be trusted? Or any distro or package?

Personally, I like the "last edited by" field - if a mod edits (in extreme circumstances) a post, it's good to know who did it. If a user did it it's nice to know they took the time to either neaten up the post or to clarify the post. We could use the slippery slope fallacy and say that this will lead to truly anonymous posts with no user name or timestamp, but .....

... but in Gentoo forums the alternative (tag comes when somebody hits the reply button) works fine.

Maybe that would make sense if a forum could identify the opinion/political/junk threads (such as this one).

But technical threads in technical forums serve a second purpose beyond whatever discussion is current. We keep telling people to search the forum before asking something that has already been answered, so we ought to do a decent job of leaving understandable answers in those old threads.

The person we're expecting to read the post long after the discussion moved on is someone who found the whole thread on a later search.

If there are technical disagreements in that thread, that person must not only understand the answers, he must judge the participants to estimate which answers are trustworthy.

When I need an answer and see contradictory answers in old threads, I will go to the extreme of finding other posts in unrelated threads by the same people in order to make a better estimate of whose answers to believe.

In IR remote control forums (certainly not in LQ) I post enough correct answers to hard questions that anyone who does a similar scan of multiple threads to decide whom to trust is likely to decide to trust me. So if I occasionally post something incorrect in an RC forum and someone with less reputation for expertise corrects me, I think I have an extra responsibility to make it really clear which answer should be believed. Especially if a lot more discussion has followed, I don't think it is enough to just add "you're right" to some reply further down the thread. I want to add the note right into my original incorrect post, so anyone reading that post for the first time later will be told right away that the information wasn't actually correct.

Any time limit or restrictions on editing my old posts would reduce my ability to give constructive technical information to people who find old threads during forum searches.

Since LQ is also a technical (not opinion or political) forum, the focus here should also remain on providing the best technical resource, not on rules for managing what kind of debate platform it is.

LOL.. A mountain has sprung from a mole-hill.

FWIW, as trickykid mentioned earlier, it can be beneficial to be able to edit ones' posts later, for many reasons, including to ADD MORE USEFUL INFO to them (as in "..I'll update this post if I learn otherwise...") and NOT for the sole reason that the poster has "screwed up the first time".

I'm picky, so loads of my posts have the "..last edited by.." because I came back at least once to correct grammar, format, typing, etc.. I don't care if someone happens to notice that I did that.

Also, on occasion(s) I have given wrong advice, and if it seems appropriate in the context of the thread, I am not above correcting the advice I posted and adding "UPDATE:" or similar; this is better in every way than (quoting and) reposting the entire post, with a few corrections included. That's a waste of space.

Finally, I never ever noticed a one minute expiry (really??) to the edit time and am fairly sure I have spent longer than a minute editing a post before.. Haven't I? ... Do we need Javascript enabled for that!?! Heh heh.

Cheers,

SVA

Not allowing editing posts would be an unpopular feature, and business owners (as politicians) cannot afford things like that. Not allowing avatars and attachments already reduce the attractiveness of these forums - don't know how much though. We have lots of good knowledgeable people here and this compensates.
However, back to topic. Which was: IMHO this tag is offending for some members and serves (in current configuration) no useful purpose.

It does have a useful purpose, it tells us a post was edited. Remember, moderators can edit others posts, so it also serves that purpose and most moderators put or should put a reason why they might edit a post.

It's here to stay, I find it very hard to believe someone would be offended by informational purposes only text after an edit was made on a public forum they are a member of and do not own. I'm sure there are worse things you can be offended by. Jeremy has it in place for a reason and I believe it's been stated already.

If you don't want it to appear, then don't edit your post. Just create a followup reply instead, it's that simple.

And if you're offended cause you needed to go edit to remove something to hide it afterwards, well, you should have thought twice before hitting the Save button in the first place. It's like email, think of what you're writing before you click the submit button to make it permanent.

Honestly no one should have to edit their posts cause we even have spelling checks enabled on this site to help prevent that. Now grammar is another thing but who cares about a little run on sentence, etc.

I clicked edit on this post to add more stuff. It's useful and I even put in my reason. Why should I be offended about that? I shouldn't and I'm not. It's a edit. Edits occur all over the world, in publishing, marketing, etc before the final whatever is read. This is a public forum where no one should be a spelling/grammar nazi, unless the post is so unreadable.

Kind of interesting. I've had complaints on my forums about the same. I wondered if LQ moderators would show up as last edited by, because with VB you can turn that option off for mods, so that they can fix a post without leaving a tag.
I agree that most do not even notice the tag, or if they do they do not spend much time thinking about it.
I end up editing my fair share of posts because of typos or to better word my reply. I reread what I've typed before I hit the submit key and always read it once after I've submitted. Why I see errors after submitting that I don't see before amuses me because it happens so often.
While 99% would not abuse the edited by option if it were not flagged the few that would abuse it cause the rest to put up with it. I surely understand Jeremy leaving the 'edited by' tag on, I do the same on my forums.

Any edits by anyone show up. So if a mod edits a post, it shows up along with the mods name. Jeremy is all about transparency.

And as to This has been a long running battle of opinions. The overwhelming opinion is that not allowing avatars is a good thing as they easily can become offensive or just too huge and slow down the site. Even in these days of high speed links, LQ still caters (to an extent) to dial up and slow link users and avatars just make things too slow for those people.

Yeah, avatars are just plain ugly, unprofessional looking and only take away resources. I think that's one of the more attractive things about LQ, no ugly damn avatars.

I'm glad to hear that and I wish hifi-remote.com (where I am a mod) worked that way.

At hifi-remote.com long urls posted without using the forum's url syntax can mess up the display of the whole thread. So the number one reason for mod edits is to fix URLs. Even so, you really want the post to show that it was edited. That forum shows when a user (including a mod) edits his own post, but not when a mod edits someone else's post. I wouldn't make a big fuss about such details, but I consider that a flaw in the forum design. Also, at hifi-remote the moderator edit button is a single click, right next to quote and always available. Other moderator actions are several clicks away. I once destroyed an ordinary post of another user by accidentally editing it and not realizing what I was doing until too late. Moderator edit should be a few clicks away from actions a moderator might take when acting as an ordinary user. Since I'm not a mod here, I have no idea whether that sort of thing is correct here.

i think it's a vbulletin thing that mod buttons are just one click away, which is why it's good to have the reason edited in there. We only edit for things like code tags, when someone posts their entire xorg.conf file or dmesg output in plaintext, or when a user puts email addresses in the post (we do this to stop the address getting harvested) or if a user is a spammer. For other things we tend to email the user to say "you have 24 hours to clean up your post or it gets done for you" - and then only edit if no change has been made in the time limit.

To get back to the OP, having an edited reason/name is useful because it's one more bit of info to anyone reading a thread - if you edit your own post it means that you cared enough to 'fix it'. If a mod edits it it shows we cared enough to do it for you