Welcome to Codidact Meta!
Codidact Meta is the meta-discussion site for the Codidact community network and the Codidact software. Whether you have bug reports or feature requests, support questions or rule discussions that touch the whole network – this is the site for you.
Should we have a grace period of X minutes on edits or a way to mark changes as "minor"?
I normally spend quite a lot of time writing my posts. However, after posting them I read them again and normally find some subtleties that I want to change: some commas, a better title, these kind of things.
These are not relevant changes and I don't expect them to be part of the history of the post but, instead, belong to its initial revision.
For this, I wonder: wouldn't it be useful to have some grace period for the edits in a post, so those done within 5 (?) minutes after posting do not count in the revision history.
Also, it could also be interesting to implement a Wikipedia-style check to allow marking a specific change as "minor", so in the revision history you can toggle between all changes and just "major".
2 answers
You are accessing this answer with a direct link, so it's being shown above all other answers regardless of its score. You can return to the normal view.
A "minor" toggle on edits makes sense even if there's no mechanism to hide minor edits from the history, if people can filter them out visually. I think this can serve some use; I've sometimes used the "minor" indicator in Wikimedia histories. I wouldn't consider this an important improvement that should be prioritized, though. In any event, I think only those with a certain level of edit ability should be trusted to mark edits as minor, since others might more likely do so incorrectly.
Afaict, the benefit of a grace period is minimal — (a) that people can avoid the very slight embarrassment that comes with having to edit a post immediately after doing so, and (b) that if someone edited something private (like a birthdate) into the post then it can be removed if he catches it soon enough — but at what cost? (1, and least importantly) The moral cost of lying. (2) SE/SO, after instituting a grace period, had to then add in code that removed the grace period in case a comment had been posted meanwhile, so that people wouldn't complain that their comments made no sense in light of the post history. This special-casing, besides requiring extra code, also makes edits within the grace period crapshoots: you don't know whether your edit will count because maybe someone will have commented right before you hit Save.
I recommend not having a grace period.
1 comment thread