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Grace period for immediately noticed small errors
Sometimes I will compose a lengthy post, submit it, see it in context and immediately notice a typo - no matter how careful I thought I was being.
I'm not sure it's desirable that, when I go to fix it immediately, the revision is recorded in the post's history. I could of course use the Redact feature, but that seems abusive.
An immediate edit like this Somewhere Else would not be recorded separately; there is a grace period of, IIRC, five minutes before an edit is recognized as actually revising the post.
Would it be desirable to follow that example here? Or do we see a benefit in preserving the original version and typo-fix separately?
1 answer
If we allow immediate updates to be "folded into" the original post, I would want to block it if anybody has interacted with the post -- if someone voted in that first minute, then an unannounced edit shouldn't be ok. Yes this is rare, but sometimes you get these quirks of timing. (It's happened to me.) And as someone noted in a comment, we would want moderators and admins to be able to see the true history, just in case it matters. When we start adding these guardrails, I wonder if we're making the code complicated and the interface confusing -- why did this edit get recorded separately but not that one?
(Thank you for not using redaction for this. Redaction is meant for things like credentials and PII. We have a change pending to add some extra guidance next to that checkbox.)
I know from personal experience how annoying it is for a typo or brain glitch to get through. It feels embarrassing. I console myself with the thought that most people probably won't even look, and for those who do, the favor of fixing it outweighs the shame of making the error in the first place. Maybe that's not always true, but it's the mindset I try to adopt.
Would it help to keep the true history (like now) but fuzz the "announcement"? Instead of "posted 5 min ago, edited 4 min ago", if we just show "posted 5 min ago" but show the edit in the history -- would that help? Or would that be confusing too? (We'd need to flesh out how that would work and what the thresholds are.)
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