Over the last week I have intermittently (like now) been unable to EDIT my posts. The buttons to Edit and Delete do not even appear on my posts.
Apparently I'm not the only one.
FWIW,
Rez
You have one hour ... use it wisely.
This actually drives me crazy and I can't really understand why we are on a time limit.
Chief Technical Officer
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This actually drives me crazy and I can't really understand why we are on a time limit.
First, we're not fond of the concept of people "changing history." Among other things, editing older posts can make reading the thread confusing for somebody who hasn't been keeping up.
Second, people who *are* keeping up may not realize that new information has been inserted into an older post they thought they've already read.
This actually drives me crazy and I can't really understand why we are on a time limit.First, we're not fond of the concept of people "changing history." Among other things, editing older posts can make reading the thread confusing for somebody who hasn't been keeping up.
Second, people who *are* keeping up may not realize that new information has been inserted into an older post they thought they've already read.
OK, but when do people 'change history'? Thats really the litmus test - how does this effect the actual users. New information added to older posts, in my experience, comes in two forms.
The first is a post thats acting as some kind of a master reference. If we are making a monster or munchkining out a character then there is usually a monster stat block or character stat block near the start of the thread that is often being updated based on suggestions by the community.
The same theme would follow for things like lists. If we were to make a thread on all the environmental types adventures can take place in then some kind of a master list that is being updated would likely appear near the beginning.
The second most common update is were a post is cleaned up so that spelling mistakes or grammatical issues are removed. Most of the time this does nothing but make the information more accessible to later readers.
The only two other reasons people might edit a post is to pretend that they did not say something that they did. Here I'd simply date stamp the edits by including a date when the post was last edited in small print in the post. Or to change a post after they have had a chance to cool down. Sometimes its to late to do that but fairly often you can realize you wish you had not said something and its only been up for a few hours in the middle of the night. Few people have seen it and maybe most important the person your trying to torch does not appear to have checked in. Well thats just grand - you can change what your saying and put in a little addendum that the post has been edited on sober second thought. This sort of thing certianly does not end all flame wars - sometimes people just want to fight about something their passionate about, but it can stop needless ones. The Flame War that neither side really wanted but it just seemed to escalate out of nowhere.
In any case I think the concept of having the boards designed so that they are ideal for 'caged fights' in terms of flame wars but less useful for actually doing collaborative work with each other in terms of designing content is fundamentally a mistaken position for Paizo to take. Ideally these boards are about working together not having flame wars. The boards should be designed to facilitate working together, even if one were to prove that 'changed history' did confuse some people some of the time it'd be a worthwhile trade off if we could more easily work together on designing a cameo involving Rune Giants in Second Darkness or making the perfect Dwarf Crossbowman.
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Chief Technical Officer
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...even if one were to prove that 'changed history' did confuse some people some of the time...
Not an hour after I posted my response, I came across an example of just such a case of confusion even with the one-hour edit window, but I was on an iPhone, which has no copy/paste, and now I can't remember where it was.... but at any rate, it does happen, and the longer we allowed people to edit posts, the more it would happen.
The boards should be designed to facilitate working together... on [such things as] designing a cameo involving Rune Giants in Second Darkness or making the perfect Dwarf Crossbowman.
While many people do try to retrofit that sort of functionality into messageboards, they're not generally designed to be collaborative tools like you're looking for. We do intend to provide some tools designed for collaborative effort eventually, though, and lists specifically are actually pretty high on our to-do list.
One of the ways people retrofit collaborative efforts into boards that don't allow historical editing is to begin a thread with a post that says the latest version of [whatever] will generally be found on the last page of the thread, and then the person responsible makes a new post either when [whatever] changes significantly, or when the thread hits a new page.