Quoting of posts makes it impossible to change them without being "caught"
Absolutely. But not everybody quotes. Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, the large forum that we run that doesn't allow editing also doesn't have a quote facility. People can cut and paste of course and format it themselves, but they tend not to.
I would prefer to stay in control of my own postings. To me this seems more important than all reasons against it. I’ll accept that you don’t want that, but i don’t like that
I would prefer to stay in control of my own postings. To me this seems more important than all reasons against it. I’ll accept that you don’t want that, but i don’t like that
Alexis – I have exactly zero intention to stop you being in control of your postings. Who writes your postings? YOU. So you are 100% in control of your postings.
So I don’t understand the problem.
A couple more specific points:
Why is it so hard to check what you wrote, anytime in those two hours? Two hours is a huge amount of time. Are you writing with some device which is really hard to use, or really hard to use for EuroGA?
If you come back to edit something after say 1 day, virtually nobody who hangs out on EuroGA with any regularity is going to see the edit, because the “regulars” have been and gone. Trust me – I can see the access statistics. Editing something say a day later is almost totally pointless. Unless of course it is libellious or dangerously incorrect in which case David or I will be happy to edit it upon your request (and have done so a number of times – aviation is an area where one needs to be extra careful about what one leaves behind).
That’s not the point, Peter. Yes, i write my postings – but i am actually used to delete whatever i write whenever i want.
Or can’t you delete your own postings either? ;-)
I agree with alexisvc and others who would prefer a much longer edit time. I am accustomed to having edit authority for my own posts for days and would prefer it to be unlimited.
I still fail to understand what a deletion authority actually achieves.
Every website is indexed by google (usually within hours – community sites such as EuroGA maybe faster) and if you edit your post, the old version will turn up with a suitable expression search. The usual technique with google is to pick an unusual text string known or believed to be in the post and search for it literally i.e. within double quotes. I use that all the time to find the original source for text which somebody quoted somewhere without giving the source.
There are also several websites which store textual web archives, and do a snapshot each month, so if somebody is “out to get you” they can work out what was changed, which is usually more compromising than having access to the original post.
Today’s facebook generation will discover this at their great cost one day.
Facebook is actually a god example for success, Peter: I can delete any posting I ever did. (While you are right in theory it is not very likely that somebody will doa Google search on something I wrote and deleted)
I understand what you are saying, but it’s all less important than having authority over your own postings.
Can YOU delete your postings? :-) Why?
I can delete my postings because David and I are admins here.
Somebody has to have admin rights, for all the obvious reasons.
I can’t recall when I edited my own posting after the 2hr slot but if I did it would have been for the same reasons for which I would be happy to edit somebody else’s upon their request, as previously mentioned. I can’t edit posts invisibly (including mine) and you always see the little note about it having been edited.
Facebook can edit or delete what you write – in fact I have recently had an interaction with them on this very topic, in a matter unrelated to aviation. But once somebody has copied, screenshot or printed off something you write on FB, you can’t edit that anymore. It’s out of your control, for ever. And you can be sure that if somebody is “out to get you” they will have made a copy.
I cannot do anything about that, iike if somebody made a screenshot or copied what I wrote. And there is actually NOTHINg anybody will ever want to "get me " for. I do not post or produce porn, I i have a valdid pilot licenes and i pay my taxes. I also never insult people on the internet (okay I can be a bit sarcastic, but that’s still legal… still :-))
But I like it much better when I can delete my postings. Period :-)
Fair enough… I can only come back to why the edit window exists: to stop somebody making a discussion thread meaningless.
This leads to the wider issue of why somebody might want to delete their old posts. Surely nobody would want to do that if they are in a nice polite community?
The only reason I can think of is that there has been a lot of personal abuse and the person wants to get out of there and remove any trace of their posts on the way out.
We don’t have that problem on EuroGA, partly because any would-be troublemaker can see there is very little to get their teeth into here. We don’t have the “fighting threads” which are a common feature of pilot forums. And any abuse will just get deleted.
I know of a case where one resident of a pilot forum left in an apparently very unhappy state and deleted all his several thousand messages on his way out of the door. He happened to have had admin rights so it was easy for him to do, but anybody could do it with a script. The result is loads of disjointed threads. I have been in such situations myself, having participated on some forums over the past decade and seen them descend into personal abuse, with the obvious consent of the mods.
That isn’t going to happen here, and surely that is a better way to work it than to give people the option to delete their posts in the event of abuse?
