Comment editing has been a huge success and is here to stay.
Hi all,
We’ve all done it. You write a comment and as soon as you click <Post Comment> you realise that there was a mistake.
I’ve installed a plug-in that will allow you to edit your comment up to two three minutes after posting – and you can even delete it if you want.
BE WARNED, HOWEVER
The author of the original post will receive an email notification of your original comment, so if you make significant changes then it will be considered site abuse.
ANY INSTANCES OF ABUSE of this facility will lead to the plugin being disabled.
If you want to experiment, please feel free to add a comment below – these comments will be exempt from the above WARNINGS.
I’d like to change “idiot” into “expert solver” please.
Expert idiot solver change
SEEMS LEGIT
Another useful thing to introduce would be either an improvement in the search facility or else standardisation of the headings. For example, a search for “Guardian Saturday Prize Crossword No 28,697” finds Guardian Saturday Prize Crossword No 28,979. What is needed to find the right one is “Guardian Prize 28,697”.
(Still, I suppose cryptic cluing is what this place is all about!)
I’d suggest a 5 minute window but – as already mentioned – I’m no expert.
EDIT – I meant to write, “I’m no idiot.”
@3
We’ll see how two minutes goes for now.
2:00 > 0:00, agree completely there!
This looks a very useful option for me. When quoting definitions from dictionaries, I like to reproduce bold and italic exactly as they are in the source, but sometimes forget or use the wrong ones. This will allow me to put things right.
I welcome this feature.
Sounds good! And it works! Thanks a lot!
Yea. It works. Thanks.
BTW, I agree with David W@2’s request for standard headings. Those of us in the NLP community like to have programs automatically download web pages (for research purposes), and that means having a standard URL format that can be automatically generated. Granted not the most pressing thing either for Admin or the bulk of users, but I don’t think there will be any loss in function, usability, user-friendliness or anything else with such a change. (OK, holiday specials may need to be excluded). Thank you for listening.
Good idea.
Thanks. Very good for those annoying and sometimes embarrassing typos most of us make from time to time.
I changed one to three
Great facility
Thanks Admin for this innovation and all you do for the 225 community.
Excuse me if I’m being dumb (not a rare occurrence), but can you clarify what you mean by “the author of the original post”? Surely, if I make a change, I know I’ve done it anyway. Thanks.
@15
The author of the post you’re commenting on.
Great idea Admin. I’m sure I’ll make use of it for minor fix-ups in the future.
Does this mean that we’ll see less posts of the type “d**n autocorrect” to which I always want to reply “just turn it off”!!
Given the nature of the blog, i.e. people can comment at any point, without necessarily making a reference to a previous comment, still don’t see how it works. For instance, if I was disagreeing with comment 13 above (I don’t!), how does the system know that I’m disagreeing with that comment? Is it looking for me saying:
1)13
2)@13
3)@ 13
4)Dave Ellison
5)Dave E
6)Any combination of the above?
Again, apologies if I’m being dumb.
@18
I’m sure we’re all capable of being dumb. I know I am.
I’m afraid it’s just one of those things.
The original author has always been able to amend/delete comments although this happens extremely rarely due to the remarkably amicable community we have.
If it happens, it happens. If it starts to cause problems, the plugin will be disabled.
Crispy @ 18 I suspect that Admin is referring to the main post, ie the blog of the crossword in question. That makes sense, as the blogger sees all comments on their blog (I think).
So the blogger can then decide, if necessary, whether there is abuse of the process.
(I obviously type too slowly!)
Thanks Admin and Simon S. Think I get it now. Just off to take some paracetamol.
i was about to say …
… but changed my mind.
This is a good change, though I’d suggest a longer window (The Times has 15 minutes, which may be too much).
I’m just commenting and want to see what happens …
Yes it was as I thought. 2 minutes seems fine, but as I said to Ken earlier, Times for the Times has something similar and allows 24 hours!
I was Editing my post a second time and everything suddenly vanished. Perhaps we aren’t allowed to Edit twice. What I was saying was that I was only being given 37 seconds to decide to Edit a second time. It didn’t go back to 2 miutes. But no big deal.
Now let’s see if it allows me to edit a second time.
Here goes: nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
That seemed to work.
But now it isn’t letting me Edit yet again. There’s just a clock counting down.
And I can’t go back to my typo in post 24. Too late?
Testing.
I had ‘tessting’ but corrected it. I was given 1 min 37 seconds.
Note: this feature was horrendously abused back in the day on the old Guardian Crosswords site. But gosh was it fun.
Yay!
I like this idea but wonder if 2 minutes is quite long enough.
Note: successfully edited after posting 🙂
Twice 🙂
Checking to see if this works at 17:53.
This was written correctly at the first attempt.
Testing test one two three having originally put in four – thank you!
Well dnoe!
Great idea; very useful.
Great idea. Very useful. I just checked it on this.
Edit function!
Awesome addition, Admin!!
Reply to this by telling me your favourite food, then i’ll edit my comment to make you sound weird
I like it! But when I wanted to use it today to correct a not-too-obvious syntactical error I could not do so because the time had tun out. 5 minutes was suggested @3 above, and that amount of time is my best guess at an adequate and certainly not an excessive amount of time to notice and correct an error (or two).
Thanks Ken.
[I have just used the edit option to change couldn’t to could not. there was enough time for that!]
… and I then wanted to change my (deliberate) typo ‘tun out’ to ‘run out’, but the time had run out(!). (I had no time to correct my fresh punctuation error!)
I have used it successfully, but agree that two minutes isn’t long enough to read a longish post and spot and correct any errors. Five would be better.
Is the faulty post visible to other readers during the two minutes it is open for editing?
Yes, absolutely. This is why abuse remains a worry
On Times for The Times we also use a comment editing plug-in (the same one, I think). I set the edit time to 12 hours initially and when I reset it to 1 hour I got complaints. I can’t think of any instance of abuse of the facility. The biggest problem has been people accidentally clicking Delete instead of Save and their comment vanishing.
I would like to experiment too and agree that two minutes does seem particularly ungenerous and hope that any abuse would be very unusual for this site.
Good idea and thanks for it.
(appears to work nicely)
2nd edit: I see you’ve set the timer to three mins 🙂
Just testing this new facility.
Please ignore this
Edited successfully
Thanks
Yes, EdTheBall@46. Just noticed it is now 3 minutes and there I was thinking it might have been a special dispensation to me, or to the Everyman blog. 🙂
🙂
The Times For The Times site also allows one to reply directly to a comment, creating a nested view of an exchange. This would be useful to avoid having to cite previous commenters as foobar@42 the way we currently do.
Agree with poc that reply to comment would be great (even better with notification) but iirc this is pretty difficult to implement cleanly without chunky forum software.
I love the short edit time. Enough to spot the glaringly obvious but not so long to cause confusion with responses to since-edited posts
Agree to edit time and to keeping it short. Three minutes seems a bit short though. Not sure about reply nesting. It will save clunking citing. But it also has the potential to create multiple strings that are not clearly categorized on a single point. Most posts contain multiple comments, yet replies are usually to a single point. Further there will always be the temptation to make multiple points in a reply.
I have tried the editing function twice. Once I ran out of time and had to revert to posting a correction to my original post. The other time it was fine – the original post was short, and so reviewing and editing took little time.
I would suggest 5 minutes; that would allow for more careful proofing and editing without leaving the original uncorrected post on the site for too long.
If one decides to edit when there’s only thirty seconds left, does one only have thirty seconds to complete the edit?
Looks like a good idea
@54
Yes that seems to be the case. If the timer runs out, you’re stuffed.
This facility is designed for small edits eg typos.
If you plan to do major surgery then consider deleting and restarting.
From experience on another site, the trick with long edits/rewrites on a short edit time like this is to copy your original post before deleting it, then paste that original answer into a new reply window. That gives you as much time as you want to correct / redraft.
It’s easier on a laptop than a phone, but either works.