About 20 minutes ago I made a post (A 'health guru' for bees: Researchers develop app to gauge colony health). Shortly after I saw an alert on it and opened it and was surprised to find an Edit had been done on it. The edit was harmless (added a “p” to a word) and I don’t mind, but I didn’t know it was possible to edit somebody else’s post.
So I have two questions. 1, what are the rules on this, i.e., what’s it take to be allowed to do it, and 2, how is it done? I can see how editing other peoples’ post could come in real handy in an argument!
Regulars can move topics and edit thread titles. There’s a pencil icon up by the title you click on and can do those two things, for your own threads or others.
I think you can edit anytime as long as you are the owner of the post. Isometimes edit my own post if I found misspelled words, or missing something, sometimes I just don’t bother. But I have never edited someone else’s post . I think it would be very odd to allow others edit the posts other than his/her own
I sometimes corrected a misspelled word in the title of a post and was even thanked one time by an author.Evidentially,the original poster is informed who did the editing.
I’ve kind of slowed on that,not wanting to appear as a member of the spelling police department.Sometimes though,the Spelling Bee nature surfaces.bb
Thanks for the answers. I’ve often found it necessary to edit my own posts, but didn’t realize I could straighten out errors on headings others wrote.
@Bradybb, I know what you mean about “spelling police”. My parents were both teachers (Mom grade school, Dad high school English) and Dad published a number of books and short stories, and a lot of attention was paid to grammar, punctuation, word choice, syntax in our house… I still cringe at the misuse of apostrophes and so on! Usually best not to say much though, and remember, languages have been changing, like, forever, dude.
And, sometimes I’m just plain wrong, so I have to be careful.
As said above, nobody except the original poster can change the content of a post but members with the regular status can change the title. I sometimes do this, including the post in question, when I see an obviously misspelled word. I see no harm in that.
Right - the forums designers believe that regulars can help out by fixing such things. I was a bit skeptical at first but we have had no problems at all with edits.
I sometimes change categories, unlike @mamuang I don’t usually PM the poster as its a very minor thing. I also fix typos in posts themselves, sometimes the formatting gets messed up and I fix it (we admins can do that). We definitely don’t want to edit to change meaning at all though!
My brother used to teach grammar, so I feel this viscerally.
Languages have been changing.
Well, that’s true. However, I maintain that, since the Founding Fathers (of the U.S.) decreed that punctuation shall be inside quotation marks, then that’s the way it should be. Ditto the serial comma.