Community Guidelines on editing posts

Discourse Feedback
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The guidelines kind of understate the issue, when saying that

Discourse as a platform allows post editing.

…because Discourse as a platform heavily encourages post editing, and in fact will do its utmost to guilt trip you into editing a previous reply rather than posting multiple times in succession.

Which I’ve always felt is a misfeature, because it ignores the fact that other participants in the conversation may be reading replies, or even replying themselves, using the email interface. Email users only get the first version of a reply, not any subsequent edits.

So, if I post in an ongoing discussion, then substantially edit that post after-the-fact, there’s a significant danger that a previous participant, following the discussion only via emailed reply notifications, ends up responding to the original version of my message rather than the edited one.

In GitHub Issues (another platform that supports full email-only participation), if I have to significantly correct some post I’ve written, I’ll first post a new reply with the correction, then edit it into my previous reply and delete the update. That generates an email notification of the update to email users, without cluttering the website version of the conversation.

(On Discourse if you post twice in a row, it will do that for you, forcibly joining your two replies together into a single one. I’m fine with that, I suppose, as long as it still generates email notifications for both posts.)

Anyway, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be worth touching on that — far more succinctly than I have here — in the Content Editing section of the Guidelines, as a reason (one of several) why users should avoid making substantial edits to replies in ongoing conversations, in particular. The potential badness of even immediately editing an existing post increases with the length of the preceding discussion and the number of participants (== potential email followers).

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The summary at the top states:

  • Avoid substantive edits to your posts after posting

The editing section that you quoted from expands on that, explains how to look for edits, and clarifies when to avoid editing.

Discourse as a platform allows post editing. If a post has been edited, you can see it has a small pencil icon next to it. Click it to reveal full history with diffs and edit attributions.

Community members are allowed to edit their own posts. Substantially changing the meaning of the original post is discouraged, but fixing spelling/grammar, rewording, or adding clarification is welcome. Avoid substantial edits after 15 minutes of posting.

Further down, email as a non-editable medium is addressed as well:

People are allowed to use the features available to them in Discourse. That means editing, splitting topics, moving categories, etc. This may not be visible to email users. Email users have to accept their experience as it is.

That seems to cover the things you’re asking pretty clearly. Was there something specific you think is not covered?

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If the existing information seems adequate to everyone else, then no.

The way I read it, your third quote sort of undercuts the previous two / the issue I’ve brought up — I see “Email users have to accept their experience as it is.”, and to me that sounds like, “Go ahead and edit your posts, and don’t worry about the fact that email users will be out of sync with the discussion.”

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The guidelines ask people to be aware of how editing works and how timing can affect a discussion. That doesn’t change when the guidelines also mention that email users may have a different experience, the same policy of “don’t edit substantially” still applies. It also means users over email need to be aware of this and either accept it or click through to see the live discussion.

To answer the question a bit more directly: yes, users are allowed to use the edit feature even if it means emaill notifications won’t have the edited content.

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They don’t, though. Not really. They just say “don’t edit after more than 15 minutes”. There’s never any mention of why. (And actually, with email the 15-minute rule is irrelevant, edit timing has no effect on email notifications.) It’s implicit in the guidelines, arguably, but “explicit is better than implicit”.

Anyway, I’ve laid out my take on this. If it’s my POV alone, then everything’s fine as-is.

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Is “Avoid editing after 15 minutes because others may have acted based on the original content.” what you’re looking for?

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Will it? Yesterday I happened to post four times in a row and they weren’t joined.

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Hm! Well, it definitely used to. Perhaps it only happens if you reply to yourself? (And/or write two replies to the same previous message, maybe?)

It doesn’t sound like the feature was ever seriously considered for Discourse, as it sounds like Attwood’s had a pretty negative view of the idea right from the start, so I must be confused/mistaken.

Discourse does provide staff/mods with the ability to manually combine consecutive posts, so it could be that I was assuming automation, when it was really an overeager mod insta-nannying in real time. (Which is entirely possible, if it was at the GNOME Discourse.)

Or, someone else reports that Discourse Chat will combine successive posts automatically. To which I respond, “…What’s Discourse chat?” So I doubt that’s where I experienced it.

Aaaanyway! If it never existed, then good because having that happen was a next-level irritant. Somehow even more irritating than when other humans do it. (Unless of course humans were doing it, and I just didn’t realize.)

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Experimentally replying to myself, just for S&G.

Edit: Yeah, nope. Definitely nothing being combined here.