He sent me a long, rambling PM telling me that Japanese pianos are terrible and I would regret buying one. It was pretty ridiculous, but it did crack me up.

He sent me a long, rambling PM telling me that Japanese pianos are terrible and I would regret buying one. It was pretty ridiculous, but it did crack me up.

He sent me a long, rambling PM telling me that Japanese pianos are terrible and I would regret buying one. It was pretty ridiculous, but it did crack me up.

note/request to frank/moderators: BBS software should NOT allow edits to posts after subsequent posts/replies

Entheo

It is sometimes necessary to edit a post soon after posting to correct typos, grammar, facts, bad English, unclear statements, ill judged comments, etc. Your request would mean none of that is possible if someone posts one second later. How can that be justified, Norbert excepted?

good forum software allows a window for editing (60 seconds to a few minutes OR until someone has replied or a subsequent post has been made). this provides the poster with the opportunity to make corrections. it's also encumbent upon the poster to preview his/her post in case someone does post a reply quickly. it's called reviewing before publishing.

HOWEVER, once a subsequent post (i.e. reply) has been made, to allow editing means that the poster can MATERIALLY change the content of their post. for example, i post "do you think steinways are good pianos?" and get a bunch of YES replies, then i go back and change the post to read "do you think steinways are overpriced pianos?". i then copy the thread and use it to support the latter.

organizations go to great lengths to prevent liabilities like this, on public and private forums. Sarbanes–Oxley deals with issues like this, and as someone who is intimately involved in developing enterprise information mgmt software i can tell you that we could never expose our software auditing capabilities to a breech of this kind.

i would also point out that norbert's post was on January 10, 2013 11:01 PM and was edited on January 12, 2013 04:12 AM. he materially changed his post, rendering our replies confusing at best. his edits reinforce my post about congress vs. used car salesmen in a race to the bottom of public opinion.

the meanings of my replies can be distorted after the fact by edits to the originating posts.

Have posts on PW been immutable in the 9 years since you joined? The only forum I've ever belonged to that didn't allow editing of posts has since allowed editing due to popular demand. I've yet to see a forum thread's meaning get entirely changed by an edit and it would get detected pretty quickly if it did.

If review before publication was a high priority then I'd not see rampant capitalization errors in the posts above.

Quotes obviate this problem.

Quotes don't always help obviate this problem.