litphoria

You can set the rp to Edit mode. Then you can edit a post infinity times.

What does Edit Mode mean, exactly? It sounded to me like it was meant to be used for RPs that are being revised or reworked on a large scale. If its only purpose is to just... let posts in an RP be edited, that seems a little superfluous (and not immediately clear). It also means we can't use a status like "in progress" for our RPs at the same time.

Proof reading is an option. I find that if I proof read my posts, I don't usually miss any typos or other errors that come along. And even if there is an error by the end of my proof reading, I would personally have that one edit to go back and revise the entirety of the post. But I think that's the biggest issue right there -- you could go back, revise a post and abuse it infinitely. You could, theoretically, use this to undermine someone else... or glorify your own stuff. I feel like there's a lot of caveats here and that the system should remain as it is to avoid a huge hassle. It's restrictive for a reason I feel, although I couldn't tell you why for sure-- I'm not WA.

But I think that's the biggest issue right there -- you could go back, revise a post and abuse it infinitely. You could, theoretically, use this to undermine someone else... or glorify your own stuff. I feel like there's a lot of caveats here and that the system should remain as it is to avoid a huge hassle. It's restrictive for a reason I feel, although I couldn't tell you why for sure-- I'm not WA.

Sure, but is this an issue enough that those of us attempting to use the site legitimately as good people should have a crippled edit function?

If my partner wants to do that, they can also do all that with just one edit. I'd also stop roleplaying with them, like any other kind of abusive behavior that doesn't need edits at all. I'd probably not be roleplaying with someone like that to begin with because I take time to get to know prospective partners and make sure I'm comfortable with them first.

Meanwhile for the rest of us there is an existing hassle: we can't edit our posts more than once. And if we can't do that more than once because some vague fears of vague abuse, that's pretty rubbish.

If we're serious about detecting serious abuse, we need an edit history so we can view prior versions of the post to check for funny business. If we have that edit history, we don't need a one-edit limit.

I write my posts in a word processor with spell/grammar check and also proofread them before posting. It's still easy to overlook things, especially if you've been working with the same text for a while. There's always the potential for someone to pop up. So yeah, I proofread... but I'm human. This is also supposed to be a fun hobby. I can't really expect the average person to treat a post like an academic paper, nor do I expect everyone to be equally good at catching errors.

I guess I'm just not seeing it as such a potential for abuse. I've been RPing in communities that allow unrestricted post edits for many years, even run some myself, and I've never encountered abuse. The only two things I can even imagine are putting rule-breaking content in a post and then edit iting out, or not liking the outcome of something their character did and so editing it and attempting to claim that the post was always that way. Now, to reiterate, I've never seen this kind of abuse happen on any RP forum I've ever been on. I don't think it's even probable that it will happen here. But even if someone did either of these things, it would be pretty obvious to anyone they were roleplaying with. I'd stop RPing with that person immediately.

But there are all kinds of legitimate uses of editing. The people I RP with just want to be able to have nice posts that we all enjoy. That's it. Editing helps us do that.

Samus is also correct: if someone wants to abuse things in this way, they can already do so in their one edit, and they can do so when the RP is in edit mode. With no edit history, it would work out just the same.

Aaaand there it is at work. I read through that post several times and revised it to make sure I was saying what I wanted to. Unfortunately, the longer you work with something, the harder it becomes to see your typos. You know what you're trying to say, so you read it correctly... even if you didn't write it correctly. More on this. Thus, I have now spotted two errors in that last post which I didn't before, despite proofreading.

That is why I want more edits. xD Here it's not a huge deal, but in RPs, it can be twitch-inducing.

For the record I am going to put so many points into this. At least 50.

The main concern is for chats and abuse. Someone could say something rule-breaking and then edit it out - the offensive must be appropriately captured. And keeping every single revision of your post seems wasteful. The current system stores the original post, so there is a way to keep track of infractions.

I recall a prior suggestion to this, but I can't find it now. In there, there was other ways to get around this issue, like limiting it to a certain time window after the post. Additionally, when we get reporting, those may be able to capture the text as it was when it was written, which might also mitigate the problems.

I've found it best to, when I must edit multiple types, just copy the post, then delete and paste, then post it as a new post. This way, my partner is alerted anew.

Hm. It may also help to alleviate another concern about your edits going un-noticed by others (intentionally or not) if it generated updates after you made an edit past a certain point.

The main concern is for chats and abuse. Someone could say something rule-breaking and then edit it out - the offensive must be appropriately captured. And keeping every single revision of your post seems wasteful. The current system stores the original post, so there is a way to keep track of infractions.

Ok, let's examine the goals here:

• Provide a good roleplaying platform where people can enjoy their roleplays.
• Capture abuse when it happens.
• Not be wasteful.

We find it useful as roleplayers to be able to edit and improve our posts, and one and only one edit makes that tricky, unless we want to dive into an edit process, when the goal is to just get on with the roleplay and have fun. (Being able to switch into edit mode isn't a consolation, it requires extra hoop-jumping from something that expected as a basic always-available feature on similar systems.)

Solara claims to never have seen this abuse happen in the first place. My own experience with RP forums is the same. I've also never heard of it happening on here in the year or more the site's been alive, and that's plenty of time for people to have done plenty of it, and they can do it, because they can edit a post once. That makes this a thing that will happen either never, or so rarely there's not even a reputation for it ever happening in this system or other systems. Someone just being a regular jerk who turns you off and makes you regret playing with them is more common.

So, this is a fundamental piece of utility we don't get because a risk of abuse that has a probability of occurring somewhere beneath negligible and nearly at nonexistent. That's a "this is why we can't have nice things" where the "why" doesn't even demonstrably exist! That's frustrating to be told as a user who just wants to maintain a quality roleplay that's enjoyable for my partner.

I can understand the technical concern of storing every version of a post. There's technical workarounds like just calculating a diff if space is a concern. We're unlikely to see more than a single digit number of edits for most posts except, maybe, a main/setting post - most of us will do just fine with a second and third edit being available except in exceptional circumstances, to fix up errors that creep in after our edits, and then the other errors we didn't notice.

Lastly, if it does exist as a problem, it's certainly not a very pervasive or common one. Most of us won't experience it or even hear of it, and if it ever happens, as Solara says, I'd also just go "... I'm not cool with this" and leave, as with any other kind of activity that makes me uncomfortable, like someone being an inconsiderate jerk, which happens plenty enough it does get heard about sometimes, but there's no technical fix for that.

So: technical reasons to only have edit once I can buy, but there's also options available for managing that.

The notion of the social problem isn't worth the trade-off though and isn't a good reason for only one edit.

I could foresee this becoming an issue in chats, because chats are much faster paced and have a mix of people who might not be on the same page. As well, I don't really know of any chatrooms that let you edit what you've said. It'll be untested waters.

But yeah, for a private roleplay with a single partner, not an issue at all.

I use a populous chat service that lets you edit your posts for a couple of minutes. (If you're in the middle of editing and you've only got about ten seconds left it warns you.) It works pretty well. The water gets a little muddied here where chat is also used for a paragraph RP in PMs and whatnot, but a small edit window still lets you catch a few mistakes.

I truly don't think unrestricted edits would be a hotbed for abuse. Someone could edit out their rule-breaking, but in my experience, people don't. I legitimately cannot think of one edit-related problem in more than a decade of edit-enabled forum RP (and other types of forums as well). Some of those sites might have had archiving of past content, but others certainly did not. If edits are unrestricted and we actually have problems, then we can deal with them, but as of now, I don't think the slight risk is worth the inconvenience. At this very moment, we have edit mode. The potential for this abuse is already there.

Having thought about it and read over everything, these are my suggestions for a practical implementation of unrestricted edits that also minimizes potential abuse.

1. An edit timestamp of the most recent edit. This will signal that the post is definitely different from before. Optionally, the timestamp can also say how many times the post has been edited.
2. A record of a certain number of edits. You said the system takes one, currently. That's fine. Recording 3-5 edits might be better. The system can just overwrite older edits with newer ones. Usually, though, a post is unlikely to hit this cap; almost all of what you're going to see is typo fixes and slight rewordings. Or, as Samus suggests, the site could archive just the difference in characters. You don't really need a record of the whole post to gauge whether something rule-breaking was there before.
3. Edit updates after a certain time period, as WA suggested. I think after 24 hours is good, and it would be best if no updates were ever generated for negligible edits. Maybe the system could ignore edits of 1-5 characters for the purpose of updates (and maybe even for the purpose of archiving).

Some optional additions. These are either not quite as important for me or possibly harder to manage, but I still think they're good ideas.

1. Allowing RP owners to turn edits off or cut them off after a certain time period, if someone's really afraid that edits will be a problem for their game.
2. Chat edits functioning differently from non-chat edits and being given an edit window of, say, 5-10 minutes, rather than fully unrestricted edits. Like regular posts, there should be an indication that the post was edited (another site I'm on used a small pencil icon to show edited chat posts).
3. Encouragement that people screenshot any abuse they encounter. This could be added o rules or the help section. This attempts to solve the potential for abuse partially through culture/rules, and I think screenshotting abuse before reporting it is just a good thing to do, whether there are unrestricted edits or not.