ehrenfest said:
I would
strongly suggest that you lengthen the editing time. I'm not sharp enough to get everything right on the first post
. OK maybe 24 hours is too long BUT 30 MINUTES IS TOO SHORT. Please compromise with something like 2 hours! It will cause me and the PF moderators lots and lots of grief I need to keep asking you to correct. I think you will greatly reduce the quality of the forum AND ESPECIALLY THE HOMEWORK HELP FORUMS if you continue this policy. Typos and mistakes can cause tons of problems in Homework Help.
Here is another possible solution: you could require people to preview their posts.
The reason the reduce editing time was added is that when someone has pointed out an inaccuracy in a post, some unscrupulous posters will then go back a retrospectively edit their post to correct the mistake. Several times I have given advice based on the posts preceding mine, only to return later to find that the posts have been edited so that my replies either seem wrong or nonsensical! If an error is pointed out in your own post the most logical and polite method of dealing with a comment is to reply to thread, correcting the mistake in a previous post and thanking the person who pointed it out to you.
Personally, I think that 30 minutes is sufficient time to correcting any typographical mistakes, especially if you preview your thread first! I can't see any advantage to
forcing people to preview their posts, if you are writing an extended post you should
want to preview it yourself, would you hand an assignment into a tutor without reading in through first? Problems in the homework forums is the primary reason why this measure has been introduced, people who had perhaps given incorrect advice or had presented an incorrect solution, were returning to their posts and retrospectively correcting the post so that it looked as if they had never made a mistake. Secondly, some students who were seeking homework help were deleting their questions form their initial and subsequent posts so that the thread no longer made sense.
Like I said previously, if someone points out an error in your posts, the only polite and logical way to respond is to reply to the post a detail the correction that you have made,
not retrospectively edit your posts. If your mistake is a typo, then no one here is going to think any less of you, everyone makes typos; but if your mistake is conceptual, then it is important that any earlier posts remain unedited so that your conceptual misunderstandings can be rectified and the posts in the thread maintain a logical progression. Whereas if you were to retrospectively edit previous posts, all subsequent posts lose their meaning.
Of course, if you've come here for homework help your going to make mistakes and your going to get things wrong, but that doesn't mean you can
hide your mistakes by retrospectively editing your posts. Rather than reducing the quality of the forums, I think a reduce editing time actually increases the integrity of the forum by ensuring that people don't
hide their errors. As for increasing the editing time to 2 hours, with the current level of activity here at PF, 2 hours is sufficient time for over 10 posts! Imagine if there have been 10 posts discussing a certain concept and then the initial post is edited, removing the parts which are incorrect, or changing the question completely! The entire thread was make no sense and be completely useless!
To emphasise again,
if someone points out an error in your post, the only logical and polite response is to post a new reply detailing the correct and thanking the person for pointing out your error.
For the record, of course when I say
'you' I mean
'one', as in people in general. I'm not accusing you of retrospectively editing your posts, I merely explaining the reasons why the reduced editing period was put in place.
) bad typing rather than stupidity.
