Editing old posts prohibited

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Hyronymus
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Hyronymus »

My view on this subject is that as soon as you hit "Submit" you make your reaction part of the restricted domain that this forum is. And as with many things in life you cannot simply undo them without a penalty. If we allow members to edit their post eternally you'll end up with incomprehensive topics and one should really ask oneself "why?".

Of course if there is a strong reason to edit or remove attachments a member can always contact a moderator or Owen to have a look.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by orudge »

Alberth wrote:I am not sure how useful it is though, do people ever find useful stuff in posts 5 years back or so?
I certainly do on occasion - if nothing else it's just nice to preserve the history. Plus if anybody wanted to go back and, say, work on TTDPatch or something, there's a load of old historical information here that might prove useful.
SAC wrote:While not going to argue with Owen about his decision to enforce restrictions to members here at TT-forums, as it's quite frankly none of my business what-so-ever, I'd like to point out that my decision of deleting and moving my attachments has its reasons - some of them rather obvious. And in the end, attachments are the property of the owner itself
That's fair enough, and as I say, my policy is more regarding posts generally than attachments. I may have been mildly peeved if OzTrans had removed his attachments, but ultimately, while a bit of an annoyance, it wouldn't have disrupted entire topics. Removing all of the post content just seems a bit much to me, to be honest.

I'll sleep on it and discuss matters with the moderators and will come to some kind of a decision regarding all of this over the next few days. I appreciate everybody has their concerns, and I'm thankful for your input, so please keep it coming. I don't want to make this place unpleasant for anybody, that's certainly the last thing I want to do, but at the same time I do feel strongly about preservation of content and of history. We just need to find some happy middle ground. :)
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Pingaware »

SAC wrote:While not going to argue with Owen about his decision to enforce restrictions to members here at TT-forums, as it's quite frankly none of my business what-so-ever, I'd like to point out that my decision of deleting and moving my attachments has its reasons - some of them rather obvious. And in the end, attachments are the property of the owner itself, and in the same manner I can't be sure that attachments posted by members over at Simuscape will remain intact either. But it would go against my beliefs to restrict a user from deciding in what way he or she will handle their files, and so I wouldn't consider a similar solution myself.
orudge wrote:I have no intention of reinstating attachments, due to the potential copyright minefield, and because I appreciate that an author may wish to remove their content in some situations. However, I don't see why the content of messages can't be reinstated, considering an implicit grant was made that content could be published by the act of posting on the forums; and now that is made more explicit by the new rule. Whether I actually will is undecided, however.
If you read Owen's posts, specifically the one quoted above, he says that he will not be re-instating attachments deleted, which appears to be your main problem with this decision, and that he will be happy to allow authors to change/remove their attachments, through either the old or a new system. I agree both with allowing attachments to be completely under the author's final control, and with his decision to not allow deletion of old text in posts.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by SAC »

No, that wasn't at all what my post was about. And if you read my post properly you'd also notice that this isn't a problem of mine, simply as it's none of my business!

I just gave an explanation as to why I deleted my own attachments earlier, and I did keep the text intact! :))
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Pingaware »

I would say that your final statement was implying that orudge was restricting users in manipulation of their own files, and my post was a counter to that. If it was not meant that way, I apologise profusely.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by SAC »

Pingaware wrote:I would say that your final statement was implying that orudge was restricting users in manipulation of their own files, and my post was a counter to that. If it was not meant that way, I apologise profusely.
Nope, it wasn't meant that way at all. :)) And has any user actually manipulated their own files?
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Pingaware »

Well OzTrans has deleted his files, which is manipulation, but nothing apart from that to my knowledge.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Chris »

Level Crossing wrote:How about prohibiting a user from editing more than 20 posts in a day, and notifying you if a user hits that limit?

If it's possible, it would allow normal editing but contain the rampages of post-deleting.
This sounds like a good idea, but maybe a lower limit, of 10 perhaps?
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by kamnet »

For the record, I don't feel/think that either OzTrans or SAC's actions of removing their posts, images and file uploads have anything to do with tt-forums or anything here, but personal decisions for things outside of the forums. While both took place in the same time frame, it was for unrelated reasons, and in all honesty it's a pretty rare thing. While it is fairly disruptive, I wouldn't call it vandalism.

As a former maintainer of online communities, though, I have a strong preference for retaining posts and threads for historical purposes. So, to that end, I can agree with Owen's decision to limit editing. As long as we can contact admins to have posts edited, then I see no problem with this action.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by ChillCore »

Here is my 2cc on editing the textual content of posts.
Note that I do not wish to, and am not going to, go into the validness of the reason for people removing attachments. My opinion on those is to be found near the end of my post.

orudge wrote: I have imposed a 7-day limit on editing old posts.
I do not have a problem with that ... it does happen that I edit older (normal) posts to correct information but the times this happens later than seven days is rather rare.
I realise this may cause issues for users who wish to update first posts of graphic release topics, etc. I will look to see what can be done about this, but what I think I may do is allow editing of post #1 of a topic past 7 days, but no other
That would be great if possible but perhaps this could be extended to just a few more posts depending on the subsection of the forum?
IMHO for the OTTD development forum(s) 3 seems enough, for the graphics development/releases forums 5 seems to be sufficient and for the rest maybe just the first post.

frosch wrote: Restricting editing is a valid restriction a forum may enforce.
I have been on a forum where you had exactly 5 minutes to edit a post. The only thing that this encourages is making one think better about the content before hitting submit. No-one was ever complaining about this fact and I was even suprised that I could edit my post forever here.

Alberth wrote: do people ever find useful stuff in posts 5 years back or so?
Hell yeah. The first six to nine months after discovering this forum I have been browsing and reading back in the OTTD development forum ... all the way back to see Belugas join. By doing so I have found a wealth of information and I am not only refering to outdated patches.

Hyronymous wrote: My view on this subject is that as soon as you hit "Submit" you make your reaction part of the restricted domain that this forum is
Indeed, as is the case on most forums around the globe. Most of the times this is explecitely stated when signing up to a forum.
I have not checked if this is the case on tt-forums but that is what I expected to be the case when I signed up here.

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Level Crossing wrote: How about prohibiting a user from editing more than 20 posts in a day, and notifying you if a user hits that limit?

If it's possible, it would allow normal editing but contain the rampages of post-deleting.
This sounds like a good idea, but maybe a lower limit, of 10 perhaps?
Personally I'd prefer the 7 days limit for anything that is not the first post(s).
With the "bad" habit I have of posting these walls of text (for which I appologise if need to be) I do edit my posts quite a few times just after submitting them. I do use the preview button and correct as much spelling misstakes as I can (I do not use a spellchecker at all) but more often than not I still find errors after hitting submit and/or feel the need to alter my wordings. This results in editing a post to up to five times sometimes. So if I post in two topics a day I would hit this limit rather fast.

Kamnet wrote: As long as we can contact admins to have posts edited, then I see no problem with this action.
I agree with you there.


In short ...
Removing the context of all of ones posts is IMHO rather disrespectful towards the people that took the time to reply to your ramblings and helped you getting where you are today wether it is through reporting bugs, giving feedback or helping you to fix things; unless they quoted you they are talking and replying to something that is no longer there.
Even if you remove your attachments later on there is always some usefull information to be found for the people that downloaded your attachments before you removed them.



Now on the issue of removing attachments:

I think we can all agree that attachments remain the property of their respective owners and people, while they may or not may have valid reasons, should be able to remove them as they see fit.

Which brings me to a question:
Say I have a locked post that has an attachment and I remove the attachment from within the User Control Panel ... will it still show up in the locked post or not?
If it is properly removed from the locked post than the issue regarding attachments is solved and only the issue of being able to edit first post(s) remains.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by CrossSide »

I can totally understand your decision. Face it, Transport Tycoon is a game what no one in the world plays anymore, beside us. We (you) are a community, we share one thing: our love for this game (or trains, trucks, ships, plains etc.). The only thing that seperates us all is the licenses, graphic, patches and drawing copyrights. Allmost all flames of this beautiful forum goes about this kind of stuff, while it's not necessary. SAC's topic is a good example and flaming about copyrights is the reason why this topic is created as well.
Don't understand me wrong. I really appreciate all the work you drawers and coders are doing, but some people are just going to far with it. I really love the work of SAC and the Canadian train/stationset is in my opinion the best set ever released. But, as I said, we are a tiny community, and I think we should all share. Why not all get the best out of TT? I think the most forumusers share the same interest: trains, transport, pictures, information, and more. Lets just be gentle to eachother and try to help instead of being arrogant. Why not help people in being great coders/drawers themselves?
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Purno »

orudge wrote:Due to a spate of vandalism of old posts by various users, some recent, some not so recent, editing out old posts to remove content entirely, destroying historical conversations and so on, I have imposed a 7-day limit on editing old posts.
While I'm not entirely happy with this, I do understand this decision.
If you have any comments or thoughts on this, please feel free to post them. And if you have posts that do need editing at the present moment and can't edit them yourself just now, feel free to PM me and I'll do that for you at the moment.
Can't a moderator do the editing? :)
Leanden wrote:While I may agree that the method by which he moved may seem unjustified, its largely due to the attitudes of people within this community, (further reinforced by this recent decision by yourself as a reaction), which has cause Oztrans, SAC, Myself and others to migrate to new webspace.
Although I realize I only read 1% of the topics at these forusm, overall, the attitudes of the people within the community seem fine, and people seem rather co-operative. It's odd that even though I don't know you well, and don't do any development with you, reading the British trainsettopics (and we do have quite a few of those), I don't have a good image of you. So it's kinda odd to see you accusing the community of having a bad attitude, while in my eyes, you're the one with a bad attitude. Oddly, your posting here only confirms these suspicions...

Additionally, some people have always preferred their own webspaces even before problems occurred...
Before grabbing your torches and pitchforks against these people (in this case Oztrans it would seem), perhaps you should look upon yourselves and determine why such a decision has been chosen by these otherwise active graphics developers.
Before grabbing your torches and pitchforks against these people (in this case the community it would seem), perhaps you should look upon yourself.



It's a shame some people can't co-operate with each other, but damnit, DON'T BLAME THE COMMUNITY, I had lots of fun here, there is nothing wrong with the community!
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by smallfly »

I just wanted to update my P1SIM first posting and it doesnt work anymore :(

I understand your point but you should really reallow editing the first post.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Emperor Jake »

I agree with Purno's suggestion (assuming such a thing is possible using the forum software) about being able to edit the first 5 posts of a release thread, etc. This especially affects the release thread I recently made where I put all of my minor NewGRF projects.
Also, the ability to make and change polls, and update the rules, is useful to the players of the Nations Game.

This is probably not possible, but a good solution would be to be able to edit a post, but you can only add new text, and you are not allowed to delete any old text after 7 days.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by SwissFan91 »

Emperor Jake wrote:This is probably not possible, but a good solution would be to be able to edit a post, but you can only add new text, and you are not allowed to delete any old text after 7 days.
This would be good, as you could then strikethrough any text you would have previously deleted.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Purno »

Emperor Jake wrote:I agree with Purno's suggestion (assuming such a thing is possible using the forum software) about being able to edit the first 5 posts of a release thread, etc.
Glad to see you agree with me about something I never suggested :mrgreen:
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Emperor Jake »

Oops, it was Chillcore's sugestion :oops:

Note that I will leave my post the way it was as I usually do in these situations. Even though I could have edited it to be correct, however, that would have made Purno's post meaningless, and it would be disrespectful of me to try to hide an honest mistake.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Level Crossing »

You could do something like this:

I agree with Purno'sChillcore's suggestion (assuming such a thing is possible using the forum software) about being able to edit the first 5 posts of a release thread, etc.

That would show why Purno posted and also clarify what you mean for anyone reading in the future.
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Jacko »

How do you do the crossing out line?
You watch i will find it now...
found it now :P :P :oops:

Anyways i think it should not be limit on number of posts, but how old the post is, so, e.g. you could edit a post from up to a week before or something?
I have imposed a 7-day limit on editing old posts.
Of course. I finally read more of the topic and revert us back to the start... :lol:
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Re: Editing old posts prohibited

Post by Transportman »

I think a 7 day time to edit your posts is long enough for 99% of the posts, because it is unlikely these changes get noticed by anyone after those 7 days, so there is almost no reason to edit your post anymore. Only in the "Development" subsections it makes sense to have a longer time for first posts because the first posts is most of the time used to announce stuff.

I think it would be good to exclude attachments from this day limit, users should always be able to remove their attachments without having to explain why. Can there be made a text when someone removes his attachment like: "File.xyz was removed by User on dd-mm-yyyy".

I also agree with the point that it always should be possible to request an edit of an old post for some "important" reason, where "important" should be to the consideration of the moderator reviewing the request.
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