One of my posts was edited by a moderator, and I don't like it

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One of my older posts was edited. And although the edits were only minor and in my eyes totally unnecessary I wanted to comment about that to the moderator who did it. But Richard is not accepting messages …

So I’m opening this thread.

I sometimes post on this forum and people reading those posts know me through my writing. Everything in my posts was written by me and if I’m quoting someone I try my best to make it clear that I’m doing so.

I find it unfortunate that on this forum a post can only be edited for a short amount of time (a few days?) so that if I find something I would like to rewrite I often can not do that anymore. Often those are minor things anyway, and until now I’ve only asked a moderator for help once.

I’ve had a moderator move a post from one topic to another, which I did not mind, since that did not change the content of my post.

What I do not like is to find today that one of my posts was edited and I was not notified about it in advance or asked to make the changes myself. The edits are minor and may not seem worth talking about, but no one reading that post can see that I did not write those bits like that, nor that in that form they were part of my original text.

We have learned to know most posters and come to appreciate them by their way of writing about the things that they contribute.

Quite a lot of people posting are not fluent in English and as long as e.g. writing style and spelling issues do not lead to any problems I think most of the readers can live with this. We can often witness ‘variations’ in writing style, spelling and grammar even by people who we might expect to be fluent in English and ‘who should know better’. In fact, it could be someone’s day job to correct all spelling problems or writing styles (which I am not in favour of), a job I certainly would not want to do. I think a forum like this thrives by the contributions of all participants, whether their writing is perfect (if there is such a thing) or not.

So I would like to propose that no one, not even a moderator edits a post that is not their own unless after discussing this with the original author and agreeing on the change. I prefer the situation where the author changes the text himself. Should the author refuse to edit the text, which I think is their right, the moderator can decide whether to refuse to publish or ban the post. But they should never edit the text without consulting with the author.

And last but not least, dealing with questions or comments is part of a moderator’s job, so they should be accepting messages.

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If the “Richard” referred to here is me, I am not a moderator. I do not edit the content of others’ posts (unless they’re wiki), and in fact have no ability to do so.

Like any Regular member, I do have the ability to edit the titles of topics, and I occasionally use that ability to correct typos and other mistakes in order to make the topics easier to find with a search.

If I have done so to a topic you started, and you prefer to have errors in the title and to have the topic be harder to find, you can of course change it back. I’ll shrug, say “whatever”, and move on.

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I understand your concern, but do not honestly know of any examples. I only have time to deal with actually problematic issues, I’m not here to act as a curator. If a post was sloppy I don’t care, but if they are spam, posting pirated content, or harassment then I’ll just nuke it.

If you want me to review the audit logs of any post to make you personally feel better, you can reach out to me via dm.

To be clear, there are only two moderators of this forum at the moment. @fredrik and @Caustic . As @analogoutput said, discourse allows users at the ‘regular’ trust level to edit wikis, move topics, and rename topics. This is personally of great use to me since that trust level is awarded only to folks who are frequent users if the forum. If there is a disagreement, err on the side of the person who created the topic. Otherwise, please keep in mind that although you make a topic here, it’s not exclusively yours. When you share with the community, it’s here for our consumption.

Your fears if someone modifying your posts to put words in your mouth are valid, but not really likely go en the circumstances. Again, if you have examples of this I will examine the audit trail with you with transparency, so you can feel at ease.

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I do not so much fear that people put words in my mouth/posts but find it extremely impolite to just change someones text without consulting them beforehand.

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If you still consider this an issue, feel free to contact me directly with more details. As it stands, I think all that was done was a title was changed, but it isnt clear what if any harm was actually done here.

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