no i see and well i feel its worth writing regardless about the only time i dont is if i think im going to get scolded or corrected on a public platform thats what honestly deters me most of all. i feel anything can still be worth writing even if it may not be worth reading and visa-versa it just depends on the context thats what i feel is most important and how its conveyed and taken by others. but that just my opinion everyone wants to be understood even if its hard to understand ya know, people like me with autism in my friends group for example and others sometimes treat me differently i feel but they dont know any better and thats ok im accepting of that . so i dont feel its right to treat them less but again just my opinion. lets all work together to be more accepting of others would sound nice but its a very imperfect world maybe one day lol . i can at least dream
Ultimately itâs your decision how you want to write.
But the quality and quantity of help you get will be reflected in the ease it is to understand what youâre trying to convey.
Make it harder, and you wonât get as much help - and youâll almost certainly get criticism for it from people who donât understand that you (apparently) donât care if people are willing to step up and try to read what youâve written in order to help.
The bottom line is this: If you make it harder for those who are here to help to actually help you, theyâre generally going to skip over something they canât understand and go help someone who asked a clear question and provided the information they needed - and if the person asking the question didnât know what info to ask, they asked about it.
When I open a bug, for example, I always provide as much information as I can, and I will then say âif thereâs other information that would be useful, please let me know what and how to obtain it, and Iâll provide it.â
The onus on being understood is entirely on the writer, not on the reader. To be understood, you have to know your audience and appeal to them.
Otherwise, donât be surprised if what youâve taken the time to write gets ignored (and when it gets ignored, of course nobodyâs complaining - because theyâre not even bothering to read it).
yea i agree it is my decision and all and the consequences that may come with the territory. and yea making it harder for others dose denture them but i feel a bit more effort can sometimes go into things that i personally feel can be overlooked like small things especially if the cost is not helping others over something small. people will live life how they want to and do what makes them comfortable i say you do you just as long as it dose not hurt others along the way big or small.
And part of those consequences are that some are going to ignore it, and some are going to criticize you for writing something that they tried to understand and felt wasted their time.
If youâre going to take responsibility and ownership for those consequences, then itâs not really fair to then complain about it when it happens. Thatâs like touching a hot stove and then complaining that you burned yourself, even though thatâs what happened the last time you did it.
On #2 the 10 seconds edit time-out, I wholeheartedly agree.
The only reason I did hear is that changing a message could derail reactions on it. On that:
- That is the reason it is always good to quote relevant spinets on what you react on
- Discourse will show the message is changed in the top right of the message and using some clicking you can even see the old message so nothing is lost.
Itâs a 10-minute edit window, not a 10-second edit window.
Yes, the edit history is visible, but the effort of going back to look through a long discussion and adjust for all the edits can be pretty significant.
If one makes a mistake, a follow-up after the 10-minute window is up quoting the bit to be corrected with âhereâs what I intended to sayâ doesnât break the flow and makes it clear that itâs been edited, even for those unfamiliar with the platform.
Nobodyâs expected to be perfect, so going back and editing a message from a day ago, a week ago, a month agoâŚWhy? Just reply with the updated information, and then everyone knows what the updated information is.
Leaving the window short makes it easy for everyone, instead of assuming that everyoneâs going to quote (not everyone does), and that when reading a quote from a message that was changed, they know to look at the edit history.
So, no, weâre not likely to change that.
people will choose to ignore it we all pic and choose we are human lol and thats fine they can criticize all they want but they too have to deal with the fact that i or others may criticize them for reacting in a way that may indict a negative response thats life and we all have to deal with it on both ends. its what we choose too do with our decisions that affect others that dictate where we may stand next to others in life. good or bad ^^
And, naturally, if things start to get out of control (or look like they will), then forum moderation staff will step in and put an end to it. I would strongly advise that a course of escalation is not going to be a fruitful approach.
It is probably more productive to take the criticism on board, understand what youâre being told, and adjust rather than to continue to fight every time someone says âI canât understand what youâre saying; it would help if your writing were clearerâ. Responding with âthe point of communication is to communicateâ overlooks the entire idea that if you want to communicate, it is the authorâs responsibility to communicate effectively.
If the author fails to do that, and someone complains about it, if the author then criticizes the feedback as âunnecessaryâ, ultimately the author is going to be ignored and end up wondering why nobodyâs willing to try to help.
A wall of text is not going to get many, if any, useful replies. Fact of life. Trust me, Iâve been at this for over 30 years. Iâve literally seen it all. I had someone once ask a question (and Iâm not kidding or being hyperbolic here in the slightest) that, in its entirety, was âmy things brokeâ. I think the subject line was âHelpâ.
That was it. That was the entire message. No context. No idea what the âthingâ was. Nothing. Three words. That was it.
How do you think people responded to that question (aside from the obvious inappropriate comments that were inevitable with that wording)?
For my part, I asked for some additional information and clarification. I donât recall if I ever got any (I donât think I did).
My point is, again, that if you take the time to write something, if you think itâs worth writing, then it should be worth reading. And if itâs worth reading, then itâs worth being understood. So start by writing something thatâs easy to read and understand.
Otherwise, consider again whether itâs worth writing in the first place (or, alternatively, write it for yourself in an openoffice document or text editor of choice). But if itâs worth writing somewhere where others are going to read it, put in the time and effort to create something that is easy to read.
It doesnât have to be perfect. Youâre not writing technical documentation, so if you donât use the Oxford comma, nobody should complain (but if you were writing technical documentation and I was your editor, then Iâd be telling you to fix it ).
Iâve said all this before in this very discussion.
Mix of Complaint 4 and Complaint 5.
I just want to add my two cents as a new user and beginner. I once had an issue here, where I was told, that I was using my computer and system wrong. I went on with it and adapted - I had to reinstall my system (it is Linux after all).
Other people started having the same problem, and the same individual gave the same answer. After a while it turned out, that in the end, it was not my/our fault but a serious bug.
It was kinda frustrating in the first place, because as a newbie, I do not know that much and I am still discovering things. I donât really have the knowledge to decide if the answers thrown at me are relevant, or might be wrong, so I kinda have to trust everyone.
Another thing was different approaches - some people wanted me to try things that werenât based on my initial issue, and I really had to insist not to try out new things, with the risk of just bringing in new errors by installing other packages or bricking my system even more. It is really disconcerting as a beginner, and I donât always have the necessary discernment to know who I should trust and which advice I should follow.
In the end, I donât want this to feel like a pointing out or only a rant. I am really enjoying everyoneâs advice and company on the forum and I am thankful for everyone who has helped me and invested time into my issues. It just can sometimes be really overwhelming.
Unfortunately, thatâs sometimes the nature of the beast. I donât believe anyone intends to give bad advice, but when a critical bug gets through the QA processes, itâs not always obvious until well after reports have started to come in.
If the bug were known before release, it would likely have been either fixed or documented.
It is unfortunate that you came away feeling like youâd been told you were using your computer/system wrong - with so many different cultures represented here, things donât always translate well, but yeah, âblame the userâ isnât something that should be acceptable to the community. Some grace should be given as weâre all âlearningâ, and itâs easy for those of us with tons of experience to forget that we once were ân00bsâ once upon a time.
I have experience with a much longer edit time-out of at least a week on another forum I frequently visit. Based on that:
- Only less than 1% of the posts are edited.
- Most users even do not know or did never edit a message
- I sometimes do look on what is changed and never had the opinion it was bad.
So the point you give is pretty hypothetical to me.
Why 10 minutes is bad for me is that I typically do not reread my own message within 10 minuten, more likely with my next visit and that can be 1/2 days later.
The problem can be that with a longer edit window, the greater potential for the thread to move on with other replies, and then the delayed edit may alter the context, or information that would have changed the discussion. in the extreme it may even render the replies that followed nonsensical in their own right. It is best to correct mistakes, clarify further etc with a subsequent reply, so that the conversation flows logically/temporally.
Let me be clear before I get into this: Iâm speaking here based on my personal experience, and not on behalf of the openSUSE project or even other forum staff here. Some may agree with me, and some may not. These opinions are my own personal opinions, formed over a lifetime of experience moderating and participating in online communities going back to my early teens using BBSes accessed with a 300 baud modem. (I am officially an âold greybeardâ - literally But make no mistake - I am no luddite who resists change; I have spent my life on the cutting edge of various technologies. But Iâm not a fan of âchange for the sake of changeâ either.)
I can only speak for my own experience over many decades and having, at my peak, replied to over 600 messages a week in a technical support forum that had zero message edit functionality, not even for staff (we could remove messages, but not edit them).
Over those literal tens of thousands of messages I wrote, I was not 100% perfect in what I wrote. Nobody ever had an issue with me correcting myself - least of all myself. Weâre all human, and we all make mistakes.
I got in the habit of reviewing my writing every single time before I hit the âpostâ or âreplyâ button. These were not âthanks for the feedbackâ or âglad I could help outâ responses (those werenât generally counted in the stats). These were deep, technical discussions about serious mission-critical software issues.
I do this with e-mails, I do this with forum posts, Iâm doing this right now (this message will probably have had at least 3 edits made before I consider it final, and Iâll read it over in its entirety one last time before sending it, I guarantee - and sure enough, here I am in my first - and second - editing pass, confirming this. ).
And yet it may still not be 100% perfect, or include everything I may want to say on the matter.
But if you read something you wrote an hour later, a day later, a week later, and think âoh, I wish I had said [this]â? So what if you canât edit it? Just reply to it with your clarification.
Our âbest effortâ changes from day to day, and thatâs human nature. Itâs not necessary to âhideâ that by editing what was previously written. Were it a mailing list, you wouldnât have the choice to edit at all. Once itâs out there, itâs out there. Same with NNTP [1], same with many other pieces of community management software and infrastructure.
We are approaching 50,000 registered users here. Thereâs no edit time period that will make everyone happy. So weâve picked something that allows for a quick âwhoops, I fat-fingered a wordâ or âI hit âsendâ when I wasnât actually ready toâ. For 99.99% of users, thatâs been just fine - and that, in my experience, is fairly typical.
For everything else, thereâs âquote the bit you misstated and write a clarificationâ. Then itâs clear to one of the literally millions of monthly views we get from anonymous users that a correction was made, and as a writer, you gain the reminder to review before pressing âsendâ.
In woodworking, thereâs a maxim: Measure twice, cut once. I always took that to be more general advice, better stated as âreview your work (or plan) before committing.â
The Discourse editor allows you to âcloseâ a reply without committing it, and to come back to it later for review and to finish/edit it before you post it. That is also a useful feature.
Yes, I know about NNTP control messages; thatâs not the same thing, and implementations vary. âŠď¸
Impressive story, good read.
I likely started with a 2400 baud modem but not that active in BBS or forums at least until Discourse.
Apart from this forum I have experience with two more fora.
The fist forum was a forum attached to a cycling advocacy organization. They were early in switching to Discourse, I guess >10 years ago. For me that switch meant that I became much more active on that forum, I became 1 of the 2 "power-users:. Small community feed by âblog postâ of the organization that indicated you could react via the forum. That triggered nice policy discussions. The other visitors came to get advised on a new bike.
The organization had no real IT person so the default edit timeout, that defaults to 86400 minutes (2 months). and used that semi-often to correct/improve things. About a year ago the forum was closed as there was no IT person anymore.
The other forum is the OpenStreetMap forum. That switched that discourse March 2023, 4 months after Opensuse. For both this forum and the OSM I have been way more active after the switch.
What I like about the OSM forum is the default edit time-out and administrators actively splitting off discussions if that was appropriate/requested.
One observation is that at least some people like to point out errors in posts even in public (complaint 1) and yes it is âcruelâ if you then can not correct things. I think people correcting themself is something good. You can always, with some effort, check the original message.
An observation is that vBulletin had no editing functionality and this forum had I think initially something like 10 seconds but now 10 minutes so unless you have experience with another forum there is no way of knowing the effect of large editing time-outs. On both other forum I never seen edits that were âinappropriateâ so I do not see what you loose extending the edit timeout or using the default time-out.
Letâs do an experiment, please vote:
- I have no experience with long edit time out but I think it is a bad idea
- I have no experience with long edit time out, I think it is a good idea to try
- I have experience with long edit time outs and have bad experiences with it
- I have experience with long edit time outs and I think it is fine
For the poll a long timeout is >> 1 week.
vBulletin had a 10-minute edit window, and that was carried forward here. Itâs never been â10 secondsâ (the configuration doesnât even permit a sub-1-minute configuration, as itâs in âminutesâ).
Historically, we didnât permit it in vBulletin because we had a gateway to NNTP, but since that sync triggered every 10 minutes, we opened it up to a 10-minute edit window. It occasionally created issues, though, because the windows werenât aligned.
Sure, we can have a poll on it, but weâre not going to change it.