9 replies to this topic

[YOLF]

I was talking to pone11 and he was concerned that professionals taking part in our site should be able to edit their posts for a longer period of time. This is apparently a feature of other health related websites and professionals are concerned with their reputation and writing quality. This would be like having people pay us to curate the site.

 

Perhaps we could expand our membership base by adding this feature for  $75-100/yr?

[Mind]

If it is technically feasible, then I would say it is a feature (member benefit) worth pursuing.

[niner]

This comes up from time to time in various forms.  The fundamental problem is that we don't want people to be able to "change history", and then claim "I never said that".   If we had a reliable way of determining who was a professional, or more importantly, who wouldn't abuse the privilege, then I'd like it, but I'm not sure that we'll ever have that.   If we let people pay for the privilege, then we potentially create a class of "trolls with money".  The site has always been about fairness and treating everyone equally, which argues against a privileged class.   I'd have less of a problem with it being a membership perk, as long as the price of membership wasn't too high. 

 

We could perhaps improve things by making the editing window longer for everyone.  I think it's an hour now; if that hasn't been changed recently, but it was longer in the past.  This raises the question of "how long is too long".  In other words, when does the danger of changing history become larger than the benefit of being able to fix an error?   It's possible that we're being overly concerned about the history-changing thing; I don't know about that.  We could trial a longer period and see if there are any problems.  The problem with all our previous "trials" is that we never have a concrete metric for success or failure, we don't have a good way of measuring things like user annoyance, and we don't have a mechanism for making changes on the basis of user input.

 

A related minor point involves a shorter window when you can edit the post without it being labeled as having been edited.  We used to have the ability to edit for a very short time, probably 5 minutes, without the post getting cluttered with a "Post edited by" message.  This is really useful for the stupid typos that you see the instant you press Post.  I'd love to have that back, even if it was as short as 2 minutes.

[YOLF]

I think $88/yr would be reasonable. We could call the membership level "Editing Member" and write rules for the use of the feature stating that it's primarily for grammar and punctuation and that any  material edits should be made an addendum.  

 

So an edited version of this post would look like: 

 

 

[YOLF]

Original Post:

 

I think $88/yr would be reasonable. We could call the membership level "Editing Member" and write rules for the use of the feature stating that it's primarily for grammar and punctuation and that any material edits should be made an addendum.  

 

So an edited version of this post would look like: 

 

 

Edited to add that Editing members could also be billed at $108/yr and to add:

 

Having "Editing Members" would announce to the community not only that an editing membership is available, but that this member can edit their posts. Certain levels of Administrators are able to see edits IIRC, so if there was a problem, we could solve it.

 

There may also be option that allow us to enable additive edits only. This would mean that the original post is preserved and can only be added to. If a user were concerned about their grammar they could copy the old post and edit it and add it to the post and a mod could hide the original if necessary after confirming that the changes don't disrupt the conversation.

Edited by PerC, 28 December 2014 - 05:44 PM.

[YOLF]

Alternatively, we could offer curation packages to users and to members at a discounted rate (5 edits for $25 or $18 for members). We have already done this in cases where we were asked to make lots of edits for users and it was profitable IMO. This was done on an hourly basis.

[Mind]

Additive editing would solve the problem Niner mentioned. The original text could be quoted, or maybe strikethrough.

[Antonio2014]

Maybe your problems are solved with a wiki?

[niner]

I don't think that a wiki could serve as a replacement for a forum.  We're a conversational site, while a wiki is more for a knowledge repository.  That's not to say that a wiki wouldn't be a good thing, if we could actually get people to contribute to it, but there would still the the issue of edits in the forum.

[YOLF]

Maybe your problems are solved with a wiki?

There is a site like this in development by another party.