board77

To edit, or not to edit: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous idiocy,
Or to take arms against one's own stupidity,
And by deleting end them?

This question has come up in another thread, but it was deemed inappropriate to discuss it there. So I have kindly provided a forum for that discussion.

Kindly and brilliantly! Bravo, Voronwe!

Err.. nothing useful to say. I generally prefer "by deleting end them" unless my outrageous idiocy has been quoted by another or referred, so that my edit would change the meaning of someone else's thread.

V, could you give us a link back to that other thread so we can get some sense of context (and I'll promise not to comment on whether I believe that the decision to rule this discussion as out-of-order in that discussion seemed appropriate or not!).

http://www.phpbber.com/phpbb/viewtopic. ... um=board77

See Idylle's comments directed to Eru, and then go up and see Eru's comments that he was addressing.

V -- thanks -- to be sucinct for a change, I think edits should be allowed as your words are your own -- however, someone who edits shouldn't really complain if someone else has quoted or otherwise has attempted to respond to the material that was subsequently edited.

This is from the days when the committee was forming. It was meant to be posted in one of the many discussion threads that was locked while I was working on it. So, "this thread" alludes to one of those threads, but the statement made below is applicable to any of the discussion threads.

What looks like an introduction are remnants of a preface I added when I PMed it to someone later. I have left a few things out of the preface, since it wasn't written for public consumption. The body is unfinished and untouched since the night I decide it was pointless to post.

I really don't expect anyone to adopt my view. It was written to explain the perspective and the logic behind the statements I had already made.
**************************
Jnyusa wrote:

Quote:

The issues themselves do not seem to have really changed – there’s transparency/accountability vs. personal hurt.

It is that simple. Any pretense that doing anything, at this point, can have any impact on the “personal hurt” aspect is unrealistic.

The only thing I think that is the least warranted is removal of RL names. Anything else that has been done or discussed violates my concept of transparency and accountability. This includes ALL of the deletion that was done that Wilko agrees gutted the thread. It was an important thread.

The board agreed on the most correct of the approaches that was being entertained. Since I already thought that was a travesty, I have been more and more appalled every day as the discussion degenerated.

I hope the following informs you of how I think about the general issue. I wrote this as my last post on the issue, but I never posted it since it seemed pointless. It hasn’t been edited, so it probably doesn’t read well, but I decided not to spend more time on it.

Please keep in mind that my concern is not so much “what” people think as “how” they think. I expect to disagree with people that I respect and the disagreement shouldn’t have any impact on that respect.


1. Background

Words and the related freedom of speech and intellectual property rights have been important issues in western culture. Once words are expressed, there are rules that are followed concerning their treatment and the consequences of them having been said.

Imprudent use of them can cost you friends. Prudent use of them can win you love. Words can put you in prison. Words can get you out of prison. Fluent use of them can make you rich, even if they belong to someone else. Incorrect use of them can cost you money. Words have power and power is to be respected.

My respect for words and their power leads me to certain opinions about the legitimate treatment of them by myself and others. The internet allows a kind of interaction that was not possible before its existence. In my mind, the nature of the internet adds some responsibilities that did not exist for previous media.

E-messages are the trinary relationship between personal conversation, letters, and published works like magazines. Their scope may be the message board, but they are public discussions with persistence. Spoken words, unless recorded, are transient. E-messages, unless deleted, leave a quasi-permanent history.

This persistence creates the responsibility of custodianship. The e-messages are a record of what someone said and as such, no one should have the ability to blithely change them to indicate something else was said or that something was not said. Whatever happened, happened. It not only happened, but the community reacted to it and a micro-structure of related messages was created that is no longer coherent if a part of it is removed. That is a disservice to the rest of the community in that it devalues their effort. It also detracts from the integrity of the community, since the only manifestation of the community is the collection of the words that have accumulated. Changing the words is lying about who we are.


2. Who are we?

We are a group of people feeling damaged to varying extents by a relationship with a community with a dysfunctional leadership. For those who have affection for TORC, please recognize that at least a few now on B77 were abused after asking for a dialog concerning what appeared to them to be arbitrary leadership decisions, and were invited to discuss it elsewhere. I am not trying to pass judgment on TORC. I’m only saying that, as is common with many human relationships, some felt and still feel abused.

That feeling inspired the creation of this board. Please correct me if I am making any of this up, but I have a memory of the desire for transparency, fairness, honesty, and self moderation.

All of these are derived from the feeling that they were missing from the place from which we were exiled. Irrespective of the impetus, they are all honorable values. When I was invited here these feelings were very much alive and I expected them to survive for a while.


3. What are we trying to do?

It was the correct time to capture these in a founding document. A founding document is important. There is something called entropy, which acts on everything that you know. It essentially means things, when left unattended, fall apart. That’s true of your car, your home, and your relationships. There is no escaping it. All that you can do is expend energy to slow it down. An objective of the Charter is to slow down the deterioration that must occur by creating a set of rules and procedures that are appropriate and enforceable for preserving our view of what an on-line community should be. This isn’t easy and there are many compromises that must be made.

The objectives are transparency, fairness, honesty, and self moderation. Transparency and self-moderation can be controlled through the right set of procedures. Honesty should be the easiest, but several members are currently struggling against it. In spite of a lengthy discussion and a vote for honesty, here we are. Fairness is one of those things truly in the eye of the beholder. I believe we all want it. We disagree on what it is. We aren’t the first to struggle with it.


4. Who owns the words?

A member creates a post for the purpose of sharing thoughts with other members of the community. There is no control over content at this point. There is no assessment of value, legitimacy, or morality. The member is free to say whatever they please. After it is composed the user submits it. At that point it no longer belongs to the member, it belongs to the community.

On B77, as elsewhere, there is a twilight region between the physical submission and the acknowledgment of the community. There can be some freedom here. The degree of freedom varies between when the first member, who is not the author reads the post and when the first member, who is not the author responds to the post. In the twilight zone, systems allow varying degrees of freedom for what can be done with posts. Unfortunately B77 allows posts to be gutted, only leaving an edit count after the first response.

I strongly believe that no one, including the author, has the right to change a post after it is acknowledged by the community, unless a rigid and conservative set of procedures is followed.

I agree this isn’t the view of most here, but it does help explain my opinion.


5. Censorship

This is a strong word, as it should be. It is a serious matter to undertake the changing of someone else’s words. It is also sometimes a necessity. Alterations should not be allowed to be done lightly and they should never be done without a record of the justification for them and a private record of the original content.

Legitimate reasons for changes are:

- violations of agreed upon, publicly posted, and clearly stated rules.

This is usually limited to obscene, racist, sexist, and libelous material.

- unanticipated events that point to a hole in the existing rules for which there is a legitimate chance of a new rule being created.

It is impossible to predict all the mistakes we can make, so there needs to be an escape clause for serious unforeseen issues that arise. Plagiarism is an example. The issue that TORC faced with the estate is another that could cause changes to be necessary.

There must be procedures for minimizing the abuse and avoiding the destruction of words that were inappropriately considered possible violations.

Illegitimate reasons for changes are:

- “If someone finds out what I said about them, they won’t like me anymore.”

- “I wish that person hadn’t said those things about my friend.”

- “It’s gutted anyway.”


6. What can we expect from members?

The aspect of fairness that is at the heart of the current discussion is the balance between freedom of speech and abuse with speech. There are many precedents for obscenity, racism, and sexism. However, even for those there can be a lot of disagreement. Other kinds of abuse are even more difficult to assess. This thread itself contains what I consider abuse and if I were the Imperious Leader, I would have acted on it. I’m not and no one is on this board (except maybe V). How do we set our limits? How do we measure them? It is almost impossible. There are legal limits, which allow behavior I dislike, but they have functioned in our culture and are our best guide as to what should be allowed. They can determine what we as community are willing and able to enforce.

We can ask and expect members to be nice to each other, but we are all human. Some day someone is going to say something that either:

- the member wishes they hadn’t said

- the target wishes hadn’t been said

- a third party wishes hadn’t been said

One unarguable point is that it will have already been said and there is absolutely nothing anyone can do to make it otherwise. All we can really do is what people do in RL situations. We can say we wish it hadn’t happened and we can ask for an apology. We can’t force someone to apologize. We can just hope that if someone brings it to their attention, they will recognize they went too far.

They may not agree, which has been the case for what inspired this discussion. Think about what is the real problem here. Is it the words that were written? I don’t think so. It’s the unrepentant attitude of the poster. Am I going to decide if they are justified? I have no way to know. Even if I take it on myself to judge the accused, I should be judging and punishing the accused. The words are just the evidence of what they did that we judged as being incorrect.

If the parties involved cannot straighten it out between them there is nothing we should do to interfere, other than to move their behavior to the bike racks if it becomes disruptive. We decided that already. It is in our Charter.

There is a part of the current situation that is a little off center from a dispute between members. Several of the injured parties were not members at the time the statements were made. Some are still not. What does that cause?

Among other things, the biggest case of hypocrisy I have witnessed in several years. It was OK to have the words around when they couldn’t respond to them but it is criminal to leave the words exposed now that they can read them and react to them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What an insipid idea of fairness.

IS wrote:

4. Who owns the words?

A member creates a post for the purpose of sharing thoughts with other members of the community. There is no control over content at this point. There is no assessment of value, legitimacy, or morality. The member is free to say whatever they please. After it is composed the user submits it. At that point it no longer belongs to the member, it belongs to the community.

On B77, as elsewhere, there is a twilight region between the physical submission and the acknowledgment of the community. There can be some freedom here. The degree of freedom varies between when the first member, who is not the author reads the post and when the first member, who is not the author responds to the post. In the twilight zone, systems allow varying degrees of freedom for what can be done with posts. Unfortunately B77 allows posts to be gutted, only leaving an edit count after the first response.

I strongly believe that no one, including the author, has the right to change a post after it is acknowledged by the community, unless a rigid and conservative set of procedures is followed.

I agree this isn’t the view of most here, but it does help explain my opinion.

IS--

A very well said, well reasoned, coherent argument -- I just don't agree with you on the ownership issue -- and I'm going to avoid being legalistic, as in how copyright law works.

When I write something to the world, I strongly believe I have every right in the world to have what I display to the world display what I want it to display. I just can't take the leap along with you when you conclude that the community owns my words -- why does it own the words? I do believe that the community has every right to discuss my words, to borrow my words, to criticize my words, and to criticize me ad nauseum for taking back my words, but they are my words. When I use words offensively, you can judge me on that. When I play games with words -- for example, throwing an insult out for just long enough for you to see them, then quickly deleting them -- you can judge me on that. When I write something that you react to, then change what I say to make you look like a fool, you can judge me on that and call me on it. When I say something, then later pretend I never said it, you can judge me on that and call me on it. If I continue to deny the prior existence of my words, you can call me the loser that I apparently am and you're free to throw my own words back at me. I'm just not a big adherent to the idea that a person's freedom to use his or her own words as he or she chooses should be handcuffed because of the need to maintain a permanent record just in case some kind of dispute arises in which a perfect record is demanded -- there is already far too much of society's resources wasted (IMO) on extraordinary recordkeeping requirements in all facets of life that are intended to catch the 1 case in a hundred years where those records are needed.

I should add, however, that having said all this, I don't think that there would be anything fundamentally wrong (annoying, perhaps, but not "wrong") if the Board's settings were such that posters did not have the option to make edits available to them (i.e., if there were no "Edit" button available). Although this seems to contradict pretty much everything I said directly above, it doesn't bother me because this would be the known rules of the game set out in advance and everyone would know that the only way to modify anything they post is by subsequent post that explains what was meant to be said or why what was said should be treated as not having been said.

SIGNED,

THE RESIDENT INCOHERENT MISERABLE POLTROO

Thank you for posting that, Idylle. I am glad that I created a place for you to do so.

As to the ownership issue (which I think is the crux of the question), I only partially agree with you. I do think that once a poster submits something to the community, the community owns those words. But I also believe that the poster continues also have some individual ownership rights about their own words. If someone posts something, and then quickly decides that it is more strongly worded then they really wanted to post, they should certainly have a right to adjust it to meet their own sense of what they really wanted to express. However, if something has been posted for some time and affected where the discussion has gone, I agree that it is problematic for people to then edit their own words, as it distorts the nature of the discussion. Nonetheless, I do believe that people should have the right to do so if they believe it is necessary. I just wish that people would use very extreme discretion in exercising this right.

I would dislike not having the ability to edit, and I think it might even be disruptive. I've been on boards without editing, and a carelessly typed post can be followed by a whole string of corrective posts from the same author—very spammy. Furthermore, I'd bet that 95% of the time editing is used only to correct embarrassing typos.

It is also used to correct posts that should not have been made, and pretty often that's right after they're made. It's true that angry words cannot be taken back once spoken in real life, but if I make an extremely angry and ill-judged post, read through it after it goes through and immediately regret it, where is the harm in allowing me to delete or edit it? I might even think longer next time before hitting "Submit," because the possibility that it was seen in the interim is embarrassing.

I feel that only I have the right to edit my words. But I do think I have that right.

People editing their posts long after the fact (which I have done a couple of times, generally out of embarrassment) are not playing fair, but someone who does this a lot will probably find others unwilling to engage with him in discussion for just that reason. The problem is self-limiting.

I like the edit feature because I don't spell so well.

Quote:

Illegitimate reasons for changes are:

- “If someone finds out what I said about them, they won’t like me anymore.”

- “I wish that person hadn’t said those things about my friend.”

- “It’s gutted anyway.”

Amen.

The above discussion relates to posts which may cause dispute - generally posts which another poster may take issue with.

However, there are also posts which are intensely personal; posts which may reveal very personal aspects of a poster's life. Even if one feels enough trust to post such self-revelatory material to a particular MB membership at a particular point in time, at a later point that instance of self-exposure may feel very raw and one may want to remove it from public view.

IMO there should never be any question of one's right to do this. To share a personal issue - as some people have done in the members' lounge or in ToE is a gift of trust to the community. It may be that self-revelatory discussion is triggered by it on the part of others but nevertheless, one is entitled, I believe to remove such things from public sight even after a discussion has resulted.

I would hope there would be no real disputing of this right.

(I didn't think there was but I felt it was worth mentioning the less controversial editing decisions which people make.)

That's a cool adaptation, Voronwe!

Normally, I'd say one should stand by one's idiocy, but if one regrets something and would like to take it back, editing is fine, I think. It's always possible to say something like 'edited because I was wrong' or so.

It also depends on why something is edited - I don't like the idea of editing in order to hide a mistake.
For me personally, it's more of a shame to edit something in order to get out of trouble and to pretend it didn't happen than to face the trouble caused by something I said.

But if a mistake has been recognised and made up for, there's no reason it should remain visible as a document for all the rest of the world.

For example, some months ago I yelled at Primmy, because something she had (quite harmlessly) done had got my blood-pressure up. She apologised and I regretted my yelling and apologised for freaking out - but my strong words were still visible, and in the following weeks, the more I saw it, the more it embarrassed me. So, with Prim's ok, I edited the strong words out. I wouldn't have wanted my lapse of manners to remain documented forever, and as the matter had been cleared up with the main victim of it, I see no reason why it should.

This example I think also goes some way to show that what IS said here is simply wrong:

Quote:

Any pretense that doing anything, at this point, can have any impact on the “personal hurt” aspect is unrealistic.

To me this is as much as saying that once the damage is done, it's no use to do any repairs.
Call me irrational, but I think that after the damage is done is just the right time to do repairs.

I'd like to answer some other points of IS long post.

Quote:

Anything else that has been done or discussed violates my concept of transparency and accountability.

Sorry about that - I appreciate that you take the time to explain this so carefully, but I hope you can accept it, too, when the board can't accomodate your own personal concepts.

Quote:

Words have power and power is to be respected.

Words only have power when the recipient of the words lets them.
Power as such is nothing to be respected.

Quote:

That feeling inspired the creation of this board. Please correct me if I am making any of this up, but I have a memory of the desire for transparency, fairness, honesty, and self moderation.

These values are honourable in themselves, and I have advocated a democratic board because I like these values, not because I wanted to create a counter-universe to one in which they were missing.
True, I've felt abused, too, but I can accept that people make mistakes, even if they are repeated mistakes that result from some character flaw. But I'm not bearing any grudges, and what you say sounds very much like that is what you are doing.
I do not wish to be included in that definition of "who we are", then!

Quote:

At that point it no longer belongs to the member, it belongs to the community.

We have made a big point here that the posts here belong to their authors. If that is so, they are free to do with them whatever they want.
It's nonsense to say that everybody owns their own posts, but they are not allowed to change them.

Quote:

This is usually limited to obscene, racist, sexist, and libelous material.

These are also very much in the eye of the beholder.
The only reason it makes sense to allow such things to be edited is because they are hurtful to people they are aimed at. If, therefore, we allow for such things to be edited, there is no reason not to allow for other hurtful things to be edited, too.

Quote:

This thread itself contains what I consider abuse

The post this is taken from certainly does.

Quote:

It was OK to have the words around when they couldn’t respond to them but it is criminal to leave the words exposed now that they can read them and react to them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This stops short of the actual point of the discussion.
The point is what I said above: once the people who couldn't react before have seen them and have reacted, it is ok to try to make repairs. It may have been dishonest to destroy the words and pretend that nothing happened before they could see them. But once they have, there is no more reason to leave them for people whose business this is not, when the parties involved in the exchange agree it would be good to delete them.

Other than typos and little addenda to posts I have edited content less than half a dozen times at the request of others and done so readily. Things like names removed from discussions and suchlike. It is a matter of politeness and I don't think my words are sacrosanct but having someone else edit them is a different matter. I'd prefer to make that judgement myself.
I sometimes sigh when I see someone edit their post but everyone is different and has different attitudes to letting others see their thoughts. It is the different personalities which make this board worthwhile and I don't want to force posters into straitjackets to suit some theoretical ideal. Basically I am with TORN in that my words and editing style are my own and I should be judged on them.

IS said:

Quote:

I strongly believe that no one, including the author, has the right to change a post after it is acknowledged by the community, unless a rigid and conservative set of procedures is followed.

TORN said:

Quote:

I should add, however, that having said all this, I don't think that there would be anything fundamentally wrong (annoying, perhaps, but not "wrong") if the Board's settings were such that posters did not have the option to make edits available to them (i.e., if there were no "Edit" button available).

If the author of a post was denied the right to change a post after it was 'acknowledged' by the board I think ToE would pack up and go away quickly

IS. Thank you for posting. I now understand how your position on Wilko's thread follows logically from your position on Internet messageboard life in general.

Like almost everyone else, though, I break with you at the point which says that members should not be able to edit their own posts, that in some sense they belong to the community. My first reaction (as it seems, was TORN's) was to think to the American copyright statute, but of course that is not what you are talking about. Your use of "belongs [to the community]" is, I think, near-metaphysical.

In an ideal world, I think it would be as you describe it.

I think that an Internet community manifests itself at two levels. The first is the tangible manifestation of people coming together - the posts, the exchange of ideas, the agreement and the discord, the discussion and the argument, that can be viewed by any who have access to the community. The second, however, is the intangible sense in which members of a close Internet community grow together. To varying extents for varying people, membership in a community causes them to grow and change, slowly but surely - and thus, the community collectively ends up at a different place than where it started. This growth is reflected in the current and future posts of members, and continues to exist even if past records are removed, lost, or destroyed for whatever reason. (For example, I know that TORC lost a lot of posts due to server problems, but their loss does not change the existence of TORC's present-day community, such as it is, nor does it change the fact that the community's past is reflected in its current manifestation - both the good and bad parts of the past.)

So, in an ideal world, both of these manifestations would remain fully intact. However, in our less than ideal world, I think that people must be deemed to own their posts for the purpose of editing them (even if, in a sense, their posts - once posted and viewed by others - become a small part of a much bigger whole, and the bigger whole is affected by the modification or removal of its parts).

First, there are the practicalities - people want to be able to correct typos or tweak the wording of their posts even once submitted. I daresay no one would object to that. Second, as someone's already pointed out, people's comfort levels change over time; someone who posted something on a closed board in March may legitimately no longer wish for it to be available on an open board in August. This is true even if the board remains indefinitely open from now on; changes in the membership could affect people's comfort levels. Third, people may wish to post something for a specific amount of time, then remove it. I give you two examples, one frivolous, one serious: I posted an explanation of the purpose of my retrograde thread in the first post, and I've been meaning to go back to remove it, now that thread has unfolded to the point where people can figure it out. I noted in the first post that the explanation was temporary. A serious example is my second post in the "Children Skipping Grades" thread, in which I shared quite a bit of my past and school experiences; I wanted it to be available for purposes of moving the discussion along, and I did not mind if it was temporarily available to members of the current board. However, I did not want it to be indefinitely available and I did not want it to be available to Google Cache, even though the rest of the thread is appropriate for the Symposium. Thus, after leaving that information up for two days, so that participants in the discussion could see it, I removed the part that provided significant detail about my personal life. Yes, it impacts the thread slightly (part of the reason that I did not put it in the first post), but I would not otherwise be comfortable. If I had not known I would have the ability to share that information temporarily, then remove it, I would not have started the discussion at all. I know that this is an unconventional use of the edit feature, and indeed, I would use it sparingly - but I'm just pointing out that is there. The fourth legitimate use of editing is to remove words said in anger, frustration, or without knowledge of the full situation - Hobby, I think, has given a perfectly valid instance of why that might be appropriate.

In all of these instances, we are talking about people deleting their own posts. In each case, there is the downside that the board will not preserve a visible record of how the community originally was. It is a substantial downside, as this record both preserves fond (and not-so-fond) memories, and ensures maximum transparency to all who discover the community. However, I think that maximum transparency is not an absolute value. I think that it must be balanced against posters' comfort and privacy interests, and practicalities (e.g. my Retrograde example, typos). Lastly, I think that people must retain the option to take back their OWN words said in anger, pain, or frustration. The Internet is unusual in that its default is to preserve a record of these words for all time. In "real life", when words are said (unless on TV or in a Letter to the Editor) - no tangible mark of them remains; only the intangible consequences of their utterance exist. If a poster removes their own words, the same circumstance is achieved - the tangible mark is gone, but the intangible effect - what I spoke of earlier as the past reflected in the current manifestation of the community - remains. That cannot be erased. And I think that in this imperfect world, on this imperfect Internet, that compromise must be enough.

- TP

My words belong to a messageboard? Like hell they do. They are mine, my own, my prrrresssshious!

If someone wants to license my words, they can pay me. It won't be cheap. It's enough that I let the perls of my wisdom fall freely on the mudded carpets of cyberspace.

However, IS, let me take your own argument and turn it around. If the messageboard as the community "owns" member's words, then there is nothing wrong with the community's editing those words to suit the changing needs of the community.

Excellent post, TP

And I thank Idylle very much for hanging on to his essay long enough for it to be discussed, and to Voronwe for finding the right place to hold the discussion, because I think the points made are all extremely important ones, having to do with the ethical application of a technology.

I have struggled myself with the hybrid nature of the internet since we first started to do coalition building using email. On the one hand, it is a fast-moving and ephemeral mode of communication, as TP says, more like talking than like publication. Indeed, I am sure that most people think of themselves as conversing rather than publishing when they write on a mesageboard. On the other hand, it is written, and the tradition of the published word has long been to preserve every edit, every edition, every translation, because the chronology, the development of thought and preference and interpretation, has value in and of itself. Indeed, its provenance impacts the market value of published works significantly, not to mention their cultural value.

The fact is, we have not yet decided as a society which ethic dominates in this milieu. And I think we are very lucky to be sitting on this cusp where we can watch a new tradition being created and express our views about it.

My own view is not yet decided. I am still listening, and filled with delight by the quality of discussion available here to listen to.

Jn

p.s. One small evidence of the ambiguity presented by this medium ...

I do have to write for publication for my work, and I never, ever, ever end a sentence with a preposition. Dangling prepositions are to the rules of grammar what terrorism is to the rules of war.

But when speaking, the "up with which we shall not put" is not an acceptable formulation.

As you can see from the last word in the above post, on messageboards I write as I talk, not as I write. Here, in my mind, it is almost always a conversation and not a publication. It would feel not only artificial but downright obnoxious to apply rules of grammar that I would not otherwise dream of breaching in a work for publication.

One thing that I want to emphasize is that it was not my purpose to reach any kind of concensus on the issue of whether to allow editing. If that were the case I would have just taken this issue to the the Charter Issue thread. Rather, what I wanted was to give people an opportunity to express their thoughts on the subject, so that everyone gets the benefit of "hearing" everyone else's perspective.

Thus far I think that is exactly what has happened. I have been enlightened (and have had my own thoughts influenced) by every post in this thread so far. This is, to me, board77 at its best.

Jnyusa wrote:

Indeed, I am sure that most people think of themselves as conversing rather than publishing when they write on a mesageboard.

That's the way I feel. I'm having conversations here. I'm talking with people. It's just that I'm talking through writing. Basically these threads are like slow chats to me.

Also, back when we were a closed board, my posts were meant for certain people, not everyone. So when everyone was going to have the opportunity to read it, I did just a little bit of editing because it wasn't any of their business.

Quick comment on the "right to edit". It seems contradictory for the words to belong to me yet I cannot do anything about them. I personally don't use the edit button that often, and I think I've only deleted a post once. If the ownership of the words transfers the second you hit submit, then you can't possibly hold any of those words against the person, because now they belong to you, too. This just seems ridiciulous to me, plus the idea that after hitting submit the words belong to the community sounds awful borg-like.

Now I shall go back and read the rest of the very long posts.