Ask HN: edit history for HN comments?

[olefoo]

I've noticed a couple of incidents recently of people editing their comments to preemptively respond to replies, and in some cases completely change the meaning of comments that had already been replied to, rather than continuing the conversation. I can't help but feel that this is a dishonest tactic of discussion, one that drives away those who aren't looking to score points. At one point a comment that had been edited was marked with an asterisk. I also seem to remember that it used to not be possible to edit a comment once it had replies (I am not sure on that). And there has at various points been an informal practice of adding a tagline when an extensive revision was introduced describing the reason for the edit.

I know there is a timelimit on editing, which limits the scope of historical revisioning.

Would adding a history of edits to a given comment make egregious revisions less likely?

[jacquesm]

I'll edit comments to clarify as long as there are no replies to it, and I'll edit them for grammar / typos after that. Any additions after replies have been added get marked with an 'EDIT' as seems to be common practice here.

English being my second language I just about always find a way to put my foot i my mouth the first time and I don't want to leave a trail of garbage behind :)

Part of the cause of this I suspect is the terribly small input form. If it is an attempt at enforcing brevity then it fails miserably but it certainly serves well to lose the overview of what you are writing.

I'm not sure if 'one size fits all' with this, I like your idea of a history but I suspect that it is computationally quite expensive to do.

Keep in mind that HN does not run off a regular webserver but on 'arc', which keeps just about everything in memory. And that adds up with the volume of traffic that it is receiving.

[elcron]

You can resize it with a bookmarklet like: http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/FormTextResizer/

[tokenadult]

This too should probably go in the feature requests thread.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363

That said, I silently make little edits for typos or expansions with more outlinks to add content to my post. If I think I'm making a new point, or refining a first point, I try to remember to post

AFTER EDIT:

before the new content on my post, especially if people have already voted on the post or already replied to it. But I probably make human-error mistakes and don't always carry out that intention perfectly.

Quoting the post to which you reply can help make clear what you are replying to.

[icey]

On one hand, I hate the fact that comments can be edited after they're replied to, because the whole context can be changed.

On the other hand, I'll often edit comments rapidfire for about 45 seconds to a minute after I submit to clarify or clean up grammar. It would kill me if the remnants of my sloppy editing were stuck there forever. I suppose I should just use the delay setting.

Either way, I don't know if it's that huge a deal. Miscommunciation happens; there's no reason we can't give people the benefit of the doubt.

[Xichekolas]

I do the same thing with the rapid edits.

In your profile, the 'delay' setting prevents your comment from showing to others for N minutes, so you can do this without anyone noticing. Mine is set to 2.

[colins_pride]

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to be able to edit a comment that has a reply