New Limit on Ability to Edit Posts

[Archie]

From now on, there will be a 24 hour editing window. Previously, I had it set to allow for an unlimited editing window, but we've already had some problems with this. The forum software has no version control at all. Each time you edit a post, it immediately overwrites the prior version. If someone makes radical edits to old posts, this alters/destroys the record of the original conversation.

I know most of you would use the edit function with the utmost discretion, but a few bad apples can cause problems and recently someone did. (I won't say who but his name begins with E, to give you a hint). The old forum had a really strict window which I remember I found mildly annoying. The hope is that 24 hours will be long enough to allow people to correct typos and things like that but without introducing too much risk of data loss.

If you do need to edit an old post for some good reason (e.g. a privacy concern), just let an administrator or moderator know what the problem is and we'll figure it out. Depending on the exact issue, there would be a number of options.

If you have an informational/reference post that you wish to update and improve little by little over time, I would strongly recommend that you make a wiki page for it. The wiki software has fantastic version control features so it is ideal for that sort of thing.

https://wiki.codohforum.com/pages/

[curioussoul]

Thank you for the update. I've seen forums use everything from 1 hour, 2 hours, 24 hours to infinite. I think 24 hours is a reasonable middle ground, especially with some of the huge posts on this forum that are bound to contain minor typos and errors that need to be corrected after the fact.

[Scott]

I think the policy of any kind of post editing-limit sucks.

It was one of the major beefs that I had with Hannover's new Revisionist Forum circa 2003 after the old CODOH bbs went defunct.

What purpose does this policy serve exactly?

[HansHill]

As a typo-connoisseur, I agree on 24 hours. I also apologise in advance for my many typos to come.

To Scott asking about what it serves: To retain the integrity and paper trail of a conversation, so key points cannot be materially altered after the fact.

[Scott]

As a typo-connoisseur, I agree on 24 hours. I also apologise in advance for my many typos to come.

To Scott asking about what it serves: To retain the integrity and paper trail of a conversation, so key points cannot be materially altered after the fact.

I can see why that is important with formal debates, one-on-ones.

But in over a quarter century of posting and reading at CODOH, I have rarely seen any of that.

What we get instead are lots of throwaway "slam dunk" arguments like wooden doors that really don't carry very far. (I had this same conversation with Hannover literally decades ago.)

What the editing limit deadline actually does do is preclude effort-posts in favor of shit-posts.

Case in point. I recently responded to the guy who said that the Nazis did not use the term "Nazis" themselves, and I posted citations where Dr. Goebbels in fact actually does just that, and he did so with great pride and affection for the term.

But that effort-post is locked now and can't be edited after 24 hours, and I can see that there is still much typo and formatting corrections that could have been done.

The bottom line is that I don't have either a staff editor to proofread my work nor time to sit on a contribution for a couple of days to make sure that it is decent before actually posting. (Sometimes you can't even gauge properly how the formatting will look before actually posting.)

Therefore, there will be likely not be any more effort-posting from me here at CODOH. Sorry.

I was in the middle of preparing something about wood-gas with lots of photographs, but nevermind. I also found some interesting stuff on WWII German hospital bunkers with lots of implications for what Hoaxsters claimed was homicidal architecture or "criminal traces" as Pressac put it.

[HansHill]

As a typo-connoisseur, I agree on 24 hours. I also apologise in advance for my many typos to come.

To Scott asking about what it serves: To retain the integrity and paper trail of a conversation, so key points cannot be materially altered after the fact.

I can see why that is important with formal debates, one-on-ones.

But in over a quarter century of posting and reading at CODOH, I have rarely seen any of that.

What we get instead are lots of throwaway "slam dunk" arguments like wooden doors that really don't carry very far. (I had this same conversation with Hannover literally decades ago.)

What the editing limit deadline actually does do is preclude effort-posts in favor of shit-posts.

Case in point. I recently responded to the guy who said that the Nazis did not use the term "Nazis" themselves, and I posted citations where Dr. Goebbels in fact actually does just that, and he did so with great pride and affection for the term.

But that effort-post is locked now and can't be edited after 24 hours, and I can see that there is still much typo and formatting corrections that could have been done.

The bottom line is that I don't have either a staff editor to proofread my work nor time to sit on a contribution for a couple of days to make sure that it is decent before actually posting. (Sometimes you can't even gauge properly how the formatting will look before actually posting.)

Therefore, there will be likely not be any more effort-posting from me here at CODOH. Sorry.

I was in the middle of preparing something about wood-gas with lots of photographs, but nevermind. I also found some interesting stuff on WWII German hospital bunkers with lots of implications for what Hoaxsters claimed was homicidal architecture or "criminal traces" as Pressac put it.

I'm not in this as long as you are, but I have probably read countless of your posts on the old forum, thanks for your decades of input in this arena! In a funny way, that kind of shows what I mean. I would rather read your old posts WITH typos included and digest them as a sort of slowburn consciousness stream, than risk you (I know not you personally) edit something for a slam dunk gotcha, or to save face!

[Scott]

Well, that just accuses me of trying to "save face" for some reason. With formal debates between two people, that is to be understood.

What I am saying is that effort-posts need a lot of work. There is no time limit for editing comments over at Counter-Currents, for example. But editing there ends when the posts are archived and no further comments are then allowed. That might be a month or so later, not a freaking 24 hours.

And the problem with slam-dunk arguments, that Hannover was so fond off, is that they are showy but superficial and don't hold up that well under real scrutiny. So cataloging or searching easily-refuted "slam dunks" like wooden doors doesn't do all that much.

I never got anywhere discussing this with Bradley Smith because he was never interested in message forums to begin with. Neither is Germar Rudolf.

Others do see value in a robust back-and-forth. I prefer a format where people can make an informational effort-post once in awhile and get it right. To each his own.

I don't see where this sudden need for limiting the editing of posts comes from. The old board did so and I rarely posted there.

EDIT: Also, you just showed with your use of the quoting function (below) what my pre-edited post was on this very thread.

(No, I'm not really accusing you of actually accusing me personally of trying to save face.)

[HansHill]

Well, that just accuses me of trying to "save face" for some reason.

To be fair, I did say "not you personally"! Archie has mentioned it happening in his OP, though.

[Archie]

Well, that just accuses me of trying to "save face" for some reason.

To be fair, I did say "not you personally"! Archie has mentioned it happening in his OP, though.

Yes, there was someone who used the edit function to completely rewrite over 30 posts that were several weeks old.
It was deliberate vandalism. There was a thread that was pretty much ruined (thankfully it was garbage to begin with). When this happened I realized that the forum software has no version control and there isn't a way to recover posts once they are edited.

[Archie]

Case in point. I recently responded to the guy who said that the Nazis did not use the term "Nazis" themselves, and I posted citations where Dr. Goebbels in fact actually does just that, and he did so with great pride and affection for the term.

But that effort-post is locked now and can't be edited after 24 hours, and I can see that there is still much typo and formatting corrections that could have been done.

The bottom line is that I don't have either a staff editor to proofread my work nor time to sit on a contribution for a couple of days to make sure that it is decent before actually posting. (Sometimes you can't even gauge properly how the formatting will look before actually posting.)

You could post the revised version as a new post (for a major addendum, I think a new post is probably better since people will be more likely to see the new material; with an edit people who already read the thread won't know there was an update). And upon request a mod can replace the old post with the revised one.

I am pro effort-post and I do understand the desire to go back and tinker, but this clashes somewhat with the nature of a forum post which is inherently chronological and interactive. For that reason, I usually let my posts stand in their original form, however imperfect. The main exception would be pages that are meant to serve as a frequent reference.

For anything really involved, going forward I intend to use the wiki site and link back here on the forum for discussion, like in the thread below. The wiki has 1) excellent version control, 2) navigable table-of-contents which is great for anything long, 3) footnotes/citations. There is a slight learning curve with it and I get if people don't want to bother with it. But I really do think the software has some major advantages.
https://www.codohforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=107

If an "effort-post" is important and original it would probably be a good idea to get it polished up and submitted to Inconvenient History.

[Scott]

Well, rarely do my effort-posts really warrant actual articles or I might actually be submitting articles on a regular basis.

Most of the platforms that I have submitted articles to in the past have actually been deplatformed shortly afterwards like the Journal of Historical Review (2002) and The Revisionist (2005).

I don't think Inconvenient History has ever published in Print format, which used to be a criteria for all serious authors, and I'm not the only one who has felt that way. Although I'm not an academic, I used to be a Periodicals Librarian (and so did Hannover if I remember correctly). Maybe that has changed but academic Librarians are still vociferously divided on it.

Bottom Line, I just think that a 24 hour limit is beyond ridiculous. A week might be understandable.

Also, it is psychologically difficult to proofread properly (if you are a perfectionist like me) in less than a day because it takes that long for your short-term memory to completely flush the thoughts from your head.

This is the first thing they teach you in High School Composition, i.e., that you need to read your work with a fresh head and to always proofread again when doing so.

The reason for letting it sit (within reason, of course) is that you are then no longer influenced by what you *intended* to say and thought that you said, but what you *actually* said and are (somewhat) interpreting through the fresh eyes of a new reader.

So the typo or even faux pas that you never saw in reading the piece over a dozen times now sticks out like a landmine right in front of you.

And let's not be so damn paranoid that everything is interpreted as a gotcha.

Yes, you do have to contend with some possible sabotage once in awhile. Welcome to message boards.

For example, with the new RODOH forum I am not happy about having had to mak`e it register-to-read instead of the unerstandable register-to-post convention, but the new forum software billing seems to require it, otherwise I have to pay substantially for Internet bots.

And with the new software, people will post a hundred times or so and elicit some wonderful commentary, and then all of a sudden for no known reason, that person will delete their own account and that is that, effectively destroying the continuity of an entire thread. And maybe worse, it looks like they got banned for "winning an argument" or something.

In having been the top poster at the old CODOH bbs almost back in the 20th century when there was a moderator feud (involving Hannover) that triggered Bradley Smith to close the board down entirely, this issue of needing to limit poster's edits never really came up that I can recall.

And then (given that there was no long any CODOG Forum) Hannover and myself started our own open-debate boards circa 2003 with different moderating styles. And then his board (for some reason that only Bradley Smith knew) got awarded the CODOH name. I wasn't consulted. (And no, I didn't doxx Hannover ─ that is disinformation.)

So anyway, I don't recall disputes about editing past posts other than Hannover thinking it was vitally necessary and tied to his notion of rigid topic policing in order to catalog "slam dunks" reliably (that were somehow going to sink the Hoax). But that rigid style (in my opinion) goes against the grain of open-debate. Bradley Smith didn't agree or disagree but then he never liked message forums in the least.

Anyway, as previously stated, if somebody is really worried about getting their opponents' words chiselled into stone when they are in a critical discussion, instead of like "nailing jelly to the wall" (an idiom that Hitler, Goebbels, and Teddy Roosevelt have all used if I remember correctly) then they can always use the board's Quote function every time. The original person cannot edit the quotes that are posted by others.

In back-and-forths, I don't usually do full Quotes myself because it (in my opinion) tends to clutter up threads ─ so I only quote when it seems necessary for intelligibility and for quoting accuracy.

I am not personally interested in shit-posting and pithy one-liners, but I guess I can balkanize things down more. Mostly, I think, why bother?