These last weeks I have been very confused reading threads on the forum, especially new ones. I see many posts quoting other posts that I hadn’t seen, only to encounter the post in question further down thread. It makes for a very confusing and disjointed reading experience.
Is something up with the forum software? Or did everyone at once just decide to skip chronology and edit past posts instead of answer properly?
In either case, it’s annoying, destroys readability and makes my head hurt.
Editing past posts is fairly common on these forums to reduce post count in long discussions, or keep discussions on a specific subtopic local. And sometimes it’s necessary if the thread is in slow mode. I do agree that it can get confusing sometimes.
People edit past posts.
It’s this, I think. I’m not a fan myself, I find it confusing having to skip up and down the thread!
Hm, is this “not a fan” from a personal standpoint or a moderator standpoint?
Personal - should have specified that, apologies!
I think it’s self-perpetuating at this point. I saw others do it as a lurker, adapted, when I became active myself, because that’s what I do to fit into a new community, and now “the next generation” will see me do this.
It’s useful for the reasons @geldar mentioned. And also, well, this forum is a lot stricter when it comes to off topic posts than other places I visit, so keeping the occasional OT and banter to a single post instead of multiple in a row feels more in compliance with the rules.
I was never a lurker but I also didn’t do it until I saw several other people doing it all the time. I could understand why they were, though, it’s just not something I see on other forums.
I honestly don’t know if this happened before 2018, but I know my first instance of doing this was the second Guns of Infinity thread, the reason being because the original thread reached the discourse limit of 10000 posts and after the system no longer permitted any further extensions to it. So when the new thread to continue discussion was created, it was understood that so as to save post space due to activity on the thread being 24/7, we’d edit posts to respond to people, both to those we are responding to in our original post and those we are responding back to who’ve commented on said post.
Okay. Thanks for the explanations. Then I just want to let people who do it know that it can easily come across as a cheap way to argue from me who is not involved. Especially when it comes to quoting, I get one impression from the quote, and then when I find the original later, I realize the quote is not representative at all. But then I have already read the first post, and had a different initial impression than if I had read them in the right order. It feels insular, as if nobody else is supposed to participate, and I tend to get a bad impression of the person.
Maybe it’s practical to you, but not anybody else.
But, that being said, I’ve got my answer, and moderators can close this thread. Guess I am just old.
I respect your different opinion on edited posts, but I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. Speaking only for myself, but when I’m doing it, I’m certainly not thinking of manipulating anyone’s opinion (especially not when the full context exists in the same thread for everyone to see), which you almost seem to be implying, or excluding others, because to me it doesn’t feel excluding when others do it, and I personally don’t have that much of a hard time following these edited posts.
But I don’t want to argue.
closed on OP’s request, if you would like it reopened please let a mod know