Policy Discussion: moderators editing players' posts

[Mr. Flay]

I occasionally fix broken quotes/formatting tags (especially when it affects votes) and blank double-posts, IF I can catch it fairly quickly. But I never really stated in my rules that I would do so, so I wanted to check in outside my games and see how other people felt.

Since polls on this site only allow a single choice, I'll do this as a list instead.

Should moderators:

1. Remove/blank double-posts
   
2. Spellcheck (except Macros)
   
3. Complete/fix broken formatting tags
   
4. Remove personal attacks (on request?)
   
5. Fix unintentional smilies (8) for example)
   
6. Remove accidental outing of roles (for any game) or personal information (home phone, last name, SSN, etc)
   
7. Add missing formatting
   
8. Anything they're asked to do in thread/via PM

Keep in mind that (AFAIK) a moderator editing another post in their own thread does

not

get the

"

This post edited one time.

"

text at the bottom.

I usually do remove roles/personal info IF I can catch it within a few minutes, otherwise there's no telling how long players have been able to see it... I'll also do smilies, but only if the player doesn't understand what's happened.

[Mr. Flay]

Yeah, I frequently do make an

::edit::

comment , I was just making sure people knew the difference.

[Mr. Flay]

My formal answerset is pleasantly close to mith's.

1. I almost always blank double-posts; I'll remove them if they're the last thing in the thread, but I'm afraid of the "No new posts" bug.
   
2. I never spellcheck (I reserve that behavior for the wiki).
   
3. I fix broken formatting tags if the resulting error is egregious (i.e. bolding/italicizing seven paragraphs, breaking quote nesting) and/or could mess up my vote counting.
   
4. I don't believe I've ever removed personal attacks, because they're part of the game record at that point.
   
5. I do fix some unintentional smilies, particularly 8).
   
6. I've only removed accidental outing of roles when it was for another game and the player PMed me frantically IMMEDIATELY. Otherwise, tough luck... luckily, I don't think I've ever seen personally identifying info in game, but I'd edit that out if it was accidental.
   
7. I never add missing formatting.

[Mr. Flay]

This is a bit of a tangent, but I'd like to ask it anyway:

How do you think vote counts should be done? I personally prefer seeing the mod post them, so I can use the View All Posts By User function to make a voting analysis, but I see a lot of people editing them in.

I've not seen a lot of it happening, but I suspect that's because I'm religious about getting a new post up near the top of each new page. Usually players start posting vote counts (hopefully marked "unofficial") when the mod starts to drift off or be absent, or posting goes nuts for a brief time (see the deadline period of Methodical Mafia's Day 1, when we cranked out like 5 pages in 12 hours).

While I agree with MeMe on mod edits for laughs/commentary, I don't see what possible benefit could be derived from analyzing broken tags; I usually only fix quotes because they're so confusing, but I still don't see it, except for broken bold tags on votes, which I never fix.

[Mr. Flay]

I mean mods editing vote counts in at the top of a page.

Oh, never seen that. I'd be irritated.

[Mr. Flay]

Why do many mods have "Do not edit or delete your posts." as a rule, when it's not possible to do so?

I have an inkling as to what the answer is, but I wanna make sure...

The site used to be set up so that any forum you had mod privs in (Little Italy, for example), you could edit/delete ANY post in that forum. Our technomage, JEEP, changed that sometime earlier this year (?) so that you can only edit posts in threads you start, or where you've been assigned the rights as "backup/replacement mod".

The old way only applies to List Moderators now, as far as I can tell... but it's still a good idea to remind people, just not as necessary.