14
votes
Should submitters be able to edit their own topic titles afterwards?
https://tild.es/55n has some discussion about this already, and now that this feature is actually implemented, I'd be interested what your opinions on allowing users to edit their own topic titles after posting are.
My main argument is that it would allow fixing typos and providing significant updates — think adding a [Solved] marker in the title for topics related to some problem or reflecting a title update of a linked article — without having to contact other users that have permissions to do that. The topic log allows that to happen transparently already.
I am in favour, even if it is for a few minutes after posting. sometimes regardless of how much you control some typo slips by.
I think it's better to use tags to mark questions as solved.
Three now. ;)
yes (although i would also be in favor of a time limit so it can't be abused egregiously, since some people will absolutely be assholes about that). there's a whole lot of meta conversations that currently get spawned which entirely don't need to happen but do because only like, three people can edit titles right now, and to be honest i think the overwhelming majority of the people here are mature enough to not misuse such a feature or use it to cause weird title edit wars or whatever with someone who currently has the power to edit titles.
You got the gist of it with retroactive, I would just say it's a bit weird to put it in a list of adjectives like that. Every title edit will be retroactive, I think(?) so it doesn't make sense next to 'inappropriate' which only applies to a subsection of title edits. Probably not the best explanation, but it's what I could come up with for why it sounded bit wrong to me.
You could phrase it like: I think inappropriate retroactive title editing is something to community can handle (...) but it feels a bit redundant because again all title editing will be retroactive.
Just as I write this post I'm having doubts if retroactive is appropriate here, most examples on the Web are about a decision being applied, but my gut says that it works. The person editing is trying to go back and change something that happened in the past, a title that exists on all our web browsers before we refresh the page, or maybe would have existed(?) if we had loaded the page... or something like that.
Count me in for someone who thinks titles for all posts should be able to edited by the submitter. However, it probably makes sense, for clarity, to limit the timeframe for editing of titles to match the timeframe you can edit a comment without incurring an edit flag.
I think that's 4 minutes currently?
EDIT: It's 5 minutes, as per @bauke's reply below. But mainly, I do think that the topic log should show all title changes irrespective of whether it's within the grace period. The grace period simply gives the submitter time to edit. After that, title changes should be restricted to those with title editing capabilities.
Yes, and the same rules should apply as when commenters edit their own comments: no flag in the first 5 minutes, some indicative flag after 5 minutes.
By trust people, but punish abusers, I support this.
I also support that if the submitter changes the topic title in the first five minutes, then it is not shown in the topic log.
Yes, I'd also be in favour of this. I trust other users to use this power responsibly, and I've seen hundreds of issues on reddit that could have been solved easily if title editing were permitted.
I'd suggest an even more generous editing time. Maybe 20 minutes or more? That gives commenters time to point out any mistake and OP to fix them.
There is an editing log to help point out any tomfoolery. If somebody abuses their power, I believe they should lose it.
I'm in favor of users editing their own titles, but there should be some (rather soft) limitations. I'm having a hard time thinking up a good reason to edit the title of a six month old post - best I can come up with is if, for example, ~music decided on a common nomenclature for the titles of the weekly threads and wanted to edit the past threads to make searching easier and give the titles more uniformity. That's a pretty weak use case, though, since we have tags for making that search easier already. At some point the titles should stop being editable and not just by OP - by everyone. That point should be past the usual lifetime of a thread, whatever that is. No editing 'ancient' history. That seems like a recipe for abuse - the issue being, how do you notice someone is on a rampage and editing old threads? That could turn into quite a mess if it goes on long enough before someone catches it, lots of work reverting things back to normal. Seems easier to just close that door.