14
votes
Feature request: Title editing
Now I know editing titles is a slippery slope, but hear me out.
One of the most annoying things from Reddit is that you make a typo in the title and it's there forever. It would be nice if on Tildes you could edit a certain amount of a title - say 1-2 characters. Then you could fix most typos without opening the doors to people trolling by completely changing titles.
I'm not sure if this is possible, but it would be a nice thing to consider down the road.
We've mentioned this is passing before, e.g., letting moderators / trusted users edit titles in their groups, but I think allowing users to edit their title for a 5-10 minutes after submission is probably a good idea as well
edit: p.s., I'm working on incorporating this post into a static page on https://docs.tildes.net/ so we have a centralized place that collects all these various discussions!
I'm glad to hear it's been talked about already.
Title and Link and Tag editing is definitely in the cards - for trusted users in very good standing, within the groups where they have that good standing. Title editing is important for typos but also for misleading headlines, and it'll also have some visual indicator it's been edited and by whom, I expect. Link editing is for stopping freebooters who like to steal content, so we can change the link back to the original source, again with those visual indicators. Tag editing is just so the more OCD among us can maintain some level of sanity. ;)
Thanks for taking the time to collect all of our brain droppings. It'll help immensely. ;)
Back at cha
Time based edits and an obvious display of the original title (red text below actual title for example) are a great compromise of authenticity and usability
Apart from implementing a time-based window for title edits, a Levenshtein distance algorithm could be used to make sure that the edits made aren't too major. The weight would have to be played with to be sure that simple edits could be made while preventing the bait-and-switch title edits.
That's a great idea -- the distance could also play into the trust-level required to actually make the title edit, so like if you're just a regular user and noticed a typo in the title you can submit an title edit, but substantially changing the title requires more trust
I could see this as causing a bit of editor frustration with seeing a typo to correct and not being sure if they can actually fix it or not.
I kind of imagined it as the user always being able to submit a fix -- it just depends on their trust level whether it's automatically accepted or not (otherwise it sits as an open changelog request for a mod to look at)
That's certainly more reasonable. Though there's still that ambiguity. The experience of title edits sometimes happening right away and sometimes not sounds squishy. Hopefully there's some UI feedback to distinguish from site error. Also mod queues filling up with repeats of edit attempts sounds not great.
Both of those are great points!