A warning: This is feedback. My question is mostly rhetorical. I would like to state that I feel insulted and demeaned when another user edits my lovingly-crafted question or answer, removing elements of tone they judge to be superfluous. (Such as politeness, courtesy, or words intended to make new users feel welcome to the community.) I can understand why we might want to give ourselves the ability to remove bad advice, spelling and grammar errors, or content intended to abuse others. But when another user feels it is their duty to make a value judgement about my tone - removing anything welcoming or conversational  about it - five seconds after I post an answer... then what kind of a world have we created for ourselves? Is this what we want? To encourage our users not to contribute to these communities, but to attack the contributions of others?
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I edit a lot of posts every day. I often run across posts with 'Hi' and 'Thanks' on the top and the bottom of the post respectively. I also run across things like:     --User   Should these items be removed during the editing of the post by an editor?
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I was reading a question and found myself very confused. I saw that it had been edited recently by a 10k rep user and looked at the edit chain.    It seemed to me that the clarity and intent of the question was made substantially worse by the most recent edit. I don't know if this was just a one-off mistake by the high rep user. I could roll back his change to the previous version, or improve on it, but it seems like there might be a need for some kind of flag / reporting option as well - if this user has a history of misinterpreting questions and editing them for the worse, (and these hypothetical flags accumulate) should something change about their ability to edit with out review? Should I comment on the post with a request for the user to undo or fix their own change?  Not sure what my best option is.  I had initially left the post out of the question as I didn't want it to be a "I'm calling you out bro!" or a shaming kind of thing, but since it was requested and upvoted :    I think that the changes he made to the first paragraph (particularly adding the B[i] = j line) are enough of a departure from the intent of the question that it makes it more confusing.
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There was a suggestion on uservoice - now down, that really illustrate the need to stop users from gaming the system by simply asking meaningless, ridiculous question after question to gain rep. We have users who have gamed the system enough to actually have moderation capabilities.   These users do not deserve the system's trust and instead cause nothing but problems.   My solution is to enforce a threshold for how many questions you may ask and receive reputation on based on your answers or other activities.  Please stop these people from becoming trusted members of the community. It will not be good for anyone.
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When I post an answer to a brand new question I usually find that someone else has submitted that same answer just moments before. (, usually ;-) )  What I've started to do lately is (I think) the right thing.   If I notice that another answer predates mine, and that I add no value over it, I immediately delete my own answer, and upvote the other guy.  I recommend that you too do the same. Otherwise the message will be diluted.  Similarly, if after posting your "answer" you realise that you are in fact wrong (and you've just misread the question) -- you can actually delete your answer.  Is this reasonable?  (The reason why I'm writing this down is because it feels completely counter-intuitive to delete your own stuff. But it really saves everyone time and effort)
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I recently posted some comments to an answer on Math.SE.  I pointed out (politely, I thought) some critical errors in the answer.  Later, on my personal blog (which is linked from my profile), someone with a similar username tried to post a large number of comments containing juvenile insults.  The user's behavior on Math.SE itself has not been abusive, as far as I can tell.    Is it worth bringing this to the attention of moderators?  Should I use a flag or the "Contact Us" button?  Or is this beyond their purview, and I should just handle it like any other abuse on my blog?  I don't so much care about seeing the user punished, but it would be nice to help prevent anyone else from being similarly annoyed by this person.  (I haven't linked the answer here to avoid public escalation, but I can if it would help.  Anyway, it's since been deleted.)  Edit: michaelb958's comments below suggest the user has also been posting similar insults on MathOverflow, so his abuse does include the SE network itself.  I'm contacting team@stackoverflow.com and will pass along my logs.
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How was an anonymous user able to suggest ? (Warning: it has an offensive edit summary, which has been edited out in the screenshot below.) It doesn't seem to change anything, not even when viewing the Markdown source:    IIRC, if you suggest an edit and then immediately edit it again, but if the new edit doesn't meet the 6 character minimum it won't be accepted by the system. I just tried (while logged out) to retag this question and undo that in the grace period, but I get a message , as it should.
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As  and described in :      [The team is] planning to open the floodgates and allow everybody to submit content edits on posts   Am I the only one who sees this undesirable? In fact, the more I think about it the more I think it has the possibility to be a really bad idea.   I think that, to provide good edits, you must have a good idea of how the site works. I am very afraid that if you give everyone the power to edit, we'll get a lot of low quality edits. The /review link was just added to help weed out low quality questions and answers... if there's a need for such a facility for questions and answers, why do we believe that edits will be much different?  I understand that these edits will have to be approved by the community:     2 Users with N reputation will have to approve each edit. There may be a capped reputation incentive (at the moment we are thinking you can get up to 1000 points 2 at a time for good edits) – waffles♦ yesterday   But I think that this potentially doubles the work for people (like myself) who like to edit. Now, instead of just doing the edits ourselves, we have to review someone else's edits and it now takes two users to approve the edit another user made, so what could previously have been done with one user now takes three.  There's another consequence to this:     @Robert ... this helps fight information rot... so many old questions need TLC. pending edit will block further edits and be actionable inline. – waffles♦ 23 hours ago   So, if I understand that correctly, that means that if some low-rep user makes a bad edit, A higher rep user can't correct it until a second higher rep user concurs the first edit was bad?  Or even if a low rep user makes a small, good edit, a higher rep user can't make a second edit until the first one is approved? I foresee all sorts of problems here.  As it stands, reaching 2,000 reputation is a great milestone on the sites. It means you have proven yourself and, most likely, you know the flow of the sites and what's good and what needs work. Congratulations, you now have the power to edit and make these sites you clearly love a better place. I think that giving editing powers to everyone greatly diminishes the privilege of being able to edit at 2k, and I think that's a bad thing.  Am I the only one who feels this way?  Is the new "everyone can edit" feature set in stone or do we, the community, have any say?
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I asked a  recently, looking for examples of an online tool. Per the , I answered my own question with a few examples that I had already found. I did this so that these examples would be included in the answers, along with the rest.  The question has received only down votes and insults saying that this shouldn't be done.   Should I not answer my own questions?
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Question says it all:  Should users edit other users' posts to correct grammar and spelling problems?  I've seen arguments both ways, and lean toward yes...but...
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Consider the following scenario please:   I see a question and think I have a good answer or comment. I post my answer or comment and move on happily. After couple of hours I see comments that my answer is bad because this and that and it's really bad - I didn't think enough before posting.   The question is: should I delete my post, or leave it be so that people won't repeat my own mistake?
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I was testing some behavior with a low rep account, and when I was trying to suggest a few edits, I was greeted with the following message when trying to submit an edit:    Huh?!?!?!  It was a suggested edit, so why are you telling me it needs to be a suggested edit?  Turns out it was a suggested edit conflict.  The post in question had an existing suggested edit by the time I tried to submit mine.  For brand new users, this is certainly not ideal behavior as it is only confusing to them.  Can this message be changed to something more descriptive?  Or at least less confusing?  I would suggest     This edit cannot be submitted as there is a pending suggested edit on this post.     Note there is a question that looks similar, but is essentially different:  This is a feature request asking that the language be changed, while the other is a support question asking, basically, what it means.
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Lot of people have posted these kind of questions, but mine deals with another perspective of the same problem, so before you cry out duplicate! just hear me out.  I'm a pretty new user on Stack Overflow, and a rookie in the world of Javascript and Jquery.  So I wanted to make something clear...  So I asked some questions based on my knowledge, and what I do not understand, while other more experienced users kept pounding me down and down-voting me.  Well, in my understanding, Stack Overflow was made with the aim that anyone can ask, and anyone can answer.  Old users constantly say This is a duplicate! or Why didn't you check the FAQ!. Now let me ask you something, Will a new user go through all of the Stack Overflow just to see whether it is acceptable to you or not?  OR does he even know that we have a FAQ?  Seriously guys, if you think that a person's question are a waste of time, why do you take the time to down-vote him??  Old users should understand that we are just wanting to get an answer, and not try intimidate us. Give us some space!   I mean seriously, after getting bullied again and again , you think anyone would want to stay on longer?  I agree some new users are just there for spamming, but hey, not all of us are like that!   Just give us some breathing room, and come on, it isn't that hard to be nice to someone.
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I'm getting pretty close to the reputation where I can start to edit others' posts, and I'm wondering what the etiquette for when (and when not) to do so. I figure that I should edit in the following circumstances:  Grammatical or spelling errors. Clarification where the meaning is not changed. For instance if the title does not describe the question very well. Where the user has made a very minor mistake that doesn't justify a full post to clarify. To add related resources or links that will help someone answer the post, or provide context  Before the commenting feature was added, I noticed that some moderators edit posts in order to insert a reply or extension to the post. I feel this isn't good etiquette (but I could be wrong) because I don't know what to do with their changes when I come to re-edit or respond. I also feel that I should be very careful not to change the meaning of any question or answer, even if that meaning is misguided. What other rules would be best practice?  Signatures and fluff are discouraged and are fair game to be removed.  See, for example, this post by  and this post by  and also see .  Also see Jeff Atwood's response in the comments to
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Commenting is one of the unsung heroes of Stack Exchange. :   Request clarification from the author; Leave constructive criticism that guides the author in improving the post; Add relevant but minor or transient information to a post (e.g. a link to a related question, or an alert to the author that the question has been updated).   These are all essential for coordinating the creation of useful questions and answers, but originally comments were not part of the design for this system! During the beta period, it was observed that, without a way to annotate or discuss specific posts, answers became noisy and tangential. Therefore, a separate space was carved out for this purpose below each post, leaving answers free for content that, y'know, actually tries to answer the question. This created a problem, however: how do we expose useful comments inline with answers without adding back the same amount of noise comments were created to alleviate? . This simple strategy proved to be quite durable, working admirably in most common cases - but it suffers from a few drawbacks:  Comments can become obsolete, addressing issues or concerns long ago addressed via edits to the post itself. Those one-liner contests Jeff alluded to don't always produce results as  as one might like. With the addition of comment replies and real-time notifications, comments can be used for casual conversation and debate - fun and perhaps even enlightening for those involved, noise for those just looking for an answer.  Thus the need for comment moderation. This involves three groups of people:  The authors of the comments themselves can clean up after they're done, if they so desire.  can flag comments in response to the issues noted above, bringing them to the attention of the moderators. (They can also vote on comments, controlling to a degree which ones are shown)  can remove individual comments or entire comment threads, , and even  posts if comments are getting unruly.  This raises several questions, which I'll try to address below:        These guidelines are based on the authors' experience moderating comments on various sites. Individual communities, particularly on meta sites, may benefit from additional guidelines - this guide is intended as a baseline.
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I recently posted an "answer" to a self-asked and answered question with basically no votes. I was hoping to ask the poster a specific question about his code, but a moderator deleted it basically saying that it wasn't an answer and I should follow the rules.   This happened to me twice now, except the first time I wasn't deleted, just down-voted into oblivion. How am I supposed to ask questions and participate to earn reputation if I don't have any reputation to ask questions/participate within the guidelines? I came very close to 50 reputation points and then people went through and voted down my discussions with the OP.  This is almost akin to the "you can't get a job without experience" conundrum, and I feel an easy solution would be to lower the amount of reputation points required to comment on posts. It's ridiculous that this community is so hostile to someone who is only trying to contribute instead of just taking without giving back.  EDIT: Thanks, to whomever went through and voted up enough things to get me to 50 reputation points!
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I was discussing this question on team chat:  This question is a high value asset on the site it was posted, it already has 150k views, 120+ total votes between questions and answers, and a very high ratio of positive anonymous feedback. I approached improving this question aggressively, too aggressively for the team's taste:  I made  to the accepted answer  I deleted 8+ &quot;duplicate&quot; answers in that question, including a  and  answer in that question.    (Since then I have undone my actions, except for a comment conversion and the big edit.) This raises the question: What should be done to keep this high value question in great shape so it effectively helps lots of people down the line? Specifically:  Should there be any answer deletion? No answer deletion? Some answer deletion? Should we play favorites improving the top voted answer / first answer? Will deleting answers with +17 and +13 score turn away high rep users? Has this asset become a public resource, whatever that means? What should we do when new answers trickle in and are duplicates?
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Meanwhile, in August 2009  as reason for comment flagging, and the comment flags show in the 10k tools. And  is on its way. Hence: I don't care for this request myself anymore. An explicit [status-declined] would be fine.    What about being able to set comments to auto-expire? Or, alternatively, set a comment to be removable by the author of the question or answer one comments on?  This way the communities would allow for some personal or funny comments (even like "Thanks") without those comments littering the sites forever. Or, when the original author is allowed to clean up, then comments that have been taken care of by editing the question or answer, could be removed.  Why?  As, , there's no way to send a personal message to other members, I find myself abusing the comments like some "poor man's private messaging system". I try to refrain from things like "Thank you", but sometimes I do want to point out something to someone. After a while (hours, days) I then  to remove them (hoping that no-one actually replied to them with another comment, like "Thanks, fixed it").  Like :    (I don't find this feature request very important (at all), I am quite impressed by what's been given us already, and I doubt there's a way to implement it without making things too confusing. Maybe I'm just trying too hard to keep things tidy and clean. Still, I wanted to share it, just in case someone comes up with something very clever...)