On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 19:59:24 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/24/2016 9:34 AM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> Alternatively, some software allows seeing the edit history of a post, so there
>> is always that as a fallback if someone where to edit inappropriately.
>
> Having public display of the edit history defeats the purpose of being able to edit it.

In my opinion, the right purpose of post editing is to improve clarity, or - more rarely - as a way of apologizing for something that should never have been said. (Anyone interacting with me on GitHub should be aware that I frequently edit my posts there, especially within the first hour or so.)

In both cases, making the edit history public is appropriate because it protects those who responded to the original bad message from being made to look foolish/unreasonable, while still allowing people to correct their mistakes.

"Deleting" posts should normally be accomplished simply by editing the message to replace the body with "[message retracted]" or something along those lines.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 20:57:22 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> I find the Donald Trump phenomena to be an unpleasant reminder that there are certain aspects of our male culture that we men need to address both in ourselves and in others. I somehow doubt that a woman could act the same way as Trump does and get a 40% approval rating for it.

[OT] While I am also disturbed by how much support Donald Trump has gotten, 40% is a great exaggeration.

According to the national polls tracked by Real Clear Politics, Trump currently has about 43% of the *Republican* vote - which itself is only about 30% of the *national* vote, meaning that his real support is ~13%. (Most years, about 40% of the country refuses/chooses not to endorse either candidate in the general election for President.)

Admittedly, that number will certainly go up if he gets the Republican nomination - but even among those who do vote, many on both sides of the aisle regard themselves as choosing "the lesser of two evils", as opposed to truly *approving* of their candidate.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 14:36:39 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 06:32:17 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
>> Come on Adam, I know from previous interactions we had
>> that you are way smarter than this.
>
> I could certainly like to see comments like this done away with too. Reasonable people ought to be able to disagree without calling each other idiots (or implying the same).

1. He didn't call you an idiot. (He actually did the opposite, although objecting to a particular thing you said to him.)

2. Your original post was pretty obviously intended to mock deadalnix. ("LOL." "We all got a good laugh.") What kind of response were you expecting?

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 23:04:42 UTC, QAston wrote:
> If only one could somehow engineer societies (males? - that seems to be the problem) meeting your standards.

Replace male by jew in your sentence and ask yourself how it sounds.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 17:55:18 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> FWIW I like to post and just see it there. On the rare occasions I make a mistake that could make my post misunderstood I cancel the message within seconds and repost it with the fix. (BTW would be nice to have the ability to cancel a message from the Web interface.) If we allow post editing we should allow viewing the history. Generally it's not something I've been missing. -- Andrei

NNTP cancellation is something I've thought about. It has issues:

1. There is no authentication and restrictions on what you can cancel. The forum would need to implement its own (e.g. by inserting a digest into a header that can only be validated through a secret cookie). I'm also worried that by exposing this feature, I'll bring more attention to its existence, which will increase the likelihood of its abuse - and even detecting the abuse may not be easy.

2. It does not propagate. If an NNTP client will cancel a message, it will still be visible on the forum. DFeed needs to request the full message list from the server to know which messages are gone (it does this every few days or so). And, of course, mailing list users will get it anyway, and it will also be stored on the mailing list archives browsable from the web.

On 3/24/2016 8:10 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> 2. It does not propagate. If an NNTP client will cancel a message, it will still
> be visible on the forum. DFeed needs to request the full message list from the
> server to know which messages are gone (it does this every few days or so). And,
> of course, mailing list users will get it anyway, and it will also be stored on
> the mailing list archives browsable from the web.

The "Archives" I generate periodically rsync themselves against the messages on the server, so deleted messages eventually disappear from that.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 23:52:58 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 23:04:42 UTC, QAston wrote:
>> If only one could somehow engineer societies (males? - that seems to be the problem) meeting your standards.
>
> Replace male by jew in your sentence and ask yourself how it sounds.

I'm pretty sure Qaston was being sarcastic.

On Thursday, 24 March 2016 at 19:45:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/24/2016 10:07 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> Perhaps you could list some particular features you're missing.
>
> A couple things I think would improve the usefulness:
>
> 1. Consider the thread view:
>
> http://forum.dlang.org/post/nd1ff7$1mui$1@digitalmars.com
>
> and compare with:
>
> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Females_in_the_community._282176.html
>
> The latter contains the first line of the non-quoted text in the message. (I swiped this idea from slashdot). This is real nice because with a lot of messages in a thread, it can give a clue which one to click on. The (n/m) thing is n=quoted lines, m = total lines, so one can not bother with "quote the whole message and add +1 at the end" style posts.
>
>
> 2. Support markdown (not html). The great thing about markdown is it'll still look fine in other NNTP readers.

Added to my list.

I actually didn't expect that you'd be in favor of Markdown, since you were against even allowing users to view HTML message parts. Previously I had turned down suggestions to integrate Markdown on interoperability concerns, but I guess now that the majority of posters use the forum interface it's less of an issue:

https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed/pull/39#issuecomment-61725661

On 03/24/2016 03:59 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
> Having public display of the edit history defeats the purpose of being
> able to edit it.

That's not right. You can't change history, otherwise the threading of discussion will be impossible to follow. Look at how Facebook does it. -- Andrei

On 03/24/2016 11:10 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> NNTP cancellation is something I've thought about. It has issues:

Thought so. -- Andrei