Kim wrote:
I just extended it from 15 minutes to 3 hours. We'll see how we get on from there!
OH GOSH that sounds so helpful
Kim wrote:
I just extended it from 15 minutes to 3 hours. We'll see how we get on from there!
Aaah oh my gosh thank you so much.
I really hope this works out for everyone like me who takes longer to edit than they do to write.
Kim wrote:
I just extended it from 15 minutes to 3 hours. We'll see how we get on from there!
Thank you so much! I just hope it won't cause any issues
Omg kim you are an angel!
Thank-you, I’ve honestly avoided using DM/PMs because of the short editing time and being so self-conscious about typos and mistakes no matter how often I try to reread my posts and replies. 
Kim wrote:
I just extended it from 15 minutes to 3 hours. We'll see how we get on from there!
A belated thank you for this Kim! I do have a question/possible tweak? With the longer edit time comes more changes/additions to messages. Would it be possible to have the DM system alert to an edit by flagging on the 'new message' prompt? I've missed a few significant edits to DM replies since the new edit window took place. I now try to review past messages before I reply, but if it isn't too hard to do, it would be very helpful to have the message switch back to 'unread' when an edit is done.
Kim wrote:
Sanne wrote:
While it is possible to build in features that save edited records so that there's a paper trail of potential rule breaking in PMs (and I can't remember what Kim has said about that at this time, so I don't know what her reasons were/are/would be for implementing that or not)
This has existed since editing PMs became a thing.
My reasons for not wanting to make edits permanently available are about the categories that Forum Posts and Inbox conversations occupy in my head.
From the news post that announced that PM editing had been added:
Quote:
I've always mentally modeled PMs after emails or letters, where once you send it, it belongs to the person who received it. They can then keep it, refer back to it later, treasure it or discard it as they see fit. It becomes something privately sent, rather than publicly performed. This is one of the ways I distinguish forums and private messages.
That said, I also understand that if you're going to send something that might become a keepsake, it's disheartening when you realize moments after it's too late that there's a glaring mistake in the middle of that message! So I'm trying to balance the keepsake idea with people's thirst to have typo free messages, by allowing edits to private messages for 15 minutes after sending.
That said, I also understand that if you're going to send something that might become a keepsake, it's disheartening when you realize moments after it's too late that there's a glaring mistake in the middle of that message! So I'm trying to balance the keepsake idea with people's thirst to have typo free messages, by allowing edits to private messages for 15 minutes after sending.
Safety and security is not a big consideration in this area, because edits are saved. So if someone were to send you a nasty PM and then edit it so you "couldn't report them," I can still go and look up what the original message was.
Here's some previous posts I have made explaining my reasoning for thinking of forum posts and inbox convos as different and needing different features:
https://www.rprepository.com/community/forums/topic/27267?page=0#post-2745562
https://www.rprepository.com/community/forums/topic/12597?page=0#post-1822380
Both those were made before editing PMs was allowed *at all* but it still speaks to why they're different.
This has been on my mind a lot recently.
So, back when I first joined the site, I found the short time frame to edit private messages extremely jarring and honestly something that almost turned me away. The improvement is, well, an improvement, but the fact that you can't edit a message at all after a certain amount of time really has to go. And the reason for it is extremely underwhelming and somewhat selfish seeming.
This is the first time I have ever seen a site actively make its experience worse for its users in a way such as this. And it isnt for security reasons, and the reason given honestly feels like you only added the feature for your own personal aesthetic. I understand that you thought of the feature as a letter or email, but we don't. Most users of the internet is have seen look at messages like, well, a discord message. And if someone wants to edit a message they sent a month ago? Why shouldn't they?
I once had a roleplayer that couldnt respond to me until hours and hours later. Only around that time they pointed out to me a detail I got wrong, and it was too late to edit it. That should not be a feature in a modern day site. While yes, sending a new message instead of editing is something we can do, we shouldn't have to. In both views of messages, most people simply edit a message after on most other sites and dont send the same message after with a few fixes, and most people don't send letters again with a mistyped fixed. Its also just, you know, inconvenient?
Theres also a social aspect to this. Hypothetically, what if someone changed their oc's gender and pronouns and wanted to change the way their oc is referred to in an rp? With the current system, they simply cant do that for all the older messages from just a day ago or more. I also understand the fear of blanking out messages, but if you already keep copies for security purposes, why not just restore those if they were blanked out?
Overall, this is just a horrible feature that actively makes the site very anti-user for seemingly only the aesthetic view of the sites creator a decade ago. The site really needs to modernize this aspect and get rid of it once and for all, as it literally helps no one and just brings frustration for no good reason.
The concern I have for this distinction is not about aesthetic, but about joint ownership of a narrative record.
The ability to fix forever also comes with the ability to destroy forever.
When someone decides to go through and edit all of their posts in a group's forum RP to simply be X, I am the one who receives the tearful messages that a record of a long, beautiful story the other participants thought they would be able to go back and look at in the future as a record of a particular time and narrative, is now gone, and is there anything, anything to be done to get those back so that the other posts make sense?
But there generally isn't, because with the forever-edit feature of forum posts, that person had a perfect right to remove or spoil that part of the record. It was not a letter that was sent that then entered into the permanent records of the recipient should they wish to keep it. It was a house of cards they were all holding up together, and will fall down should a single person decide they no longer wish to keep their words there. This happens more than you might imagine, but I'm often the only one who sees it who wasn't a direct participant.
And my advice to the people who are devastated, every time, is that in future they should discuss with their partners whether they wish to build their RPs in a private group to utilize the edit forever feature of those forums, or if they care most about record-keeping being protected and want to use the inbox instead. If we make both the same, this choice goes away.
It may be that the modern expectation is that there should be no choice and if you care about looking back you should be taking constant back-ups, and I'm willing to be convinced of that, but I do think there is a real utility here about there being a distinction between the two. I also think that utility is under-appreciated because the loss of RP coherence is hidden to those who it hasn't happened to yet, unless you are the site admin who is constantly being asked to fix the unfixable.
If I give you the option to edit forever, why should I override your choices about how to use that feature if they aren't rule breaking?
Your argument seems to be "I should be allowed to make edits that I like forever, but you should intervene if someone made an edit we don't like"
This is not a position I want to be in. I prefer that people be able to make an affirmative choice about which risks they want to take together. The distinction between the two allows for them to make that choice in advance and allows me to respect that choice if it is exercised in future and it upsets someone.
The ability to fix forever also comes with the ability to destroy forever.
When someone decides to go through and edit all of their posts in a group's forum RP to simply be X, I am the one who receives the tearful messages that a record of a long, beautiful story the other participants thought they would be able to go back and look at in the future as a record of a particular time and narrative, is now gone, and is there anything, anything to be done to get those back so that the other posts make sense?
But there generally isn't, because with the forever-edit feature of forum posts, that person had a perfect right to remove or spoil that part of the record. It was not a letter that was sent that then entered into the permanent records of the recipient should they wish to keep it. It was a house of cards they were all holding up together, and will fall down should a single person decide they no longer wish to keep their words there. This happens more than you might imagine, but I'm often the only one who sees it who wasn't a direct participant.
And my advice to the people who are devastated, every time, is that in future they should discuss with their partners whether they wish to build their RPs in a private group to utilize the edit forever feature of those forums, or if they care most about record-keeping being protected and want to use the inbox instead. If we make both the same, this choice goes away.
It may be that the modern expectation is that there should be no choice and if you care about looking back you should be taking constant back-ups, and I'm willing to be convinced of that, but I do think there is a real utility here about there being a distinction between the two. I also think that utility is under-appreciated because the loss of RP coherence is hidden to those who it hasn't happened to yet, unless you are the site admin who is constantly being asked to fix the unfixable.
Quote:
I also understand the fear of blanking out messages, but if you already keep copies for security purposes, why not just restore those if they were blanked out?
If I give you the option to edit forever, why should I override your choices about how to use that feature if they aren't rule breaking?
Your argument seems to be "I should be allowed to make edits that I like forever, but you should intervene if someone made an edit we don't like"
This is not a position I want to be in. I prefer that people be able to make an affirmative choice about which risks they want to take together. The distinction between the two allows for them to make that choice in advance and allows me to respect that choice if it is exercised in future and it upsets someone.
I did some quick checking around and we're far from the only social media site that has a distinction about DMs being editable. For example:
Reddit does not allow editing DMs at all
Bluesky does not allow editing DMs at all
TikTok allows up to 5 edits within 15 minutes of a DM being sent, and then nothing.
Snapchat lets you edit DMs within 5 minutes of sending it
Whatsapp lets you edit DMs within 15 minutes of sending it
Instagram gives you a 15 minute edit window
Facebook gives a 15 minute edit window
Threads gives a 15 minute edit window
X, Discord and Mastodon have no limits for DM edits.
So, color me not convinced that there is only one modern way of handling things.
I now present an alternative version of this conversation:
Hey Kim, it's been awhile since you raised the limit to three hours, and you said "We'll see how we get on from there." Is there any chance this could be raised again? Or maybe even removed?
You know what, yeah! Three hours has so far been a safe window to balance concerns about editing and preservation, and has not resulted in any upsets about lost records despite it having been in use for a full year now. Although all my same concerns are there that prevent me from removing the limit entirely, I'm going to go ahead and raise it to three days and again see how we get on from there.
Enjoy everybody!
Reddit does not allow editing DMs at all
Bluesky does not allow editing DMs at all
TikTok allows up to 5 edits within 15 minutes of a DM being sent, and then nothing.
Snapchat lets you edit DMs within 5 minutes of sending it
Whatsapp lets you edit DMs within 15 minutes of sending it
Instagram gives you a 15 minute edit window
Facebook gives a 15 minute edit window
Threads gives a 15 minute edit window
X, Discord and Mastodon have no limits for DM edits.
So, color me not convinced that there is only one modern way of handling things.
I now present an alternative version of this conversation:
Hey Kim, it's been awhile since you raised the limit to three hours, and you said "We'll see how we get on from there." Is there any chance this could be raised again? Or maybe even removed?
You know what, yeah! Three hours has so far been a safe window to balance concerns about editing and preservation, and has not resulted in any upsets about lost records despite it having been in use for a full year now. Although all my same concerns are there that prevent me from removing the limit entirely, I'm going to go ahead and raise it to three days and again see how we get on from there.
Enjoy everybody!
Kim wrote:
I now present an alternative version of this conversation:
Hey Kim, it's been awhile since you raised the limit to three hours, and you said "We'll see how we get on from there." Is there any chance this could be raised again? Or maybe even removed?
You know what, yeah! Three hours has so far been a safe window to balance concerns about editing and preservation, and has not resulted in any upsets about lost records despite it having been in use for a full year now. Although all my same concerns are there that prevent me from removing the limit entirely, I'm going to go ahead and raise it to three days and again see how we get on from there.
Enjoy everybody!
Hey Kim, it's been awhile since you raised the limit to three hours, and you said "We'll see how we get on from there." Is there any chance this could be raised again? Or maybe even removed?
You know what, yeah! Three hours has so far been a safe window to balance concerns about editing and preservation, and has not resulted in any upsets about lost records despite it having been in use for a full year now. Although all my same concerns are there that prevent me from removing the limit entirely, I'm going to go ahead and raise it to three days and again see how we get on from there.
Enjoy everybody!
Three days? Wow! That is generous! I was going to suggest thirty hours, because sometimes it's a day later when I see grievous typos, coding errors. missing words, or even missing sentences!
On the forum posts, one of the advantages is the open edit, but it can be a disadvantage as well. I tend to use the 'Save' function on both my DMs and my private group's forum posts a lot to preserve great stories.
My deep embarrassment over goofy mistakes will likely remain intact even with… Three Days Grace.
*rimshot*
I’ll see myself out...
*rimshot*
I’ll see myself out...
Oh wow, I was just getting used to it not being 15 minutes hah, my brain was still stuck there. Never once thought it made my experience worse, sometimes just rolling with the typos can be fun if they change the meaning of something entirely. Making up entire new NPCs just because a name was wrong for instance. And if it's just a misspelling, oh well. They happen all the time. Missing information can be discussed and added later if need be! 3 days is super generous though, hope it makes most people happy.
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