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I recently made this edit. Strangely though, it includes changes that I did not make.

I did make all of the changes outside of the code block, but I did not delete the comments within the code block. My intention with this edit was to do some basic grammar/spelling/formatting changes, and deleting those comments totally changes the meaning of the post. I'm glad that it got rejected because I would have rolled it back, as it is a very bad edit in its current state.

This question seems to be related.

I'm not sure if this will be reproducible or not- I've never encountered it in the past, but based on the post above it seems that something similar may have happened to other users in the past.

Edit

I found this question answered by Jeff Atwood that seems to be the exact same situation (I didn't see this in my initial search).

This question also seems to describe the issue.

I think that some warning to the editor would definitely be nice in this situation. Also, in my situation, this effectively caused changes made by the author during the grace period to be rejected, which (correct me if I'm wrong) is not currently possible otherwise.

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  • My first suspicion was that the post changed in the meantime and your edit was calculated on the basis of a changed post, but there is no edit on that post at all. It seems something strips out the HTML comments when the diff is calculated or displayed. – Disappointed in SE Dec 21 '11 at 14:26
  • @Fabian: I also initially thought that someone else's edit somehow got picked up and merged into mine, but it seems strange that there are no other edits on the post. Maybe they did get merged, and there's someone out there who made an edit that didn't get attributed to them. – Drew Gaynor Dec 21 '11 at 14:32
  • Was your edit within the first 5 minutes? If so, it got absorbed into any changes the OP made during the grace period. – jonsca Dec 21 '11 at 14:35
  • @jonsca: I think that it was within 5 minutes. Timestamp of post: 13:19:43 and timestamp of suggestion: 13:25:27, which means that I probably started the edit with 5 minutes. – Drew Gaynor Dec 21 '11 at 14:40
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Probably the original author edited his post (in the grace period) while you where doing your edit. Then when you submitted your revision, those interim changes were overwritten.

I'm not sure if there are checks against this in place, but even if there are, there most probably are race conditions that can cause this problem anyway.

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  • That makes sense, and I think that my edit was within the grace period (see my response to @jonsca above). – Drew Gaynor Dec 21 '11 at 14:42

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