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Possible Duplicate:
Should we be allowed to edit comments?

I've never worked with Greasemonkey so I don't know how it works or if what I'm about to ask is possible, but I had a great idea for a script.

You know how you can post a comment in a hurry, only to later realize that you've posted your comment with a grammatical error? To correct the error you have to delete your comment and write it all over again (copy+paste if you're really smart).

Why not create a Greasemonkey script that adds an edit button to your comments that allows you to 'edit' your comment by deleting your original and pasting the original in the comment textbox?

Is this a stupid idea? Maybe, but I'm always doing this.

It would be nice if SO supported this automatically (feature request).

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4 Answers 4

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If comments are edited, a user can change the entire thread with a single edit making every other comment a waste of space and the commenter looks like an idiot. Do you then clutter the UI with revision history for comments.

My Vote: NO

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    well, you can still delete the comment, to the pretty much same effect as you've described (even worse).
    – shylent
    Dec 27, 2009 at 12:19
  • It's actually a much worse affect: User confusion as I discovered, repeatedly, and it is quite jarring. See my writeup at webapps.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4643/14529 (the theory is that someone deleted a comment so that they could correct it after the allowed time-to-edit period has elasped).
    – bgoodr
    Jun 23, 2019 at 13:40
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If a comment is sufficiently flawed or incomplete and, for fairness, is not referred to by subsequent comments, then it could be re-written and the original deleted by the poster. I do not know if deleted comments are visible to some users but, even so, this seems better than a sequence of partial comments by the same user.

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The problem is that there is a required 30 seconds between posting comments, and it wouldn't nearly be as functional as editing because if your comment was in the middle of a group of comments, it would appear at the bottom

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    The 30 second thing should've been erased once users hit 1000 rep.
    – Kredns
    Aug 4, 2009 at 5:25
  • I'm just working with what we got. And what we have, is a 30 second limit. But yeah, the limit should be reduced with rep.
    – Tyler Carter
    Aug 4, 2009 at 5:40
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I bump into the same issue over and over again. It just happens all the time, you read you comment and there it is, stupid mistake. It's hard to believe that we don't have that feature done already, Jeff has complained numerous times on podcast that he also makes such mistakes.

To protect flow of discussion I'd say it is enough to make 30 seconds interval during which you can edit your comment and disable edit afterward. 30 seconds should be enough to read 600 chars and you can't post new comments during that time anyway.

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