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Background

Stack Overflow has a five-minute edit interval where you can continue editing the current revision before a new revision is logged.

While editing, one of the bigger internal quandaries I typically have is "Should I edit this post??" (see below). The issue is whether I have 10 seconds or 59 seconds before a new revision is logged.

4-minute timer problem

Feature Request

Support two edit countdown timers:

  1. One timer should be at the bottom of the question or answer that has been edited within the last 5 minutes
  2. One timer at the bottom of the edit window (see text below in red)

Both timers should provide second-granularity visibility to when the current revision edit window will expire. After the countdown timer expires, the text should read "Saving a new edit will result a new revision".

Edit timer

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8
  • I can kinda see the desire for this, but - why wouldn't you edit posts that require it? Does it really matter if an edit shows up in history?
    – Michael Petrotta
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 0:46
  • 2
    it's about prioritizing edits. I put the important changes first, and batch cosmetic changes if I don't have time for them in the current edit. I am a perfectionist and it's not uncommon for my posts to go well into 7 or 8 edits (close to the 10-edit community-wiki limit)
    – Mike Pennington
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 0:47
  • And so, your intent is to get the meat in the first edit? Again - how important is it to have a pristine first edit?
    – Michael Petrotta
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 0:48
  • 1
    Again, community wiki after 10 edits. Status quo often leaves me at 7 to 8 edits
    – Mike Pennington
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 0:50
  • 1
    Ah. That community wiki thing is pretty weird, when it's a single person making those edits. Bit of a vestigial feature. I'd prefer to see that go away, along with the five-minute edit window, which is pretty broken.
    – Michael Petrotta
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 1:04
  • @MichaelPetrotta: As far as I know, that rule is in place to prevent users from constantly bumping their posts.
    – Dennis
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 4:27
  • How so, @Dennis?
    – Michael Petrotta
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 7:17
  • @MichaelPetrotta: Making many consecutive minor edits to a post bumps the question to the front page every time, thus increasing the posts view count. As it is, if you do so more than 10 times, you won't gain reputation from subsequent upvotes.
    – Dennis
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 15:25

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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While I admit to being somewhat obsessed with this as well, if you really need to not create excessive revisions just edit in your favorite text editor (or StackEdit) and paste it all in when you're happy with the results. Infinite edits with one revision...

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4
  • This is fine for you, but markdownpad has no Stack Overflow features such as syntax highlighting or imgur.com links
    – Mike Pennington
    Commented Jul 22, 2012 at 1:02
  • Won't necessarily help you with imgur, but Stack Edit is built on SE's PageDown editor and does do syntax highlighting. It's rather nice...
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Oct 21, 2013 at 15:24
  • if you could somehow bump an edit into your answer, I can remove my down vote. Sadly, my attempt at doing this without interrupting your day got rejected
    – Mike Pennington
    Commented Oct 21, 2013 at 17:37
  • That edit rejection sucked. Added manually, @Mike!
    – Shog9 Mod
    Commented Feb 10, 2014 at 1:46

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