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I've noticed that if you post a message in chat, press the "up arrow" or click "edit", and then press enter without changing anything (instead of pressing cancel), a little pencil will appear by the message indicating that the message was edited.

I decided to post a chat message, and then follow the steps above. I then went into the message history, and this is what I saw: Message History

As you can see, there are two versions of the exact same thing. I have even seen messages that were edited multiple times, but had several versions of the exact same message.

I feel that it would be more intuitive for the edit to be canceled when nothing is changed, instead of appending a new copy of the same message to the history, and making the message appear as if it were edited. As some have stated, if you edit a normal Q/A post or comment, you can cancel the edit by pressing enter. So I think that it would only make sense to make the behavior be the same in chat.

Also, one idea for an implementation that I have, is to make the "cancel" button be invisible until you start typing. Of course this would mainly serve as a visual indication that pressing enter/send will have no effect. It may also be a good idea to put a small message that states that the message will not be changed.

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  • You goofed up the title! Ungoof plix Feb 26, 2014 at 5:10

1 Answer 1

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This is the case in all chat rooms. The edit icon indicates that you started a new editing session after the initial post. If you "canceled" out of the initial edit, the icon won't appear but re-submitting the same message treats it as a new edit.

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  • I do realize that clicking "cancel" will prevent a new edit from being appended to the history. Though this isn't a major issue, I do feel that it is more intuitive to simply press enter to cancel an edit.
    – Lysol
    Feb 26, 2014 at 3:57
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    Compare this behavior to editing a post, where submitting an edit with no changes does not add a revision to the post history.
    – icktoofay
    Feb 26, 2014 at 4:02
  • or comments for that matter
    – jmac
    Feb 26, 2014 at 4:11
  • @AidanMueller Are you reporting a bug or requesting a feature? Because I personally don't feel it's a bug. It's a status-bydesign. It could always be improved though.
    – Hynes
    Feb 26, 2014 at 4:24

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