Moderator post: Please don't delete your own comments

[ron_newman]

If you delete your comment after other participants have replied to it, readers who arrive later will have trouble following the conversation. Please try not to do this except to correct important typos such as addresses, phone numbers, and dates. Thanks. -- Your friendly co-moderator

Comments

[anomie666.livejournal.com]

This is so gonna get snarked. ;)

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Ron, can you remove that typo exception? If a comment has already been replied to, it should stand -- corrections can be made in further comments if necessary.

[ellf.livejournal.com]

Why?

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Same reason as in the OP.

[ellf.livejournal.com]

Correcting a typo doesn't make the conversation unreadable - the content remains, unlike simply deleting a post, no?

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

If you reply to my comment and even a thread develops, my "correction" will be nowhere near your reply to what I said. Yes, whatever you responded to will be somewhere, but not very easy to find, particularly given how bad LJ threading is in general.

[amethystmoon.livejournal.com]

Only certain levels of users can edit (versus delete) their comments. If a user deletes it and re-comments with the same content but the typos fixed, I believe the thread relating to the original comment becomes disjointed.

[ellf.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's really a horrid way to implement a commenting feature.

Nice going, LJ.

[ron_newman]

To be specific, only paid users can edit their comments. Furthermore, they can only edit a comment if that comment has never been replied to.

[diatomacearth.livejournal.com]

I think the restrictions on editing comments exist at least in part to prevent people from being able to significantly change the meaning of a comment after the fact in an argument. It has its downsides, but I don't think it's an unreasonable choice.

[ron_newman]

Well, sometimes I don't realize a comment has been replied to until after I delete it. And some kinds of typos call for deletion -- wrong phone numbers, addresses, or dates, for instance.

[ron_newman]

(to clarify: the above refers to me deleting my own comment as an ordinary user, not to me deleting someone else's comment as a moderator. I've almost never done the latter.)

[antimony.livejournal.com]

I'd suggest wording the typo exception specifically for that -- don't delete because you misspelled "the", delete-repost only if you made a typo that impacts sensitive information like addresses/names, and state clearly in the repost that it's a repost and why the original was deleted.

For anyone reading these comments who's fairly new to LJ -- deleting comments isn't just like deleting comments on other blogs -- the threading breaks down in ways it doesn't elsewhere. Which is why we all are mildly irked at it.

[ron_newman]

I changed the OP to reflect some of what you said here.