I have sometimes silently made corrections to spelling, grammar, or mechanics in other users' posts for the benefit of others reading the posts. Though some users consider it rude to silently edit a post, it is also rude to a post's author to put him or her down for having made errors that need to be corrected, and public indications that a post has been edited might be misinterpreted as a passive-aggressive way of doing that. It may also be rude to readers to disrupt the flow of reading a conversation with detailed "commit logs" on each post, especially if it is not the first in a topic. (This is why Stack Overflow encourages users to suggest edits to other users' questions and answers and puts each post's revision history on a separate page, though phpBB does not support either feature.)In [url=http://forums.nesdev.com/viewtopic.php?p=171640#p171640]this post[/url], calima wrote:I wonder whether the admins could mark their edits of users' posts - rude to find out your post was edited without any indication as to who did so or why.
I edited this post to add attribution for the image. Some operators of websites consider it rude to hotlink for a couple reasons. One is possibly outdated perceptions of the cost of long-haul Internet bandwidth, which may have dropped dramatically in the years since someone first started to operate his first site. Another is that authors of photos and illustrations feel they deserve credit for having created those copyrighted images, and the law agrees with them (as codified in attribution laws such as 17 USC 1202). A fair use defense requires having acted in good faith, and I feel attribution is one of the elements of establishing clean hands.
So when a site operator reads server logs and finds people hotlinking too often, he will try one of three things. One is to add a rule to the web server's configuration to produce a 403 Forbidden status when the value of the Referer header isn't an approved site. The other is to replace the image with disturbing pornography, as textfiles did to a bunch of MySpace users (NSFW: Goatse). And even if the image is on a site that explicitly tolerates hotlinking, such as Imgur, the author could do a third thing: sue for infringement. So I silently edited in an attribution to deter the website from taking measures against hotlinking because at least the site has a possibility of getting visits out of the deal.
After the complaint, I edited calima's post again to provide a notice that I had edited the post. I've put up a poll about what to do in the future, especially until such time as phpBB supports revision history for each post.
