Admin needs access to posts... pleeeeease!

[mywaytoo]

Hugo... As I'm getting a few posts now, I'm noticing that I really would like to be able to 'edit' other people's posts... for example, displaying a link but not actually linking it...

[Peter <Nabble>]

Hi Anne. Regardless of being able to edit or not, I would discourage that. If you do that, people will not learn how to do it right and will rely on you to fix stuff for them. Is that what you want?
Also, it may make people feel unconformable knowing that the admin edits user's posts and may even be considered offensive to do that.
Instead of doing that I would advise you to reply explaining how to do it right. You may have to do it every now and then but it's better than having to check every post of all your members to see if they need a fix.

[mywaytoo]

Yes... I guess you're right... thank you for replying...

I think that I'll set up another instruction topic, and perhaps email its address to everyone when I contact them... or a casual tweet...  

Edit: Hmmm... I've already included a Help Topic for this... Is it easy enough to follow?

[GregChapman]

I tend to agree with pplupo. One of the things about a managing a forum is learning to allow people to post their way - even if it offends your own sense of what is best practice. It's the nature of letting other people participate rather than running a conventional web site where you maintain things your way. It's a slippery slope! How far do you take "correction" of other people's posts? Do you start correcting capitalisation, spelling and grammar?

About the only time I foresee myself jumping in to edit someone's post would be if I found a member posting gratuitous bad language. I such a case I would reply to the message topping the reply with an explanation of what I had done and why, then include a quote of the original message, edited to remove the bad language. Finally I would delete the original message. (That's about as close to editing other people's posts as you can get with a Nabble application. In the ideal world I'd preserve the original post by moving it to a hidden sub-forum rather than deleting it, but something seems to be a little broken in Nabble's software. I can manage that in a MIXED forum, but I don't seem to be able to hide things as I would like in some other combination of applications.)

The rest of the time, as pplupo suggests, it is better to try to encourage members to post as helpful a reply as possible directing them to and help files you have posted.

[DiditzZz]

Well, that is true. However having the ability to edit other people's posts does have its use. For example, someone posting uncontrollable spams or offensive stuff continuously. We could have this edit post feature to enforce "post not shown due to violation of conduct guidelines", or for the case of spam we can have feature of delete spammers' post (after banning them).

This happens a lot for gaming site. I am a moderator for www.kongregate.com and I can see how nice to have that feature for admin in case damage is being done by spammers and/or offender (while there are no admins/mods around). The users could have the option of "flag post as inappropriate" as well, but that feature doesn't really help on spammers (no one would flag each one of them spams). Just my $0.02.

[mywaytoo]

There are a few different issues here...

1. With the role of Moderator, I would expect to be able to 'edit out' / moderate the odd bit of bad language...
      i. Has Nabble got a Moderator facility?
      ii. Has Nabble got a list of bad words that will automatically be rejected, maybe on input?

2. Is it not possible to store undesireable posts that have been Deleted into a 'secret' place???. HANG ON... you can... a forum where there are NO permissions except for Admin...  

3. IMO any spammer should be permanently banned immediately AND all posts should be deleted immediately. No links submitted from spammers should be keep anywhere, by anyone! Ever! Rather than deal with them yourselves, add them to stopforumspam.com.

4. All I want to do is discretely help my users... They are busy people... and I certainly don't want to scare them off!

[sparkle creations]

I would like to be able to do this, as people will be posting pictures and would like them to all be the same size in my forum.