You can edit your post, let me edit my comment

Since my first days in the forums world, we have always (pretty much) been able to edit our posts. Whether they are initial forum threads, or replies/quotes, click the edit button and you can edit or delete your post completely. Yet in the blogging space, this is not the case.

About a month ago, Steve Rubel started discussing this topic. His post discusses deleting of comments by users, but I think he also means editing. He had many comments and most seem to believe that you should think before writing and comments should not be deletable (is that a word?). But what about misspelled words, grammar errors, and other irregularities?

I am not sure if this has anything to do with where Steve got the inspiration for his post, but TechCrunch had an article during the same week titled, "Geni Blew It." Several hours later, Mike had a chance to catchup with the founder of Geni, David Sacks, and then updated the post accordingly. I think he did the right thing by editing the post to reflect the current information. But what if someone wanted to edit their comment on that post to reflect the updated information? They can't along with the same issue on 8 billion other blogs.

My belief is that there is absolutely no reason why someone should not be able to edit their comments. I am not sure if this started because the initial blog software wanted to make it easy to comment so they removed the need to create a login like a forum does. Whatever the reason, it's time to make a change and let users edit their comments. Should really be relatively easy. From what I can tell, add an edit button. Then a link is sent to the user's email. When they click that link, they are brought to a page allowing them to edit/delete the comment. This would allow minimal changes to the systems (wordpress, movable type, etc.) and keep the simple name/email/url comment posting the same.

In case anyone is interested, here on CenterNetworks, you can edit your comment if you are logged in. So if you want to edit, then register. Registering also removes the cache so you see the posts immediately!

So my summary to every blogger out there, let people edit their comments. Why should they be treated any differently than you are? Remember, everyone makes boo-boos.