I was under the assumption people liked that, since it helps to hide minor spelling mistakes and errors. This system wasn't intended to show every minor detail. It was meant to show major changes to posts to prevent confusion and people aggressively modifying their posts.
I agree that this is a good reason to provide this functionality and overall it does address the issue. The only problem that I have with it is that it does seem to be overly verbose and it mostly ends up tracking the minor editing and spelling corrections that we all end up doing immediately after submitting a post.
Back before the forum upgrade of about a year ago the way editing worked is that you could edit a post only up to the point that the next person responded to it. That worked well except in popular threads where you had just submitted a reply and were trying to correct a spelling or grammatical error but someone else's reply beat you to it.
I do believe that the functionality was originally intended to allow people to edit their posts for a reasonable time after making them even if someone did manage to post a reply prior to them doing so, but for some reason that did not turn out to be practical. In the end it turned out that you could edit your posts forever which of course introduces the problem that the view edit functionality was intended to address.
All in all the functionality is not all that intrusive given that you don't actually *have* to view the edits of every reply if you don't want to, however to be honest I don't really want to see someone's minor spelling/grammar corrections and would just as soon prefer that my own spelling/grammar corrections were not made so obvious to all that chose to view them. I suppose I could just do a better job of composing my replies but sometimes you're in a rush and everyone’s human.
It is good to have tractability of significant changes and I don't really see any method that could automatically differentiate between the minor things no one cares about and real changes to the content or intent of the reply that are significant.
For what it's worth I would just as soon go back to the old system of allowing edits only up and to the point that someone else replied to them and forgo the view edit functionality.
The other thing is that the forum functionality applies to both “blogs” and “forums”. Even though forums and blogs are conceptually different, the Article in the case of blogs and the Original Post in the case of forums are special cases when it comes to editing. For as long as I can remember the Article/OP could be edited forever and there are important reasons to continue to allow this to happen. There are many cases where the OP of the thread is continually updated in response to the ongoing conversation. In this case there still is a need for something like the view edit functionality however many of these kinds of Articles/OP’s are very long lived and that 1st post can accumulate a *very* long view edit history.
I think this is at least part of the issue that GmOOnii is reporting above where in his Metaverse Empire thread https://forums.galciv2.com/340151 the “view edits” hangs up and never responds. Again I *think* that his issue is that he can no longer edit his OP because of perhaps an excessive amount of changes, particularly ones that show pictures that had at one time or other been in the OP.
The bottom line is that the ability to edit the OP of a thread that in some cases can be 3 or more years old with many *thousands* of replies needs to be preserved. If there has to be some kind of arbitrary limit on the “view edits” history that eventually causes someone to be unable to edit their OP then I think that either needs to be fixed or if it can’t be fixed then the view edit functionality should be scrapped.
