Here's an alternative notion.

Leave Max out of it.

He's nobody's Dad around here, kids. We can quibble all day if we want -- I sure don't -- or we can find a reasonable compromise.

ASSUMING such a thing is possible.

The Clone Department has certain editorial abilities. They are minimal. Evidently, Shambles feels they should be nil -- that only "fellow posters" in our great cybercommune should have the power to allow any changes.

This of course would defeat the purpose of having such authority, which was made necessary by wicked anti-social shitheads in the past. It is the anti-social, above all else who have changed the mood and flavor here, not the volunteers. The problem was not created by the volunteers, it was created by juveniles and a**holes. Or by spammers, who will never approve of having their threads deleted or marked as unwanted commercial spam. So the notion of asking people if you can edit their stuff is totally extraneous to the reason for needing to do any editing in those categories -- of course their harmful intentions are such that they would decline. IF they were sane enough to accept such a modification, they wouldn't be writing scurrilous invalidations

Correcting typos? Adding a prefix to a thread name? These are NOT SUBSTANTIVE FACTORS. They improve communication EVEN if they annoy the original author who WAS NOT RESPONSIVE to a common good through some sort of oversight, or error, or unawareness. Pride of authorship is one thing, if you have written carefully and well, but thread pre-fixes are below the par and should not even be noticed. This isn't the Library of Congress, for cry-i -- it's a voluntary discussion site!

So how do we bridge this insistent, droning gap?

1. Well, we could make it personal and just give Sham his own unedited thread. I don't think that is his point though.

2. Or we could just say -- to hell with it, the present standard is good enough for 99.5% of us, let it ride as it is. That has certainly been my feeling so far.

3. We could tabulate a vote to formalize the process, assuming we could persuade Joe and Max -- who have the actual power over the matter at hand -- to accede to such a decision.

4. We could ignore it and hope it dies out. Just paint it black and close our ears.

5. We could articulate the exact protocols and formal specification of when any post or thread may or may not be changed and by whom. That has already been pretty well tried in the FAQ.

6. We could say, "This is not a community under law, but a community under the free willing participation of anyone who participates" and on that basis let the current situation continue indefinitely, being shaped by its participants, of which I will no longer be one as far as this subject goes; expecting it will sooner or later evolve one way or the other -- toward understanding or toward oblivion. That's kind of the default value. If that's the one we go with, as has been the case hitherto, I only hope it evolves sooner rather than later.
Unless something new gets said on it, I think I have plumb run out of comments to make!


A