I've been meaning to mention this for weeks now, and being too disorganized to do it; meanwhile, it looks as if code development at That Other Place may make this much more plausible.

For years and years, we users of That Service have been begging TPTB to give us the ability to edit comments. The hell with those other so-called enhancements to the service, we kept saying: we want the ability to fix our grotty typos and HTML errors without having to delete and repost entire comments. And for years and years, we've been told that this will never happen.

The excuse given has been that editable comments have too much potential for abuse. If comments can be edited, we've been told, there will be ghastly problems because one commenter could say, "I think Hitler was right!" Then a second commenter could reply with something like, "How can you say something like that, you're completely wrong, don't you know anything about the actual history of the 20th century?!" And then the first commenter could go back and edit her comment to say, "I think Hitler was wrong and evil!", leaving our second commenter to look as though she'd made approving comments about Nazis. In public.

It's a plausible-sounding argument until you remember two things. The first is that posts have always been editable, and thus subject to the same kind of potentially abusive behavior. And yet, we see no problem with it, and no hint that posts shouldn't be editable. There is no reason to think that abuse would be more prevalent in comments. And second, there is already a strong policing mechanism in place. Most of us have comment notifications emailed to us, and those emails contain the text of the comment being responded to. The option exists to have copies of our own comments emailed to us, too. Anyone with any concerns about this need only select that option, and she will then have email copies of the original comment to which she'd replied. That, in turn, means that it would be simple to prove that abusive use had occurred, and to boot the abuser from the service.

All of which is to say that it's a silly argument when you examine it. The LJ people seem finally to have realized that; there are now evidently plans to make comment editing available to paid and permanent users, albeit with certain restrictions. But it's still not going to be perfect, and it's not going to be available to the masses.

People really, really want to be able to edit comments. Really, we do. I suspect that the ability to do so would give IJ a big advantage over other services that don't allow it, and would encourage many free users at That Place who've been reluctant to consider migration a real incentive to do it. And given that the base code may already have been written, it might not be such a huge hassle to implement it over here.

So I toss the idea out, for what it may be worth. It might be too much of a pain to be worth thinking about, but I can't tell you how happy it would make a great many people.