So when trying to edit a comment before 5 minutes after posting, you get the error message "Comments may only be edited for 5 minutes."

I think that message is is unclear and should be changed to something like "Comments may only be edited after 5 minutes" or "Comments may only be edited 5 minutes after posting."

Any objections?

Screenshot of the message.

  • It feels like a slight softening of "Comments are only editable for 5 minutes". If you feel strongly about getting the wording changed then I suspect that meta.stackexchange.com might be a more appropriate place for this kind of question. – Mokubai Aug 9 at 17:39
  • Should this post be closed due to the fact that I was mistaken about the true meaning of the message? – Cancun101 Aug 9 at 19:52
  • The wording as it stands makes sense: You post a comment, and from the moment it is posted to 5 minutes later you can edit it. Perhaps the wording could be “Comments may only be edited for 5 minutes after initial posting.” – JakeGould Aug 9 at 20:27

I think that message is unclear and should be changed to something like "Comments may only be edited after 5 minutes" or "Comments may only be edited 5 minutes after posting."

In the English language, your suggestion would mean that comments could only be edited, 5 minutes after they were submitted. Which of course is not the case, and in reality, after 5 minutes have passed you no longer can edit a comment.

The statement as it is currently written actually is grammatically correct.

  • My complete mistake, then. I was under the impression that it was in fact after five minutes. I still think the message could be a tad bit more clear, and I like the way @Mokubai put it in his comment on the OP, and I think I'll bring it up on the stack exchange meta that way. Thanks for the clarification! – Cancun101 Aug 9 at 19:51

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .
https://meta.superuser.com/questions/13246/unclear-wording-on-comment-editing-timeout
meta.superuser.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-43
94584
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZRQHHNZ5LACEQX2UYQPP46HMRCBM7QZB
<urn:uuid:137f8d3b-fc19-4f16-bd57-fa76096d38a0>
2018-10-21T12:55:10Z
151.101.129.69
text/html
sha1:HQNWOHWGBOIYGJH2QOB4SEFKSSS446LY
<urn:uuid:58a75087-d7ac-464f-b1fc-c2da66217528>
https://meta.superuser.com/questions/13246/unclear-wording-on-comment-editing-timeout
response
<urn:uuid:e10cdd3d-7c8d-4def-8391-4e5ec651f2bf>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2018
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-30-126-152.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.15 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 0.11-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/