h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Farlander's rant for the day:

There are times when I think that it would be nice to have an EDIT POST option in conversation threads here at Hootoo. Now, I'm a member of several other forums outside, and being a perfectionist, I find it highly useful for there to be an option to make corrections or additions. Not having such an option here at Hootoo sometimes just drives me utterly bonkers, especially when I make a typo in the post and don't catch it until after I hit the 'Post' button... and I can't do a darned thing about the mistake! And when I double/triple post by accident, I can't remove it either. (At HF you'd be lynched if you didn't clean up your own mess). So... why is it that this edit/delete option isn't available here? Wouldn't it help save space since, if you could just *add* to your last post, you wouldn't have to make additional ones?

Well there _is_ a preview option (rather underused by some people it seems). However, I agree that there are some errors you just never manage to spot until a moment too late (after pressing the button). Or, in the case of the dalek bug, problems which don't even show up except on the final post.

Yup, that's happened to me as well, and it drives me nuts.

Well, in my case, it would be more of correcting statements I've made wrongly (and only realised belatedly - like quoting somebody, and then later realise I've messed up the quote a bit); I suppose I've been brainwashed by Hitman Forum, but I prefer making 'EDIT: I made a mistake here... It shoulda been...' additions to my posts rather than making a new post to make the correction.

What's the dalek bug, by the way?

I drew a text art dalek in a conversation post. It worked fine on preview. Only on posting did it turn out that a final unprotected \ character on a line (as there would be all down *its* left side ) got stripped off by the site software. The error occurs at some low level of processing strings in the pre-written and imported software rather than being in anything Jim could easily alter. Remembering that \ is the continuation character for real programming, there's potentially a reason for it but it seems very out of context here. The fix is to stick something after it, such as the invisible space smiley. Since the software bug was only discovered by me drawing a dalek (after years of other people doing other things and never noticing), I named it the dalek bug.