Stylin' Threads

Here's a netiquette question about posting here. I've heard and read about a sort of minimal edit/deletion approach to posts and moderation in general here. I see the reasoning in the context of your average ask-n-discuss thread. I have a thread on my community project that I feel has grown kind of sprawly and difficult to convey the project status in. Maybe I'm being too perfectionist, but I'd like to start a new thread and try to organize it to be more clear from the outset.

I'm thinking of a posting style that has been in common use in other similarly structured discussion forums I've participated in. The basic idea is to keep the first post (sometimes 2 or 3) updated regularly so that anyone who comes along can immediately get a sense of where things are with the project, and anyone who has had past interest and would like to check in can also do so without necessarily following all of the comments that have accumulated since the initial post. But they are free to explore those if interested also.

I didn't want to go to the trouble of constructing a framework for such a post only to have it turn into some sort of headache for the volunteers here. I was also raised protestant and am hesitant to jump into the catholic mindset of doing first and asking forgiveness after... ;-)

What you can do is make the thread a wiki--just click the wiki tab when you're composing the thread, and click the button that says something like, "Make this thread a wiki." This will allow you to keep the first post updated, and you should be able to edit it whenever you want to going forward.

(Staff do have the ability to edit any wiki pages, but we only really do that on official threads like SKIP/PEP threads, event threads, etc. I don't see why any of us would ever edit a project thread like the one you're talking about.)

I hope that helps!