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I proposed an edit on this post. It was rejected with the reason

This edit did not correct critical issues with the post - view the revision history to see what should have been changed.

The new edit is almost the same, save some minor style details, and what moves me to post this question is that said edit didn't resolve what I think is a critical issue, which is the title:

403 Forbidden Error Apache2 Ubuntu (Tried everything and all solutions I've ready.)

Which I corrected to:

403 Forbidden Error Apache2 Ubuntu

I guess that there's no action I can do to revert or at least discuss this situation?

But I wanted to use this space to complain. I understand if it gets downvoted.

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    Bold Text should not be used for file paths or commands, you should use code formatting for that. I can see why this was rejected because of the other changes you made which were more of the reason you were rejected, I believe. only the one who reject+edited your post can really provide more insights though
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Aug 15, 2019 at 13:21
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    "Bold Text should not be used for file paths". Good to know. "only the one who reject+edited your post can really provide more insights though". But I can't complain with him I guess. The title is what bugs me given that is crucial for searching posts. Should I propose a new edit? Aug 15, 2019 at 13:30
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    Under no circumstances because Eliah has replied here ;) They're one of the good ones who checks Meta frequently ;)
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Aug 15, 2019 at 13:33
  • ... unrelated, I did a title revision. :)
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Aug 15, 2019 at 13:34
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    BY the way, you did exactly the right thing here. If you feel an edit was rejected incorrectly, the way to revert it or art least discuss the situation is precisely this: post on meta! So don't worry, you're not complaining, in fact you're using the system as it is supposed to be used. :)
    – terdon
    Aug 15, 2019 at 14:00

1 Answer 1

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I clicked Reject and Edit while reviewing the post. Although the rejection is shown as being done by the Community bot, I'm the one who's responsible for your edit being rejected (whether or not that action ends up being considered the correct one).

I rejected the edit because it:

  • applied incorrect formatting to code-like text.

    If paths are to be formatted specially, they should be formatted as code, not bolded. In rare cases, paths could be bolded (though typically also formatted as code) to indicate that they are especially important and should receive more attention than the surrounding text. That did not apply here.

  • removed leading whitespace inside an already-correctly formatted block of code.

    This whitespace was presumably present in the file being shown, so removing it made the post less accurate. Even aside from that, removing that whitespace didn't constitute an improvement. It did not make the code any easier to read; it just changed it from having one indentation width to another.

    When a block of code is presented in a question to show something as it exists on the asker's computer, there is almost never a good reason to edit that block of code to show something else. Edits that do this without explaining the reason should rarely (if ever) be approved.

Accepting and improving the edit, to correct these problems, would have been much harder than just editing correctly starting from the existing revision, which is a pretty strong heuristic indication that an edit should be rejected.

This is not a guess. I know it would have been harder because I actually tried that first--I generally prefer to accept and improve edits than to reject them--then backed out of it when I realized it was not reasonable to do that. Then I clicked Reject and Edit and applied my own edits.

I should very likely have improved the title while I was at it, and I think that should be considered an error on my part. I am sorry about this. "403 Forbidden Error Apache2 Ubuntu" is not really a good title. But removing the vague parenthesized text after it would indeed have been an improvement.

Although I don't think the change to the title would have justified approving the edit given the other problems, I nonetheless think I could have done things better in light of that. I could either have edited the title during my edit, or rejected your edit with a custom message pointing out what was harmful, or both.

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    "Apache2 throws 403 Forbidden error when accessing site resources" isn't much better, but at least is a little more informative of the core problem :) (that was edited by me heh)
    – Thomas Ward Mod
    Aug 15, 2019 at 13:34
  • @ThomasWard Yes, you're quite right. I'd already started an edit to improve the part of this post about the title when I saw your comment. :) Aug 15, 2019 at 13:35
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    "removed leading whitespace inside an already-correctly formatted block of code." I did that because the last phrase was stubborn to get out of the code block. But nonetheless, thanks for your answer, I learn how to improve my edits. Aug 15, 2019 at 13:36

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