Proposed edit rejected - new edition is almost the same and didn't solve some problems

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.