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I posted a comment, and I can't edit it anymore. Why?

We can edit questions, even after a while.

2 Answers 2

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The goal of Ask Ubuntu is to create a high quality reference library of questions and answers. It makes sense that posts can be revised and improved. Comments are supposed to facilitate the improvement of posts, for example by pointing out the need for corrections. Once a comment has served its purpose, it ought to be removed (in practice, comments serve a variety of purposes and sometimes deserve to stick around for longer).

I think one reason we can't edit comments is that comments are somewhat conversational and being able to edit them could create confusion about what was said, especially when comments become argumentative!

Another reason might be just to avoid maintaining extensive revision histories for large numbers of comments, when comments are considered relatively unimportant anyway.

As mentioned by Thomas Ward you do get a bit of time to fix the typos and wording of your comment. As a person who doesn't think enough before starting to type, I used to occasionally get frustrated that the comment fixing grace period would expire before I was done. The thing to do in that case is just delete the comment and write it anew.

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There is a 5 minute timeout for comment revisions. Only moderators and staff have unrestricted comment editing. If you are trying to do a minor revision then don't worry about it. If you have something NEW to add, just add another comment.

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