Editing users posts for the sake of readability?

Hi all,

I have several users, who write really great and informative posts contentwise. The Problem is, that these guys do not care at all about the readability of their posts, which makes them very hard to read and in the end might drive off even the most interested users.

So, do you guys go into your members posts and clean them up where needed? I don't mean contentwise, I'm just talking about readability (and maybe even spelling mistakes) here.

Inserting breaks, grouping content in paragraphs, lists and whatever.

Or would you consider this too hard an encroachment on the users privacy?

Thanks!

It seems that I'm always editing thread titles to make them more descriptive and to include better/more relevant keywords, but I can't say that I've done much cleaning up of the content of the posts.

I don't see a problem with making it easier to read though.

Suppose you have moderators to moderate forums, support you can get moderators to correct wording grammer, spelling etc...

your choice, put it in the agreement when signing up


say something like,

At times a member off staff may alter your post or thread, this is only due to help other users read it more easily...

or something similar..

I definitely will fix thread titles. I have fixed a few obvious typos in posts, but don't mess with the posts very often.

I always correct thread titles and i made a addon for infraction system. Mods warn users who uses bad grammar or chat language and the user has to correct the post in 24 hours otherwise they receive an infraction point. If they receive this error 3 time they will get banned for 1 week. We really care about the language on our board.

Originally Posted by Mike

I definitely will fix thread titles. I have fixed a few obvious typos in posts, but don't mess with the posts very often.

Same

Alright, great to get your opinion on it, guys!

Mods warn users who uses bad grammar or chat language and the user has to correct the post in 24 hours otherwise they receive an infraction point.

This sound very harsh, but somehow reasonable. Didn't you get a lot of complains about this tactic? I mean, wasn't it driving some users off?

put it in the agreement when signing up

I already have. Thanks for the advice though!

This sound very harsh, but somehow reasonable. Didn't you get a lot of complains about this tactic? I mean, wasn't it driving some users off?

If we don't use this , new users usually use chat language and bad grammer which makes it impossible to read. We discussed with them and in order to improve readability of the board we decided to put a system like this. Instead of complain they really love this new system. New users also get used to it pretty quick. Once they receive a warning they never use bad grammar or chat language again and if they correct their post the mod reverse the warning.

Great idea, Mert! I'll definitely try to put something like this into action for myself.

What I've done is use vbseo to replace errors in words for example very important keywords or typical spelling errors. So I don't have to worry about that, also correcting titles sometimes to have more relevant keywords but only for important topics. Another thing I do is add zoint tags to threads, noticed it works pretty good too.

I will not interfere with post content to much, I do not believe it's appropriate. If it's an article that's posted I might ask the author if I can make it more readable and add some keywords to it.

Yes, I'm also using thread tags with pretty good results so far, it's great!

Currently I'm trying to educate my users in regards to why readability is a great goal to achieve. Hm, the results are mixed though. We'll see!