Any time you change a post, a FAQ, an announcement, or a story for ANY REASON besides a very minor typo, you must put “EDITED mm/dd/yy HH:MM.”
You must put that at the top of the page or post that was edited, and you must make it clear within the body of the page or post what it was that changed.
It does not matter if your page or post was only up for a few days. Or even a few minutes. Have you heard of Google cache? If you haven’t, go ask your community manager while I wait.
*Benny Hill theme plays*
Right! Whatever it was you HAD posted is still on thousands of computers, ready to be quoted in literally thousands of blog posts and threads!
Ethical people don’t rewrite history. Just because you get away with it when you’re talking to people you control? Doesn’t mean your customers are similarly bound to nod and smile while you tell them we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
It’s quite a mess to deal with. If there’s any lesson to be learned from this, besides the editing stuff, it’s that whatever you say has an equal chance of being used to vindicate you or villify you on the altar of developer quotes. All it takes is a single sentence or statement, and people can and will run with it even though you meant figuratively and not literally.
Sadly, the people doing work with your community are the ones who ultimately have to suffer through trying to make sense and a voice from an angry mob with pitchforks and torches.
Perhaps it would behoove companies to offer their own dev-quote searches like http://blue.cardplace.com/. If your more intellectually rigorous customers get in the habit of linking to the official source, and then you keep a change log AT THE SOURCE, then you can go to the page they’re quoting and edit with explanations.
I like to think it would be something like moving from an e-mail based project tracking system to a wiki. Centralize your messaging, and it’s easier to push updates.
Sanya,
I think you may want to reach out to your ‘young apprentice’ Missy cause she needs it these days.
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1600157#post1600157
I think that I have in my time been dreadfully punchy after a marathon, and written much poorer apologies for said punchiness.
Oh I remember some of the threads ‘back in the day’ on VN.
I’m just glad that Mythic has corrected it rather than going into radio silence for the weekend.
Meh. My husband and I joke about that ‘great burning ball of fire in the sky’ all the time when we’ve been spending too many hours playing our MMO du-jour. People who got offended by it need to take a step back from the keyboard and a few deep breaths.
I have an acquaintance who has recently picked up the habit of editing customers’ posts. Not moderating out parts, but rewording phrases and sentences or replacing paragraphs and adding her own commentary.
I know it comes from the best of intentions, and I know she reads eatingbees
So I’ll ask, do you think anything good can come of that (the editing, not reading your blog 
)
- Oliver
Oliver: NO. But you suspected as much.
From a different perspective. Any time you see a dev or customer relations person say something obnoxious or confess to something make sure you copy and save it.