The straw that broke this camel's back was they edited and rewrote an answer I had posted, but left my name/avatar beside what was no longer my words. That was too much for me. I wouldn't mind if they did something like "(MOD EDIT: alternate info)" or removed it if they thought it was incorrect, but I can't be having my face and name next to words I never uttered. I've never experienced that type of mod behaviour anywhere since.

TBF having others edit posts is pretty key to SO. It's how, for instance, the site handles those still learning English - editors try to parse what the person meant and reframe the question or answer accordingly.

I've made drastic edits in the past... but the goal was always to capture the intent of the writer. From your anger it sounds like someone, a mod, went way beyond that?

> TBF having others edit posts is pretty key to SO. It's how, for instance, the site handles those still learning English - editors try to parse what the person meant and reframe the question or answer accordingly.

Right. Editing a message should be for stuff like typos, markup, bugs in example code, etc.

Soon we'll have LLMs rewriting answers en masse for..... reasons?

Can't you still delete it or edit in the explanation that it's not actually your answer anymore?

Depends.

Delete - yes, if it's not the accepted answer or locked. But deleting highly-upvoted answers is generally discouraged.

Edit - Probably not. Editing to correct it might be possible if it's not locked but editing to add such a disclaimer would be problematic.

The best course of action would be to request disassociation, so that it's not attributed to them any more.

If you delete or edit a highly voted answer, the moderator undoes it and bans you. Happened to me.

Completely rewriting it is against the rules, you should have reverted that or taken it to meta. They're supposed to post a new answer instead, if they think it deserved that much of a change.

You make it sound like "they" is stackexchange inc. Don't you just mean another user of the site, just like you can edit other posts? The feature that always shows who last edited a post and what changes (byte for byte diff) were made if you click on it?

If it's against the rules, like a meaning change rather than a correction, you can report it. I don't see how simply leaving your name next to it and leaving the site helps anyone nor lets the person who did it even know they made a mistake (without link, from experience moderating the edit queue I can only assume good faith by default since the overwhelming majority of the edits I reject are made for understandable reasons; one of my reject reasons is conflicting with the author's intent btw, and there's no qualification about the author needing to be correct)

Edit: I'm not sure this needs a disclaimer at all since I'm a normal user but, to be clear, I have no affiliation with Stackexchange. I posted answers mainly on the IT security site and one of them blew up the karma points, giving me access to some of the moderation queues on that specific site. I was always annoyed how slow these things are handled so I started looking at those queues on occasion, and that's basically all moderation I've ever done. No special instructions from, communications with, or particular love for the company that operates the site. I just feel that the parent comment misconstrues how the software works if it wasn't actually the company that made the edit in a hidden way (I only know of that happening for things like switching http to https)

> so I started looking at those queues on occasion, and that's basically all moderation I've ever done. No special instructions from, communications with, or particular love for the company that operates the site.

The idea is supposed to be that you've been on the site long enough to learn what a valid edit is by the time you get access to those queues, and it's tested by having already-handled edits mixed in to your queue. IIRC if you get it wrong it tells you what you should have done.

Yes? Not understanding what you're trying to say with that

The guidance you're saying isn't there does exist, but you're only exposed to it when you screw up.

Can you link to the post in question? An edit is credited to the person doing the edit. You can inspect it. Do you claim it was done differently and there's no evidence to that in the revision history of the post?