Many of you may have wondered why your message has ended up with a little note at the bottom saying, "This message was edited by CVCalhoun," and whether anything you may have said might have been distorted by the editing. Although as moderator of this board, I have the ability to edit any message, I try very hard to avoid changing the meaning of anyone's message. So, just for general information, the following are my standards for editing:

  1. I never edit a message for substance. If I feel like a message violates the standards of this board (e.g., if it advertises a Ponzi scheme which has nothing to do with employee benefits, or attacks another writer), I will remove it entirely, but I will not edit it. I suppose that if I found a part of an otherwise useful message to be objectionable, I might delete the whole message but send a copy back to the original writer suggesting a rewrite, but so far, that hasn't happened.


  2. I will edit a topic heading, either for typos, or because the topic has drifted into a more general discussion than its original heading might have suggested. (I don't edit specific messages for typos, but I do like people at least to know what each topic as a whole is about.)


  3. I will edit specific messages to insert links to articles, cases, or statutory provisions referenced in them, when I believe that the link may contribute to understanding what the message is about.


  4. I will edit specific messages when the peculiarities of this board cause a message to get garbled. For example, if you use a % sign on this board, neither it nor the rest of the paragraph in which it appears will show on the board. Instead, you have to use %, which will insert the % sign into the message. If someone does not know that (which I consider quite understandable!), I would edit the person's message to put it back the way the person originally intended it.



And that's all the editing I do. If you want to know why your personal message got edited, feel free to e-mail me. My e-mail is ccalhoun@cwlaw.com