response 27 of 34:

Oct 31 15:06 UTC 2001

Here's a variation on Mary's suggestion that might be interesting:

  (1)  Users required to agree to irrevocable license before posting, so
       their words may not be deleted.
  (2)  The "scribble/erase" commands vanish from Picospan/Backtalk.
  (3)  An "edit" command added to Picospan/Backtalk.  If a response is
       editted, then by default people would only see the newest version,
       with a tag saying "editted by so-and-so on such-and-such date), but
       they would be able to call up all previous versions (via a link in
       backtalk or some command to show the history of the response in
       Picospan).

Parts (1) and (2) are exactly Mary's plan.  Part (3) allows a person who
regrets something they said to insert a correction and/or apology that is
seen before the original text.

Implementing (3) would be somewhat challenging.  Users should probably be
able to configure whether or not they are shown new versions of responses
that they saw before when they do "read new".  However, technical issues
are solvable.

I'm not sure this would be a good idea.