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Don't add comment for minor comment title edit.
I added a comment to a question, then realized I made a minor typo in the comment title (left of "s" at end of word). So I changed the title. However, a second comment appeared pointing out the very minor edit to the title:
That looks stupid and is distracting. Unfortunately, I can't delete the second comment written by "System". If I had known it was going to do that, I would have left the original title alone. The extra comment is a lot worse than the missing "s".
I realize it may be difficult to automatically decide what a "minor" comment is, even though a single letter change is likely minor. However, when only a single user has written anything in a comment thread, there is no need to point out a title change whether minor or not. The system could also possibly look at the comment thread age. If it's only a few minutes old, there is little harm in allowing a title change.
1 answer
When we implemented this, we erred on the side of auditing, because a changed title essentially puts words in the mouth of the first commenter and this can be used in negative ways. I don't want to try to decide what's major or minor and get it wrong. Moderators can delete these auto-comments, so you can flag them.
That said, I think if the person renaming a thread is the author of all comments so far, we should allow silent renames. This handles the case of a new thread with a typo or unexpected formatting, which is probably the most common case for renaming. I'm not sure why I didn't do this when implementing the change, particularly as I had once proposed that approach. (Probably because I was originally thinking of only the narrow case, we expanded to allow others to rename, we decided we needed auditing in that case, and... the original case got forgotten. Oops.)
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