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Basically what the title says, Does editing your own post leave details about each edit?

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    Yes, but if you make a million edits within 5 minutes, they all get collapsed into one edit in the edit history.
    – Molag Bal
    May 23, 2016 at 13:31
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    If you tried to make a million edits within 5 minutes, I suspect there would be problems somewhere.
    – Donald.McLean
    May 23, 2016 at 13:44

1 Answer 1

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Yes, unless you do more than one edit within a 5-minute window.

Edits by a user to their own post are shown in the post's revision history (random example).

But more than one edit by the same user to any post within 5 minutes, if no comments or answers are added during that 5-minute window, are all rolled into a single edit in the revision history. See also questions with the [grace-period] tag on main meta for more details about how this works. This is called shadow-editing, and just for fun, I've done it on this very answer here: first posting it with just the first two paragraphs, and then going back to edit in more text within a 5-minute window.

(This is useful for people who wish to be the so-called Fastest Gun in the West: a user can post a short and minimal answer in order to be the first to answer a given question, and then edit their answer to be longer, better, and more detailed, and these changes will not show in the answer's revision history provided they're all done within 5 minutes. This strategy has often been employed by users such as DVK, Richard Valorum, Jason Baker, and myself.)

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  • Comments break up the grace period? So if I had commented a minute ago, I would have thwarted your rewriting in the 5-minute window?
    – Molag Bal
    May 23, 2016 at 13:37
  • Ok, I see now. I was trying to pull up an example to show, but you did it for me.
    – KyloRen
    May 23, 2016 at 13:37
  • @anaranjada Correct. And you've just thwarted my second shadow edit by leaving that comment there.
    – Rand al'Thor Mod
    May 23, 2016 at 13:38
  • "Strategy"? You credit me with far more cunning (and sense) than reality would suggest.
    – Valorum
    May 23, 2016 at 15:38

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