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I performed a formatting edit to Weird drive popped up randomly. The site is prompting me with "Edits must be at least 6 characters; is there something else to improve in this post?". Since is a simple formatting edit, the answer is NO.

I tried to click Save Edit again, but it did not dismiss the popup or save the edit.

How do I answer NO to the question and submit the change?

I'm tagging with because I think I'm supposed to answer the question, but I don't know how to submit the answer or the change.

Related, if anyone has edit powers, then add the back ticks to the volume so the leading slash is not escaped. There should be two slashes displayed there (its in the source of the question, its just not displayed).

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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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You cannot suggest edits which change fewer than 6 characters.

There is always something you can do to improve a post, even if your original intent was to fix a single-character problem. Surely some formatting can be improved, some wording can be clarified, etc. This restriction is to ensure that if we're going through the trouble of putting an edit in the review queue and taking people's time to look over it, that the edit is worth the time for all parties involved.

Once you get to 2000 rep and can edit without needing review, you can make as small of edits as you'd like; however, we would still encourage you to make every edit count!

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    Thanks @nhinkle. Then why did it ask me the question? Why did it just tell me I can't do it? Should a UI bug be filled for this?
    – jww
    Commented May 25, 2015 at 0:38
  • @jww if you wanted to you could post on Meta Stack Exchange requesting the wording be changed, but the popup does say what it means: "Edits must be at least 6 characters", then it offers a suggestion that perhaps you can improve something else with the post in order to reach that minimum.
    – nhinkle Mod
    Commented May 25, 2015 at 1:51
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    This is stupid. It encourages users to ignore spelling mistakes. I can't tell you the number of times I've been prevented from editing a simple misspelling on an otherwise excellent post, "This is always something you can do to improve a post" is an extremely bad response to this problem.
    – pbarney
    Commented Feb 17, 2016 at 14:44
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    Strong downvote here if only I had the rep to do it. "There is always something you can do to improve a post" is false, has a condescending tone, and the policy is wasting my time. For example I'm currently wanting to make a 1-character change (adding a missing backtick) which would fix the severely messed up formatting of a whole paragraph. I have no interest in making other changes in which I risk messing something else up.
    – Don Hatch
    Commented Nov 1, 2016 at 0:45
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    I recently had to edit a post that had exactly four character error. The first line of a code block was not indented 4 spaces but the rest of the lines were. As a result, the whole code block was rendered as a paragraph (which looked like mess). There was nothing else I could improve in the post apart from adding the four missing spaces. This policy discourages this kind of useful and important edits. I had to add an HTML comment like <!-- foo bar --> just to satisfy the 6 character requirement. When will this restriction be removed? It impedes useful contributions.
    – Lone Learner
    Commented Aug 31, 2018 at 9:49

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