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It bugs me when unregistered users edit my Answers. It's not that big a deal to undo their edits (Moderators always seem to approve them almost immediately), but when they make really bad edits (and they always do) I can't communicate with them why their edts are lame.

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    (-1) Some anonymous edits are actually worthwhile. Though I do understand that some edits are annoying, or even invalid. I'm very careful when approving edits, and I'm pretty sure that Mods are as well. Also, the community requires at least two people to agree to an edit approval before it goes through. (the only exception is moderators where their votes are binding)
    – James Mertz
    Nov 15, 2012 at 23:10
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    If bad edits are being approved on your posts, then maybe the review system needs fixing, but banning unregistered users from suggesting edits is not the solution.
    – nhinkle
    Nov 15, 2012 at 23:16
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    How about presenting some examples to support your case? Right now we really have nothing to discuss about.
    – slhck
    Nov 16, 2012 at 4:38
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    I doubt it's Moderators approving bad edits. You only need 2000 reputation points to participate in the Suggested Edits review queue. Also, this has been brought up multiple times on Meta Stack Exchange and it is quite emphatically status-declined.
    – ale
    Nov 16, 2012 at 19:28
  • @slhck I found three relevant edits: superuser.com/review/suggested-edits/44220 superuser.com/review/suggested-edits/52540 superuser.com/review/suggested-edits/52560 (not sure how much here is public) -- One of them only fixes a formatting issue with the previous edit.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Nov 17, 2012 at 11:00
  • Isaac: The link-formatting ones actually looks like an interesting addition, if only marginally relevant, other than the relevant fix of an error in your post you decided to keep. The other about processes I don't understand either. Please note that of five reviewers, only one was a moderator, and another user first approved of the edit as well. It seems you're just looking at what is effectively two edits, so they make really bad edits (and they always do) seems exaggerated. Feel free to provide more examples of bad anonymous edits for your argument.
    – Daniel Beck Mod
    Nov 17, 2012 at 11:03
  • I don't actually feel comfortable with approving added texts, because I always worry about the original intentions of the Poster. So if I had seen the earlier edit on the link-formatting post, I would definitely skip it (I approved the "HTML entity" one). But I guess not everybody skip edits when in doubt.
    – TFM
    Nov 17, 2012 at 15:12

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I agree that not being able to communicate with anonymous users is an issue, because there's no way you can tell them what is/is not wrong.

The following edit suggestion is a good example: https://superuser.com/review/suggested-edits/53965

I should be adding another solution instead of editing someone else's solution, but I didn't know how to do that.

The suggestion is incorrect, because it's an "attempt to reply to or comment on the existing post", and I have no way of telling the person what to do instead.

What I'm suggesting is:

  • Require more attention from the reviewer when handling suggestions from anonymous users.
  • Inform the anonymous users that they should register when making substantial changes/additions.
  • Or, limit anonymous users' capabilities for making substantial changes/additions.
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