Is there a way to Edit somebody's own Questions/ Answers in a Quiet Edit?

Question

Not sure what you all call it, but it's basically when you quietly edit something, and it doesn't show up on Recent Activity. I think Mods/ Experts can do this, but can regular ol' users like myself edit stuff without having it glaringly obvious? There are some answers of mine that have Grammatical errors, and maybe some typos as well, but I don't really want to unnecessarily make an edit and bring up my answer(s) on the main page again.

Thanks in advance,
-Rex

_Yes

Comments

if you edit something RIGHT after it's posted, it won't say. i know because i've screwed up answers a great many times and fixed it without it saying anything

Answer 1

SoClassy did a decent job explaining this. Still a few little details missing though.

When you post an answer, question or comment, if you edit it again in the five minutes after it's posted, you can edit it without an "edited by" message appearing on it. The edits will also be invisible in the edit history. Any user can do this.

Note that if you start editing the post in those five minutes but publish it after the five minutes are gone, the "edited by" message will show up. However, I believe this does cause a glitch where the link to the edit history doesn't show up on the "edited by" message, and still won't show up if you edit it again. This doesn't actually affect the actual edit history page though, which you can access by adding "revisions" and a forward slash before the post number in the URL.

As for silent editing, only mods get access to that. This will also prevent the "edited by" message from appearing (and will stop it from updating if it's already there), but it can't stop the edits from being added to the edit history, which you can access via the method explained.

Hopefully that answers your questions!

Answer 2

Is is not possible to edit older posts without it ending up in the post-edit history and on the recent activity tab. However, as Sweet Seraphimon said, immediately after a post or comment is made, there is a gap of approximately two~ minutes where it doesn't show up in the history of that post.

There is still no way to silently edit older posts however, unless you're a mod. Also, FYI, Experts can't edit silently either, and neither can Editors (do correct me if I'm wrong but experts definitely can't).

If you're really bothered about an older post go ahead and edit it. Just don't do loads in one go and clog up the activity, or only do it on questions that are viewed more often.