Is there a way to undo changes to your answer? I've had on an occasion someone adding several trivial/self-evident intermediate steps to an answer which make it more long winded and harder to follow. Would be good to have the option to undo such a change.

3 Answers
Aug 21, 2015

You can click on "update" to access your original version.

Explanation:

If you click on "updated" in the message that says "somebody updated ...."; you should see what they updated your post to and what it was before that.

The "updated" link looks like this (example from this question):

enter image source here

From the "edit history" page (example from the question above), you should be able to cut and paste the original version back in to the answer boxes.

Aug 21, 2015

I've had the opposite happen: someone deletes all of the words of explanation because they find it cluttered.

Instead of re-editing, I post a comment telling students that they can see the original answer by clicking "Updated" in the appropriate comment.

Aug 27, 2015

To undo major, harmful changes to your answer, you should @mention a Socratic Hero, who can revert your answer back to it's original state.

Explanation:

If someone made one small change to your answer that you believe makes the answer harder to understand, it will likely be easy enough to check out the edit history and copy-and-paste your original work back in if necessary.

However, imagine if someone made many harmful changes to your answer, and it would take a lot of extra work to copy-and-paste them all back to what you'd intended.

In that case, you should @mention one of the five Socratic heroes in the comment box beneath your answer asking for a revert, and they will be able to revert back to the original for you right away.

We've empowered the Heroes to make these changes easily to help keep the community safe from people who are intentionally trying to harm answers.