No, that says what revision of the node was in place when I finished my reply. It says much less about what revision of the parent node was in place when I started my reply (or, more accurately, what revision was in place when I loaded the page from which I later started my reply). And I can envision some members objecting if we started publishing how long it took them to reply, so I don't think publishing the start date would be an unmixed blessing.

But I agree with others that the important thing is that people should not make non-trivial updates to their nodes without 1) making it obvious that an update took place, and 2) making it clear what (at least mostly) the node looked like before the update. It is also important that people be discouraged from making major updates to nodes at all. There are too many features that don't work well in the face of major updates so it is more important to discourage those than to publish details about how long (even just in terms of count of revisions to the parent node) it takes people to reply.

This way, at least readers would be warned that they should think before assuming that the replier is an idiot

I'd rather people think before assuming a replier is an idiot even if there has been no update made.

Do Recently Active Threads and Newest Nodes use the lastedit field? They should, especially if a change is implemented to keep lastedit up to date.

No, not currently, because the lastedit field is never updated; it's always the same as the creation date/time.

They should, especially if a change is implemented to keep lastedit up to date.

Right on!

A word spoken in Mind will reach its own level, in the objective world, by its own weight

I don't know about everyone else, but I don't see much value in a "Most recent spelling and typo corrections in nodes" page.

The site was built around the idea that new content goes into new nodes. Trying to change features of the site to work around ideas like "/msg me if someone updates a reply to one of my nodes" and "show me the most recently updated nodes" etc. just isn't going to scale. Most updates are currently (and should continue to be) quite minor updates, and as such should be of little interest to the majority of visitors. We could add a "this is a significant update" checkbox like we have for homenodes but the one we already have doesn't work well at all.

So the better route is to continue to discourage major updates to nodes, that is, to encourage major updates to happen via a new node (or at least be accompanied by a new node).

- tye