Edit Forever instead with time limit?

Forum Feedback
1

I noticed, that I can’t Edit older posts I made. This seems to be a limit by the forum - Maybe after 1h a post can’t be edited anymore? Is there a reason to avoid that people shall not edit their posts even when the post is already 1 year old?

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I don’t know of any reason. I’ll look into this as I suspect there to be at least some logic for this default setting. But I guess we can at the very least make the timeframe longer.

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The two main reasons are:

  • Prevent spambots from posting legit-looking posts, then editing them into spam a long time after the post is no longer in the list of recent posts to avoid raising suspicion.
  • Prevent users from editing their posts after the fact to skew the conversation in their favor.

I’m not very convinced by either of these arguments personally, as I’ve almost never encountered either of these situations in 10+ years of using forums. For comparison, GitHub does not lock editing over time, but it keeps a full edit history where you can choose to remove specific revisions in case they contain sensitive information. Discourse doesn’t seem to have a public edit log like this, unfortunately.

In the meantime, I’d suggest making the edit limit longer for new users (between 7 and 30 days), and make it permanent for users with a Regular rank or above (moderators are already exempted from this limit).

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Thanks for the answer and I totally understand the arguments and I also agree, that personally I never occurred the potential problems. I like the idea of having long-term (active) users being exempted of this limit.
In a different forum, I updated a thread with new links from time to time, BUT the forum did not let me make new answers as the last 3 were already from me. So in that case, I just edited the last post and added my new links. This would be an example why long-term-editing is a good idea.

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Discourse has a public edit log.
i can still see the edit history of my posts in private windows.

edit: ¿why does this comment have a public edit log
but for this comment not even me can see my edit?

edit: now this comment has a public edit log. it seems i have to make at least 2 edits before they can be seen.

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Yeah we do have public edit logs. It sometimes can take a bit for revisions to show up in the UI due to how the data is handled.

We also can remove revisions if they contain sensitive information.

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Can that time be incremented? I wanted to edit a post that I’ve made around January and just noticed that I can not longer edit the post, is a bit long post that I wanted to keep updated through time with users feedback, didn’t expected there was a time limit to edit :sweat_smile: