Not much, but I feel a certain relief/pleasure instantaneously vaporizing a bad joke
Oh, yeah actually a more legitimate thing, I sometimes reply to the wrong person, or reply to a person and then change my mind and reply to the thread but forget to reset the reply to field; there’s no way of changing the reply to after you post so in those cases I would want to nuke it right away
Perfect example, was going to say lol to devil when sweet Thalia blessed me with an even better jape
So that’s one whole hour of anxious hope that nobody sees that when normally I would just delete that instantly
Nobody can see what the original post was. Act like you posted something incredibly insightful in the wrong thread. They can’t prove otherwise.
bump
The latest software update allows longer post editing timeframes for users at Trust Level 2 and higher (currently everybody is at TL2 but eventually we’ll probably have new users start at TL0). By default it is now 30 days for TL2 and above.
NEW POLE
0 voters
Oops I cast my visible-edits vote too hastily. The same thought process that led me to vote for Hours can be extended to make it longer, so I hereby change my vote to Days.
My thinking is, letting people visibly edit their posts for days could benefit people reading a thread from the beginning. They can see the final draft of the post right away instead of only after scrolling down.
Forever would open the possibility of abuse because one could edit their post long after the thread is active, which would almost be a ninja-edit.
I don’t think we should make rules based on possibilities of bad actors, this is still possible over at Exiled for example and doesn’t seem to have broken anything.
You’ve got a point, that’s an edge case and I can’t picture anyone on this forum doing goofy stuff like that.
The other reason I said Days is perhaps lack of imagination - I can’t imagine needing to edit a politics post weeks after you made it, but if there are valid use cases then yes they probably outweigh the exposure to exploitation by bad actors.
In topics like programming and math I can definitely see eternal edits being useful.
30 days to edit a post seems wildly excessive and I find it hard to imagine everyday cases where someone acting in good faith would want to edit a post made that far back in the past.
Here’s the example I had in mind then: Someone makes a thread in Sundry Chitchat and wants to be able to update the OP from time to time. The current solution is to nicely PM a mod and say “Hey please change bit XYZ in my post to say YZA, thanks” then wait and hope the mod did what you wanted correctly.
It seems like we’re limiting edit times artificially just in case we get a JV or whatever who decides to go back later and change posts (that will pretty much only be read by new readers of threads btw) instead of just working with trust levels and just knocking anybody who can’t be trusted to not abuse editing down to level 0 or whatever.
ETA: We already have posts that are editable FOREVER, I just edited one to check, they’re just editable by any user who wants to do it.
I had wanted to update the first post of my health log with my weekly progress and my rowing PRs for different distances. However, I realized after that nobody is ever going to go back to the first post anyway so I just do it inline and it’s fine.
But there could easily be some other similar types of edge cases where it could be useful. As long as there is no abuse, not sure why anybody cares. If it gets abused, then cut it down.
I got confused and set this to the default 30 days so now you have 30 days to edit a post and I’ll leave it like that unless this is devastating to someone. If a post is edited, the pencil icon displays 
and a mod can compare versions in case there is ever suspicion of nefarious edits or other shenanigans.
Thanks for changing this. I had an error in one of my posts, and saw I couldn’t edit it less than 24 hours later. I could now and did.
As noted in the admin log, there is now an unlimited window to edit posts and PMs:
Feel free to discuss that change here.
Deleting a post flags it to admins/mods and increases the likelihood of them reading it.
If an old post or PM is edited is this change flagged to either admins or mods?
Good point anon
Deleting your own post flags it? I’m not aware of that. (I am in my admin account almost never, and when I am I don’t review flags.)
If an old post or PM is edited, I know that it will be marked with a pencil symbol to indicate that it’s been edited. But I have no reason to believe that editing would flag it to anyone.
Putting aside the flagging issue, I believe the following is true, but I’m not positive:
Might be useful to have a mod speak to this.
Deleting a post leaves behind this in threads:
Mods/admins can click and read the deleted post.
Editing a post adds a pencil like this:
Mods/admins can click the pencil and Discourse will show us a comparison of the post and highlight what changes were made.
Neither action sends a notification or anything like that.
It is what it is but deleted posts live on in the mod/administration views? What about edits before the 10 minute edit timer (before the pencil shows up that the post has been edited)? EG I’ve edited this post a few times, is there a log of these edits?
Nope.
phew all the magic happens in the first 10 minutes
