The Discourse software for the MEPBM Forums is deep and complex. There are a ton of settings behind the scenes and most of them I have left in their default state.
I had a player email me today asking why he couldn’t edit a post he had made previously. Good question! I looked into this and it seems that the software, by default, limits user edits after five minutes. This is not too uncommon in some social tools. But, that doesn’t mean we have to leave it as-is.
Editing, generally, is there for people to fix typos after posting. The window of five minutes gives users a chance to read over their post after publishing it and make any final changes.
The reason I am personally opposed to infinite edit rights is that it can fundamentally alter the course of a historical message thread. You might come back to a thread years from now while doing research and the thread won’t make sense because edits were made in the history of it being online.
So…
Let’s make a decision as a community about the editing timeout setting.
A lot of boards lock you in after a couple of hours, which makes sense. You might write something hasty and realize after cooling off for a bit you may want to tone it down. Does avoid confrontation.
I think 5 minutes is too short. 15-30 minutes would be better for editing typoes and such.
For example, one could write a post, then go for smoke or whatever before returning.
Increase the duration, but keep a lockout. One might write, wander around a bit, come back and…ah, I see, I’ll edit/fix/update etc.
If I stayed up too late and ‘enjoyed’ too much…[ahem]… and decided to log in and let loose, well, there is an argument that the duration might be 12 hours… For example, I might ask the people on the naming thread why they care so much, in less polite terms…and want to, [ahem], update that to something more akin to polite discourse on ‘sober’ second thought in the morning…
OR - keep a more appropriate “Oops, should correct that or improve the grammar” duration and let the drunken flamers stand on their merits beyond X minutes…
