If we already disallow editing posts after 24 hours to prevent abuse of search engine trackers, why do we also need to limit the number of edits users can make? The 24-hour limit is all the protection we really need against abusing edits. All the editing limit does is hurt people trying to use Chief Delphi legitimately.
Please raise this limit to infinite if possible, or at least to something so high that you would never hit it.
It’s been set this way for almost 20 years. All the arguments for changing it seem to be related to the games forum topics, which are not the main focus of the site.
I don’t see any harm from catering to them, however.
I’m agreeing with @Brandon_Martus here. if you need to edit something a lot just make it a wiki
In this case you aren’t understanding the issue.
All posts in question are already wikis. We are already going out of our way to accommodate the forum’s spam protection.
However, the forum also arbitrarily limits the number of times you can edit a post, even if it is a wiki. This is just an annoyance, and doesn’t really serve any useful anti-spam purpose given the 24 hour limit that already does that job.
What would be helpful here is to remove that ultimately pointless limit, unless anyone can think of a good reason not to? It’s quite an easy fix, all it involves is changing a number in the site settings.
I think a BIG reason to limit the edits is all the arguing that goes on. Giving posters the ability to infinitely edit their posts after likes, mentions, replies, etc. would be chaotic, at least for a minority of posts.
I’m unaware of how something on CD is a “wiki” versus a regular post, so I’m just speaking to classic posting of messages to threads.
Is this already a problem?
The limit is high enough where people could still do this in any small argument, and if it’s a large one every post has its edit history recorded and publicly available after the first five minutes have passed, and again you can’t edit at all after 24 hours.
Thus, trying to edit your way out of an argument leaves a public paper trail of exactly what you tried to do, and is also not an issue we currently have and so is not likely to be born by raising the limit higher.
That doesn’t really work as a reason for maintaining a limit on the number of edits, as it is again really only affecting legitimate users.
For everyone’s consideration:
Is there a stated mission/vision statement for CD?
Or perhaps a list of core values?
As far as I can tell, the stated mission statement is: “A discussion forum for the FIRST community.”
That comes from the CD “about” page. That, to me, reads that this is a way for community members of FIRST to participate in FIRST activities. A “forum” is defined as “a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged.” That definition makes it sound like as long as community members are interacting, in ways they like, then the forum is doing its duty.
Every good community has a strong aspect of focus and effort, but also has a side of leisure and community building. Just as we love to say “FRC is the hardest fun you’ll ever have,” we should be supporting both the technical and interactive parts of FIRST and CD.
Many in FIRST find CD to be a particularly daunting location to find help sometimes, I know I did. But fun, community building games brings people together in a less intensive way, allowing everyone to have an opportunity to find a group for them. The number of friends and connections I have made to other FIRST counterparts around the world far surpasses any I could have made in the absence of games. And because of it, I feel far more comfortable interacting, helping, and learning from the technical side of CD.
Before Mafia started on CD, there were 2 members from team 2412. Myself, and a Mentor of ours. Today, we have 16 active members on CD, most of them participating in technical discussion just as often as games. Most of them would not have found their way here if it weren’t for a community building game here to meet them.
I mean no disrespect when writing this. I understand that I haven’t been here as long as many, and that my activity with games far surpasses my activity in technical discussion; however, I am of the firm belief that games like SLFF, CDFM, The Caption Contest, or otherwise, are strong community building and leisure activities that ACTIVELY contribute to the goal of making a community on this forum. While technical discussion may be more connected to the goals of FIRST, supporting games and chit-chat, in ways that we can, certainly does not detract from the technical side, and many would argue, actually boasts the technical side.
I don’t personally have an issue with a minimum edit number, but if raising the minimum number of edits can help games, while not hurting another part of CD, then I see no reason to withhold a change. I don’t think “that’s the way its always been” is sufficient.
While I only came to this site for the mafia games held here, I’ll like to think that I know what I’m talking about involving forum communities. People don’t really understand why communities have a game section and this really leaves a divide between the two. Every community I have been to has been like that, where there’s this divide between the two of them.
However there’s an importance of the games section. The game sections is what draws in new people who have never heard of it before. I would argue that the games section is probably one of the most important parts between building a permanent community. Since this site is such a large community, it will never die even if it didn’t have a games section. However the games section is what keeps some people invested in the site.
The people who play games such as forum mafia will be here a majority of the time I can assure you of that. Once you play games such as that and become part of the community, you will realize how special that community is to the site. Regardless of whether the sites goal is to provide a spot for people to host games, I’ll like to think that the games section is one of the important backbones of a site.
So while it may have been this way for 20 years, it doesn’t mean it has to stay this way. People have already pointed out that there’s not a real consequence for changing this. The only argument against changing it is that it helps improve a section of the forum that isn’t the original purpose of the forum. That is why I think you should change it, because all it can do is help.
I was just pointing out that it hasn’t caused major issues in the past. I do see how the games section helps bring in new users and provides the opportunity for them to participate in other areas of the forum.
I believe the main reason the prior software (and Discourse) default to not allowing editing after a certain amount of time is to prevent changes in the posts that inadvertently affect the conversation that follows that post. If a user goes back and edits their post 3-4 days and 100+ replies later, there isn’t a notification to anybody that the content/context of that post has changed.
I wouldn’t be opposed to installing a plugin to modify the behavior of the edit limits on a per-category basis, but someone will have to find one that is actively being maintained, or take this opportunity to learn how to write a Discourse plugin. 
Except you literally can’t do that because of the (totally understandable) 24 hour limit on editing posts.
There is no plugin needed here - what you’re afraid of is already impossible.
All that raising the edit limit would do is help those of us working on a lot of posts at once to be able to continue to do so, rather than being arbitrarily locked out.
It’s literally just changing a number, and there really doesn’t seem to be any downside given the protections that already exist already prevent every negative thing I have seen in this thread.
Editing posts a lot (or a lot of posts) shouldn’t be encouraged. Take the time to be a good internet citizen and take time to compose your posts so they don’t have to be edited. That’s why it shouldn’t be raised in general. What you linked to is the general setting, not a per category setting, like Brandon agreed to.
I find it ironic that many of your games don’t allow editing of posts.
You want to keep the 24hr limit, but make the count infinite (so infinite edits for 24 hours). You also say this wouldn’t be a big issue for most posts. And this is true. A small discussion between 5 people over a couple of days would be an odd situation to make 40 edits to the original post.
But…
63 posts in 19 hours:
While this is not a typical post on CD (and neither are games posts, by rough estimate less than 10% of threads under Other are Games, and Other is a small part of CD as a whole), you can imagine the turmoil the OP would cause by changing the post 20 times in a 19 hour period, right?
There are no more red dots (
) but I’m sure in the CD of old you’d get quite a few for making that many changes in a technical post.
The change you are asking for could benefit a small number of non-robotics posts on this site.
The change you are asking for could derail a small number of robotics posts on this site.
It seems the moderators are in favor of protecting the quality of high traffic robotics-related threads through edit limits. You may just need to accept that.
Just to throw a wrench in this: The one post that NEEDS to be edited needs to be edited frequently. That would be the opening post, which is usually converted to a wiki right away.
There’s also occasional grammar edits, but those are a one-time deal.
Question: Could the edit limit only be raised on wiki posts?
In our case, this is not the issue at all. Edits need to be made for drafting, players, and as the game goes on, and so it’s not really a question of post composition. In particular, a lot of post edits are made in PMs, which wouldn’t even benefit from a per-category limit change. To be locked out of editing any posts I make on the entire forum because I’m working on my own big project in a PM chain with myself is both aggravating and unnecessary.
Unless I’m misreading this, it seems kinda passive-aggressive? I’m just trying to make user experience better here, not start a fight.
No, I can’t, because there is a public log of every edit that has been made to a given post. You can see all of them by clicking on the orange pencil. If someone were to abuse this, it would be highly visible, and moderators could rectify the problem.
In addition, the limit is already high enough where you could make a series of edits to one post in the way you described. It’s really only when editing multiple wikis that this limit becomes a problem, and there is no evidence that anyone is trying to abuse the website in that fashion, while there are multiple instances of people trying to use the forum in a legitimate manner being hamstrung by this limit.
Again, the limit is not low enough that this could suddenly become a problem if it has not yet.
Again, the edit log is public and easily viewable, so abuse of the feature can be easily spotted and reported.
I don’t see any real reason to be afraid of raising a limit that is already high enough that nobody is abusing it. Jumping up by an order of magnitude on a limit most people don’t reach won’t suddenly make their number of edits jump up by an order of magnitude as well. It will, however, allow the people who are hitting this limit to use the forum instead of having it arbitrarily hamper their ability to edit, just because they’re making edits elsewhere.
I don’t think Discourse natively supports this.
Would be easier to see if there’s a way to make wiki edits not count. I’ll look around for that.
After all, this does solve the problem elegantly. Good idea.
I asked on Discourse’s site and got the following response:
I can press on to see if it’s possible but I’m definitely inclined to agree that trying to legislate issues that don’t exist yet is not the move.
One of the main Discourse staff also added their take:
I’ve asked if a plugin could fix this, but it seems they tend to think it’s not worth the time investment unless it becomes a proven issue.
So we’ll see about plugins I guess. 
This cannot always be done. In mafia sign up pages, the OP needs to be changed a lot so we can update who has signed up to play. If there’s 20 people who are playing in that game, then there should be 20 edits (not including people who change their minds about deciding to play and their replacements)
I have to side with the admins here. #other:games-trivia is no really the main focus here on CD, though I do enjoy them. Games should cater to the existing limitations of CD. There are reasons for the way the site is set up. If the devs did decide to set up more editing for only threads tagged games, I still think it would be a waste of their time. The most complex game I play is some occasional mafia. Others I find too complicated/time consuming/annoying to play. Keep the actual FIRST related discussion top priority here.