Posts now become un-editable after about 24 hours. I don’t know if this was intentional, but it makes running a game on the forum with an updated OP entirely impossible and makes copying old posts to edit impossible as well. Not sure how this change was made, but please revert it if you can! 
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The change was intentional. The previous ability to edit posts for up to 60 days* was an unintentional miscalculation. If you want this changed, you’ll have to petition @Brandon_Martus.
He did suggest to me that once you become a member with Trust Level 2, you can make topics into Wikis. These can be edited without a time limit by anyone, with the purpose of gathering and preserving information. I’m not sure for what use you wanted unlimited editing, but this may be something to look into.
*it hasn’t been 60 days since the migration to Discourse so it was effectively unlimited to this point
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With vbulletin, the edit limit was 24 hours.
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What they said…
So while I understand wanting to add some sort of time limit, I’m trying to figure out what the “correct” or optimal approach is for regularly updating a document. For instance, I’ve posted my rules cheatsheet, and had been editing new uploads in as team updates came in. That was kind of a kludge as it was, as I kind of wanted to keep the old versions around in order to keep seeing their download count, so I just had them crossed out and added new uploads. And then when editing was disabled, I needed to post the newest version as a new reply. So, what’s the best approach? Is there some upload-versioning system I didn’t see? Should I just expect to post a new reply with new uploads for each update, and hope people don’t accidentally download the first one they see which is now out-of-date?
The wiki-like functionality seems interesting, and might help. I just gained the “Member” badge which says “Trust Level 2”, but I don’t see an option to convert my original post into a wiki or anything. Maybe it is just too old now to convert, though?
Wikis don’t really solve this issue - then anybody can edit the post.
Is it possible to raise the time limit to infinite for TL2 and up or something?
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It is actually Regulars at Trust Level 3 that can make their posts into wikis. But you have to have an account for 100 days to become a regular. And that number only started accumulating since we switched to Discourse, which was a little over two weeks ago.
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I’m a Member at Trust Level 2 and I can make a Wiki. Click on the three dots, then the wrench, then Make Wiki. I think there may be a time limit to when you can make a post a wiki. I can do it for my post in this topic, but not some other posts.
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You’re right! I guess the default setting was changed.
I’m in a similar situation – I have an update to Driver Station Best Practices. What is the best way to post evergreen content like this that gets updated occasionally?
Here is what I have thought of so far:
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Reply to the original post with the updated document.
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Create a new post with the updated paper, and link back to the original post.
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Make your post a wiki.
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Link to a Google Doc or other service where you can update the content independent of the post.
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Ask an admin to change something.
Unfortunately I’m at Basic trust level and can’t convert things to a wiki. There’s no way I’m going to jump through the Discourse hoops to get to be able to create wiki entries:
- Must have visited at least 50% of days
- Must have replied to at least 10 different topics
- Of topics created in the last 100 days, must have viewed 25% (capped at 500)
- Of posts created in the last 100 days, must have read 25% (capped at 20k)
- Must have received 20 likes, and given 30 likes.*
- Must not have received more than 5 spam or offensive flags (with unique posts and unique users for each, confirmed by a moderator)
- Must not have been suspended or silenced
Or you can flag to a moderator and they can convert it to a wiki, and save yourself some hoops.
Like this setting in general?
Seems like an overall useful feature, and I’m not sure why a limit is being placed on edits in the first place.
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The reason why editing after 24 hours is locked down is because of a tactic that spammers used:
- Spammers make innocuous-looking accounts that manually post generic replies that don’t get flagged as spam.
- Spammers exploit the fact that most things on the Internet have a “half-life decay” in terms of views by actual humans: you have a ton of views initially, then it quickly drops off to a slow trickle.
- After a few days or a week or a month, spammers edit the original post and add spam links. Since most humans have already read that thread, and since editing would not flag as a new reply, it’ll fly under the radar and likely not get flagged for spam for quite a while.
- Until it gets manually flagged for spam, search engine crawlers will pick up on those links and boost the SEO rating of the spammer’s website.
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So this is still probably the single thing that annoys me the most about using Chief Delphi on a daily basis.
Is there no way to extend the editing time limit for people of trust level 2 and above to infinite? I highly doubt any spammers will get that far up the trust level ladder, and it would make using this site a lot less painful on the daily.
Also it would mean I could stop requesting a mod change one of my topics into a wiki every other day. This creates more work for them, adds in a painfully unnecessary waiting time for me, and opens up a lot of my posts to being edited without my consent.
It’s only a matter of time until someone with less than pure intentions gets it in their head to start messing with all these wikis people are forced to leave behind if they want to be able to do anything to their posts over more than a measly 24 hours.
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