Allowing users to edit their own posts without a time limit

General Feedback
1

I’ve been tending to a couple of posts and comments that I intend to maintain long-term.
For example:

Those are rather complex and long, which means they inevitably must be updated after some time.
However, Discourse comes with a time limit of three months (I guess) by default, after which the post or comment is locked and can no longer be edited.

@JCS I’d like to propose, and encourage you, to relax that time limit for all users to unlimited. That would fix the frozen-post issue. Discourse project members have suggested in the past that this is what they do.

If you’re reluctant to relax the time limit, then may I suggest that we try the relaxed setting for a limited time as an experiment. In case that during that experiment, you find that the relaxed setting makes your work more difficult or causes the moderator team any inconvenience, I wouldn’t mind that the limit be set back to the stricter default.

I’ve been bitten by this issue several times in the past (example 1, 2), so I figure that relaxing the time limit might be a net benefit for everyone.

Please let me know what you think.

Also pinging @irvinewade for comments.

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2

A workaround is to make the post into a wiki if your trust level is 3 or higher.

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Sounds fair. I browsed this forum for prior art but couldn’t find a single wiki, so I figured wikis might be unwelcome. @JCS any guidance?

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Here are the top three most viewed wiki posts:

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5

Thanks @FrankyFlawless, that definitely helps.

So I guess it’s time to grind so I can re-earn that Regular status so I can do the conversion. Been Regular several times but keep losing it again due to intermittent inactivity. Welp.

Gotta go grind, I guess.

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As a general comment, I think it is reasonable policy to disallow editing of old posts, even though there are arguments to allow it. I don’t have a strong opinion either way and it is definitely not something that I myself can change.

I would actually suggest that for information that will be maintained over long periods of time, it should be in the Community Wiki, rather than in this forum. That has no restrictions as far as time-frame goes - and it is a cleaner place to locate information that has long-term and ongoing relevance.

Maybe it would help if a moderator could relax the forum restriction for a specific post but I don’t know whether that is possible.

Anyway, it looks as if you have a solution.

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7

Be prepared for a multi-step process getting an account and permisions with no clear guidance on how many steps there are or who to direct each “Mother, may I?” to.

As far as I know, a forum account is not needed, but it might help.

I didn’t know “Regular” staus required maintainance, but I guess that is implied by the name.

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Here is a Discourse blog article explaining trust levels:

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I haven’t encountered this problem. Especially making spelling corrections way back. But then again, I forgot how far back.

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10

Up to one month:

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