What happens when you try to edit the old thread?
It shows me the same menu at used to when I try to edit, but I canāt actually click on anything
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Hmm. I would try restarting your browser, clearing your cacheā¦ that stuff. I was able to edit it. I think you should be able to as well.
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Thanks, Iāll give that a try!
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There is indeed a time limit on editing old posts, I believe it defaults to 60 days.
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Why was it put in place?
Personally donāt agree with that āfeatureā.
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Itās configurable, 60 days is just a reasonably safe out of box default we ship with.
The potential danger is you get someone that signs up, posts a bunch of innocuous stuff, then months later edits in spam or weird content. Or someone ragequits then goes in and edits their old posts to be really obnoxious, mean, etc.
The only time the current (default) value is an issue here is for extremely long running b/s/t topics, but I feel any b/s/t topic that is more than a few months old is probably too stale, and certainly a b/s/t over a year old is ancient history.
To my mind it kinda depends if you have a chatty community where everything is old hat once itās posted for more than a day, versus a community where people regularly go back and edit new updates or revised info into old posts.
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Some of the stickies. like Useful modification & maintenance guides ā clean, repair, tune, fix yoyos need to be updated at times. These need to be able to be edited as needed regardless of age.
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Yes!
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staff are of course immune to these kinds of edit limits
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a wikipedia style post that anticipates many edits over a long period of time can be made wiki, which means any TL1 user can edit it. Use the staff wrench action on the post to do so.
Thereās a very complete public edit history on all posts and itās a 1-click operation to revert to any revision of a post. Just click or tap the pencil indicator at upper right to get to the edit history.
Note the pencil will be more red if the last edit is recent, and fade to grey once the edit is no longer recent.
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Iām with @codinghorror here. Giving users the ability to screw with the site by childishly changing or deleting old posts isnāt a good idea. And yes, after over 15 years running web communities, I promise you, people do that sort of thing. It can gut useful threads and cripple a forumās ability to be a historical reference. Honestly, Iād cut that editing timeframe WAY back. 60 days is far too long in my book. But thatās just me.
That said, I can see how it would be frustrating in specific instances such as the one listed above. But I also feel like a little annoyance to deal with the workaround processes is worth the protection that the rules gives the forumās long term usefulness.
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I tend to agree, we like to be safe by default. We have slowly been reeling that setting back in. It defaulted to 365 days originally, then we reduced it to 180, and eventually 60.
Right now the default here is set to 172,800 minutes or 120 days for B/S/T reasons.
I do agree this setting can vary depending on the tenor of the community, as I mentioned above.
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I donāt understand why you would want to edit an old Post??? Do you mean like if you made a mistake or typo?
Iām not sure with this community weād really have to worry about someone āslamming all the doors on their way outā in regards to editing old posts; weāre pretty small and fairly tight-knit so I donāt see something like that happening too often and if it were, Iād bet itād be remedied pretty quick.
Iām in the camp where Iād much prefer a longer window to edit topics. I have a couple old topics that Iād like to edit but canāt (Damage Terminology, Ti Walker Holders, etc.) Probably one of the more disappointing results of this is Iāve lost my years-old BST thread. Perhaps a bit silly, but I like the fact that it was the most viewed BST thread on this site (over 130k if I remember correctly). Plus since I donāt trade as much as I use to, Iād still like to keep and use the formatting over my old post without having to make a new one.
You can copy n paste the old post into a new one any time. To view the raw content of any post use this URL form
https://forums.yoyoexpert.com/raw/297705
https://forums.yoyoexpert.com/raw/297705/14
Basically delete all the middle part of the URL, change it to raw and leave the post ID.
Also I kinda strongly disagree that years-long running b/s/t topics are a good thingā¦ they arenāt. You want regular fresh turnover in b/s/t.
However if there are any specific posts like Ti Walker Holders, Damage Terminology etc just flag them and ask a moderator to turn them into wiki posts with the staff wrench tool and youāll be able to edit them forever.
In my case it was to keep links to all my tutorials in the same post for ease of persuing, instead of making a new thread every other day.