I just noticed that it is impossible to edit my old posts. I wonder what is the reason for such limitation? If I made a typo or a grammatical mistake while discussing something in “Sentence discussions” and only realized it now, why can’t I edit it, in order to avoid confusing whomever will be reading it in the future? To be honest, I am less and less motivated to keep my activity on this forum. First, it’s getting spammed by incorrect and misleading AI “explanations” which I already gave up on correcting, because it takes too much of my time, the users who post them don’t even bother to react to my corrections, and the admins don’t seem to care at all when I flag the most serious and dangerous instances of misleading information (none of the posts I flagged and demonstrated to be entirely incorrect have ever been removed or at least hidden). And now it seems I cannot even correct my own mistakes? What’s the point?
Hi @Hyacinthe, please don’t feel demotivated. I understand what you’re saying, but without people (like you) who post human queries and answers, these forums really would suffer.
Anyway, to the point at hand …
As I’m pretty sure you’re aware, this forum uses the Discourse software platform as the underlying architecture.
Now, there is a setting called “post edit time limit” that determines the duration during which someone can edit their own posts. By default this is set to 86,400 minutes (i.e. 60 days). However, it can be reset so that there is no time limit, by changing the value of this parameter to 0 (zero) as outlined in this post on the Discourse forums -
Free to edit post at any time - Feature - Discourse Meta
Now in normal circumstances this setting of 2 months is perfectly fine for most forums, as you can see in that discussion where people raise some of their concerns.
However, in the case here of Clozemaster where people might only see their old post many weeks or months into the future when they next come across a sentence, then in my opinion setting this parameter to 0 does make sense.
Therefore, I will join you in appealing to the all powerful @mike to please set the “post edit time limit” parameter to 0 so that people like @Hyacinthe can edit their old posts and hence provide a much better and/or less confusing experience for their fellow learners by correcting old posts that might be erroneous or else contain typos, grammatical mistakes etc.
I understand your desire to correct errors in older posts.
When you spot an error in one of your older posts, why does it seem insufficient to you to simply create a new comment and correct your mistake there, in a new comment, possibly linking to, or quoting, your erroneous post?
There is a reason why people aren’t allowed to edit their posts after a certain time as it has a lot of potential for abuse and harm. Especially with old comments where malicious edits go unnoticed much easier than with newly created comments. People will know that a forum post does not have an encyclopedic character. It’s a place for discussion, not a wiki. In a forum discussion, altering a comment after the fact—especially after the very generous time to edit a comment has passed—might render all following comments invalid.
For newer posts, you have multiple weeks to edit your comments, so your criticism applies only to comments that were created more than several weeks ago.
As it was stated already, this is not a policy of the Clozemaster team. It’s a feature of Discourse, the forum software that Clozemaster uses.
Thanks a lot for your elaborate replies and further clarifications of the policies of this forum! One more question, regarding users not being able to edit their own posts in order to protect the forum from abuse and harm caused by their malicious edits - if a user completely deletes their account, will their posts (and new topics they opened) remain on the forum, or will they all be deleted together with the account?
An example what I mean by that. Let’s say I ask the forum users, “Do you like Clozemaster?” and you decide to chime in and reply “Yes.”
One year later, I go back to my comment and sneakily change my question to “Do you think Clozemaster is the worst?” Your answer remains “Yes” and since it was a year ago that you gave that answer, you don’t have this topic on your mind anymore. You probably don’t even remember anymore that you once discussed whether you like Clozemaster. You simply answered the question and moved on with your life. Too much time has passed for you to notice the edit. But now, on the internet for everyone to see, it appears that you hate Clozemaster even though you love it. There it says, black on white, that you said “Yes” when you were asked if you think Clozemaster is the worst, even though that is not at all how it happened. As an extreme case, maybe you died 8 months after you commented, and can no longer react to my edits 12 months after you commented and 4 months after your car accident.
If you don’t limit how long people are able to edit their posts, you open the gates for putting words into your mouth that you never said.
You can ask the forum administrator to optionally also delete all your comments in addition to deleting your account. By default, your comments won’t be deleted when your account gets deleted.
we have mostly all default settings in place. On the one hand I agree - why not be able to edit old posts at any time. I also get @davidculley’s counter arguments.
We’ll leave it with the default for now with the assumption that Discourse has more experience with forums and has that default in place for a reason, and edits/updates can be made by simply adding another comment later on if needed.
Longer term it’s probably time for us to find a forum moderator / community manager who wants to help us develop opinions on these sorts of settings and the forum in general (for example with respect to copy/paste AI comments discussed elsewhere). TBD.