Time limit for editing old messages is two months?

I noticed that I am now unable to edit the first few messages in my community build thread. I would have update it with the info about the newest builds.

I was able to edit the messages just a few days ago. I can still edit the later messages in the same thread.

Looking at my activity log and the availability of the message edit button in each message, it looks like editing is not allowed after the message is two months old (or 60 days?). That will make it really hard to publish & update any community build threads, where typically the first message contains "up-to-date" info about the build.

Please change the discourse defaults or create and additional permission that can be granted to users as needed.

@jow @tmomas

Current setting for "post edit time limit" = 86400 sec (1 day), therefore I'm wondering where the 2 months come from.
I only see the option to set this to 0 for no edit time limit at all.
@jow can we safely increase the edit time to "unlimited"?

My guess: the limit is minutes, not seconds.
86400 minutes = 602460 = 60 days

EDIT:
googling reveals that my guess might be right:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/free-to-edit-post-at-any-time/35516

There is a configuration item, post edit time limit, that limits for how long posts can be edited. It defaults to 86400 minutes (2 months).

I vote that we allow unlimited editing time in view of the best practice for long-running projects to keep an announcement in message #1 and a changelog in message #2...

If we can detect a problem, we can figure out what to do at that time.

I think this opens us up to people griefing if they ever get mad. Retroactively editing all their posts.
I like the idea that you can't edit a post after a while to preserve integrity on the timeline/discussion.

Should we have a community build section of the wiki? Wiki would have better formatting for things like build pages with Q&A and stuff

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[quote="weedy, post:5, topic:725"]
Should we have a community build section of the wiki?
[/quote]That does not sound good to me. A "community build" is compiled and published by somebody, so its description should not be editable by any random wiki user. And the possible users of the build may have questions etc., so there is a need for build-dedicated discussion. Forum has been traditionally the place for that in Openwrt and I see no reason why we should do things differently in LEDE in this front.

Just to provide some background: link to my WNDR3700 thread since 2011 in Openwrt. So far 1533 discussion items since Jan2011: https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=28392

I think this opens us up to people griefing if they ever get mad. Retroactively editing all their posts.

afaik this forum still shows the original post if you click on the "post edited" icon. EDIT TEST: see edit test of this post.

Should we have a community build section of the wiki?

I'd place a pointer to the forum section yes, but not moving the actual community builds to the wiki, for the reasons said by hnyman.

I do not recall any such issues on the OpenWrt forums though. Like @bobafetthotmail points out, you can see edit history of the post if you click the pencil. So nothing seems lost.

In the openwrt forum one could delete posts, and if the first posting of a thread were deleted the whole thread disappeared, IIRC.

I didn't know this software kept history.

I retract my complaint in it's entirety.

As long as you cannot delete your posts, I wouldn't see any problem with not having a time limit on edits.
I am on another forum and there was an issue with someone deleting the first post in a thread (he had progressed from a really sketchy looking truck build to a nice looking one and wanted to end the replies to his old threads about the previous iterations). When he deleted that post, it then deleted the whole 2000 post thread. That really annoyed everyone else who had posted (and in some cases, shared tech info that would be useful for someone else).

Aaron Z

OK folks - time limit on editing is now set to 0 (forever). If this is unacceptable, we can always try something else.

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Thanks. Editing old message works again. :slight_smile:

Sorry for the late reply, just wanted to voice my acknowledgement here. I see no issue with having unlimited edit time since discourse makes the change history easily accessible.

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Found the old thread :wink:

@tmomas @thess @jow
It seems that something has changed (yesterday?) on the forum settings.

I can't edit any of my old messages that are more than one month old. Looking at my old messages, editing is possible for messages later than Aug 7, so I assume that a "one month" limit was activated somehow.

Pretty hard to edit the community build threads :frowning:
(like Build for WNDR3700v1/v2 / WNDR3800)

There was originally that kind of limit in Discourse, but it was removed right after the forum was started and the issue was noticed in December 2016.

Editing should work again now, please check.

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Thanks.
It works again :wink:

Apparently a recent update added an additional parameter for post editing time limits replacing just the one and reseting the values to the default. A TL0 or TL1 user has 1 day and everyone else at TL2 or higher has 30 day time limits. I think restricting TL0 from post editing is also desirable - thoughts?

This move was made to help deal with spambots (human and otherwise) which are intelligent enough to optimize for Discourse’s built-in spam filters. They first make a comment without any links, and later on they’ll edit and add the link. Discourse doesn’t catch them this way.

Proposed settings for us:

  • TL0 - no edit
  • TL1 - 1 day
  • TL2 and above - no limit.
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Looking good!

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That's a bit harsh. It often happens to me I see faults in my post directly after submitting. How about an hour?