Complaint Why can't I edit my posts after 24 hours?

Fredrik

The limit is 11 hours and 40 minutes. I think this is a bit on the short side, but for me it's usually enough to fix my late-night blunders in the morning. One thing you can do is to report your own post (use the "report" button), and ask a moderator to change it for you.

Evo

In rare cases, like this, where you couldn't spot the error until the edit window closed and it's not easily corrected by a subsequent post to clarify, just hit the report button and tell us what needs to be corrected. We don't mind doing this ocassionally for unusual circumstances.

The reason we had to put a time limit on edits is due to people going back and erasing their posts after people have responded. This can destroy a thread or make a member that responded look stupid, etc...

Redbelly98

The 11+ hours is a compromise. We also have to worry about people getting help on homework that is not allowed by their teacher. If we allow too much time, they can go back and delete the content of their OP after getting help, so that their cheating cannot be tracked down.

I've recently adopted the policy of quoting homework-help requests, if the OP is a brand new member, just in case the person is not supposed to be posting the problem.

strangerep

I agree with mathwonk, as I also often need sleeping time to realize my mistakes.

Is it possible to keep the current (short) edit timeout on the 1st post in a thread, but a longer timeout (24 hrs) on all subsequent posts?

That would address the homework cheating issue, and also partially eliminate potential work for mods if a member wants to modify their own post the next morning and must "report" it to a mod, requesting changes.

Evo

Apparently it's not possible to have differing edit windows.

strangerep

By "not possible", I guess you mean "not implemented" by vBulletin? Unfortunate, since the actual software mod would be dead easy. (sigh)

Evo

I don't know the answer. I know we've tried several different remedies and we're looking at options in future upgrades we will need to make. If we could stop only edits of the OP, that would be enough, IMO, but I'm under the impression that is not an option. It does concern us because the last thing we want to do is make things difficult for our members that have a real need.

mfb

As far as I know, the posts do not have a flag "is starting post of a thread" in the database, you would have to check the posting time (!) of all posts with the same threadid. And any hack in the vBulletin-mechanics can lead to problems at updates of the board software.