by Tempest » Sun Jan 29, 2023 10:44 pm
Yes, it's limited in time. New posts can be deleted within 500 minutes, so anything that was said, shall we say... without thoughtful consideration, can be removed and if no one has noticed, no harm is done. It is also possible to edit your own posts within 50,000 minutes (~35 days).
The reason for this is that a mix of "what has been said cannot be unsaid" and that most threads are more or less collaborative works and interactions between different people and allowing old posts to be modified/deleted would tend to make these threads impossible to follow anymore.
But there is also a theoretical/practical reason for this: preventing modification of old posts also prevents someone from taking over an old account (due to a very weak password, for example) and retroactively spam the message board. This may not seem like something very useful for them to do, but we all know that spammers when left uncheck, can post thousands of messages in a short period of time (they would be able to edit posts equally as fast). They do that so that search bots find their posts and think that whatever they are selling is extremely popular and as such, that they should appear at the top of search engines. Unfortunately, if that ever happens, the only way for me to fix this would be to view every single post of that user and manually fix everything. Hence why there is a time limit on this ability.
Yes, it's limited in time. New posts can be deleted within 500 minutes, so anything that was said, shall we say... without thoughtful consideration, can be removed and if no one has noticed, no harm is done. It is also possible to edit your own posts within 50,000 minutes (~35 days).
The reason for this is that a mix of "what has been said cannot be unsaid" and that most threads are more or less collaborative works and interactions between different people and allowing old posts to be modified/deleted would tend to make these threads impossible to follow anymore.
But there is also a theoretical/practical reason for this: preventing modification of old posts also prevents someone from taking over an old account (due to a very weak password, for example) and retroactively spam the message board. This may not seem like something very useful for them to do, but we all know that spammers when left uncheck, can post thousands of messages in a short period of time (they would be able to edit posts equally as fast). They do that so that search bots find their posts and think that whatever they are selling is extremely popular and as such, that they should appear at the top of search engines. Unfortunately, if that ever happens, the only way for me to fix this would be to view every single post of that user and manually fix everything. Hence why there is a time limit on this ability.
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