As this came up over and over I think it deserved his own thread.
During our adventure with our white slated Discourse forums we stumbled upon a feature that hindered us doing certain things that we usually like to do.
Having hubs of information in our post. For things like community servers, clan threads, collections of known informations, community projects and so forth we stumbled over the problem that discourse has a build in feature that blocks the user from editing his post after a set amount of time. I think here it is set to 6 months. This is to hinder vandalism from users as they may retroactively insert links into all their older post for advertisement reasons or just delete their posts, creating holes in the discussion.
This on the other hand creates the problem for users that maintain a thread of the further up stated purpose. If the IP of my server, the members of my group, the website of my fansite or in others such cases change after the 6 months I, and all others, created a post, we can’t go back and correct that, rendering the whole topic outdated and useless.
One solution would be to allow users with the “Regular” rank edit their posts.
Another would be to increase the overall edit window for everyone …
Here’s a discussion on the meta forums:
Here are some posts from the community prior to the creation of this thread:
Why have a limit at all, really? To prevent abuse? Archival? The cases of where edits are abused are so rare as to be nonexistant compared to the instances where people actually have a good reason to edit old stuff, and discource saves a log of all edits, so archival isnt a great reason either.
It’s to prevent abuse - the levels of which will vary between communities - so making it customisable makes sense.
For the purposes of this forum, @INovaeKeith might as well set it to years, but as the whole point of a limit is to prevent abuse, it would seem to make sense to make it customisable per trust level.
Leaders are regulars who have been around forever and seen everything. They set a positive example for the community through their actions and their posts. If you need advice, these are the folks you turn to first.
They can get to trust level 4 by…
Manual promotion only at the moment!
In the future, look closely at quality?
ExplicitQuality = min(1.0,
contributionValue(LikesRecievedCnt) * LikesWeight +
contributionValue(BookmarksRecievedCnt) * BookmarksWeight +
contributionValue(FavoritesRecievedCnt) * FavoritesWeight +
contributionValue(RepliesCnt) * RepliesWeight +
contributionValue(AvgTopicRepliesCnt) * TopicRepliesWeight)
Look also at site and topic promotion: invites, accepted invites, external links followed?
I guess you are saying that because the topic on meta that I linked to says Leaders… Note it also says trust level 3.
Since that topic was started over a year ago, the trust levels have been renamed. ‘Leader’ is now the label for trust level 4 which is by manual assignment only.
We have a bunch of trust level 3 users which are now called ‘Regular’.
Trust level 3 users do not get the nofollow attribute set on links that they post.
The nofollow attribute effects search engine ranking. Users could abuse this by going back and editing old posts to include links to sites that they want to improve the ranking of.
Because they’re old, no one will notice. If they put the links in new or recent posts, they’re more likely to be spotted.
Yeah, he probabaly doesn’t know how to solve this issue without backslasch in the future … just rather decided to play some more Battlescape Prototype.
Anyway this topic must be the leading cause for Keith pinging by now.
For now, any threads that require an edited OP we should just remake after 6 months. Many forums (usually much bigger) provide a post limit before a thread is locked, in our case we’ll need to do it based on time passed. though this will mean things get spammy for corporation threads.
