In the past week I’ve suddenly been hitting a limit on maximum number of edits that gives me a notice that edits are turned off for 15+ hours. Has a change been made in this regard to Discourse?
For context, I do a lot of copy edits on my comments, and also frequently add in additional info and links as they comes to mind to improve the quality of the comment. I don’t substantially alter a comment’s underlying thrust, especially after it’s been replied to, without a clear “ETA” signal or strikethrough.
Maybe it’s just me getting the notice. I’m probably unusual in that I do multiple edits on a lot of comments, not just one. But the notices only started appearing in the last week.
Also, the icon showing that a comment is edited is time-based. Apparently there’s a grace period.
I often edit after the grace period. The recent notices have been somewhat erratic, and the 15-hour window announced doesn’t end up being nearly that long in reality (I’ll get the notice, forget about it, and a few hours later it’s “oh, it took my edit”). Maybe it’s a glitch.
The “grace” period for edits is based on not just time, but also volume of the edit - obviously if a comment is substantially edited after posting, folks should probably know.
It’s also important to ensure people don’t “rewrite history” by editing posts long after a discussion has moved past them, so there is a limit to how long a post can be edited for in general.
The maximum time period for making edits has been discussed in the scope of a new kind of spammer: One that posts an innocuous comment, then comes back days later and edits it to a spam comment. The discussion has been over on Discourse Meta if you’d like to follow it:
