Is this time limit really necessary? I have never seen it on other forums.

There are various reasons but you can read the thread where this has been discussed before:
Previous poll on 5 minute limit.

I'd have it set at 10 minutes. Reasonable time to to add the afterthoughts, Not enough for a malicious little skroat like max the battyman bear to wreak havoc,  AFF is a medium-traffic forum, not as fast as say I2, but where responses are well thought out....and so are the afterthoughts.

If there's drama somebody could change a post and well... You know what could happen.

Yes, we had a lot of trouble with people editing posts and being dishonest and trolling, then trying to look like they weren't trolling.  For a long time we did not have an edit function at all because of this trouble, then after things calmed down this was introduced as a compromise, to deal with harmless innocent edits like grammar and spelling, and afterthoughts.  

Frankly, if it takes longer than five minutes after you post something to come up with an afterthought, it really deserves a separate post.  And as for proof-reading, well, it rarely takes me longer than five minutes, and ever since firefox added dictionary files, I don't even really need that.  Every so often, I'll use the wrong preposition, but it takes forever to notice.

From the poll conducted in 2010, see Cynara's post, it seems that we have a roughly even distribution across the options, except the no edit which nobody wants.

However there might be another option (not included in that poll, what a surprise) that might please the majority but I don't know if its feasible.

What if there was a no time limit edit but you couldn't edit after somebody else posted in the thread.


s that possible to enact? Would it be popular?

Avariable time limit

This post was last modified: 07-08-2012 09:37 PM by heterodox.

that would technically be a time limit  

Sorry to do that but it demonstrates that a 5 min time limit can be too long.

It happened to me recently on AFF by a member who recently stopped posting, and it ruined my comment.

Sorry again.

The reason I ask is cause I sometimes make random grammatical and spelling errors  which really irk me and don't notice em till after the 5 minute period. Lets just call it one of my AS bugbears. Though the point about stealth billigerence and trolling makes sense.

If you need to fix your post after the 5 minutes are up, you can PM a mod or report your post.

Personally, I think anything more than 10 minutes would be too long. The reasons are explained in the thread Cynara linked to.

This post was last modified: 07-08-2012 10:17 PM by d_olson27.

The reason for the time limit is because of proof of accusations being changed.....

By the way, Thomas, you certainly wouldn't be the first to ask for typos to be fixed in your posts.

I'd sooner tend to let it wash over me. I draw a line where the task needed of contacting a moderator to correct the error outweighs the satisfaction of having the error corrected. Would be nice to remove the 'task element'.

Fair enough.

Still, no time limit would, as people have pointed out, allow a person to change an offending post after a fight has broken out, and claim that they were misquoted. Keeping everything on the record makes my job easier.

Personally  I'd be inclined to set a 10 minute cutoff. Sometimes people have to post from phones etc. Pika is about the best mod we could have, he is honest, gives reasons for post edits, i fosters community when everything is out in the open and there are no secrets kept,  no room for liars etc.