modified

I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't even know this was a thing, but apparently phpBB3 has the option to have editing turned on, but with a time limit. I've set the time limit to 20 minutes. This is something that I remember being asked about waaay back in the day, but it wasn't an option in phpBB2 without unsustainable hacks. phpBB3 fixed that.

I've always empathized with people clamouring for an edit button on these forums. But it's always been super impractical because you can seriously mess with people's heads when unlimited editing is enabled, and that's not cool. At the same time, even when using the "Preview" feature, it's still totally possible to mess up a post in some way when you post it and then read it back to yourself; being able to make quick edits for a while after you post so you can fix shit is totally legit. The potential for abuse is limited to an acceptable level.

Does anyone have any objections to me having enabled this? Should the time limit be longer? Shorter?

How about for example, my challenges page, where I update the first post when I get new challenges and hit new challenges. Will this stop us from doing these type of edits?

No, forum permissions haven't changed at all. It's simply that, where previously you would not see an edit button (editing has been turned off for that forum/post), now you will; but only for 20 minutes.

Are you sure? I don't seem to have an edit button on my blog any more. I don't want to lose the ability to edit the first post of my blog, event threads etc.

Looking into it.

UPDATE: It appears as though I've misunderstood this feature. I think we can still implement it, but I need to read more about it before we do so. For the time being, I've set it back to how it was.

Sorry for being overly enthusiastic. I figured it'd be more straight-forward.

A much better feature is untimed edits but with an edit history. There seems to be a few of these, although I'm not clear how well developed they are. Being able to keep running lists seems like a popular function of modified, so being able to always edit is something that I'm sure a lot of people would like. At the same time, it's annoying when people abuse the edit function.

If you didn't bring in an edit history, I'd think the benefits of untimed edits are much greater than the occasional instance of edit abuse, which is usually a trivial annoyance. Prioritising functionality over babysitting seems reasonable to me.

The permissions system of phpBB is weird. I'm not dumb, but I'm having a hard time figuring out what does what; the interface is really quite obtuse. The docs don't help very much.

Untimed edits with a history would be ideal. I'll look into a plugin that might allow this.

In the meantime, I've attempted one tweak that I think will enable editing on some posts where you couldn't before. Let me know if you see anything problematic happening.