Ability to Edit Post Expires After ~ 24 hours

[awinston]

I've brought this up before, but I didn't see a thread about it. It seems that the ability to edit posts is taken away (at least for regular members) after about 24 hours. This usually makes it impossible to mark a thread as "solved" without assistance from a moderator.

[pbrockway2]

From an earlier discussion...

It appears that the forum faq regarding using the "thread tools" to mark a thread as [Solved] is out of date, and that the only way members have of marking a thread as solved is to edit the original post to add the "prefix".

The ability to edit a post, however, disappears after about 24 hours (and a good thing too, imho) which leaves posters unable to mark a thread if the answer doesn't appear fairly quickly.

I'm just posting this in case I've misunderstood something. Or to suggest reinstating the "thread tools" mechanism if I haven't.

[awinston]

Sorry pbrockway2, I'm not sure what you meant by that last post. Are you affirming that the problem exists, or is there a solution?

[pbrockway2]

Yes - just to affirm that there is a problem. It used to be the case that an item in the "thread tools" menu let you mark a thread as closed. That doesn't appear to exist any more. So unless a thread is marked as solved within 24 hours then it doesn't get marked.

There isn't a lot of pressure for this - but it comes up occasionally. Personally I would prefer to see threads marked as solved. But I'm not prepared to do that myself - nor recommend other moderators go to the trouble of looking out for solved threads and changing the title - because that just doesn't scale. It should be doable by the OP of a thread but it's in the hands of the forum's owner whether to implement that or not.

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A secondary question is whether to allow *edits* after 24 hours. I wouldn't like to see that because of the way edited threads can rapidly become incomprehensible.

[awinston]

Yes, the question about editing is tricky. I can think of a case where it would be useful to allow edits after 24 hours:

Steve gets home from work and posts a thread with unformatted code and no code tags, so he doesn't receive an immediate response. A few hours later a moderator tells him to add code tags, but Steve is asleep at this point. Steve doesn't get a chance to check the forum until he gets home from work the next day, and by that time he is unable to edit his post and add code tags.

In this scenario, Steve could just create a new post with the updated code. It isn't a big deal by any means, so the argument for editing code after 24 hours is not a strong one.

Updating the thread tools seems like the best solution for marking a thread as solved at this point. I looked back at an earlier thread, and the functionality used to exist a few years ago.