Editing

[Greyhead]

One for John I think.

I recently wanted to edit a post but there was no “Edit” button so I just did a “Reply”. When I uploaded the reply it had the “Edit” but it has now disappeared.

Is this a “feature” of the new look forum? If so I think it is a retrograde step, it was useful to be able to edit posts at anytime, not just immediately after uploading them

Especially as I make so many mistakes!!

[Guest]

Howdy Grahame,

Ok, I am gonna have a go at this question although I may be completely wrong in my answer lol. If thats the case, I will deffer to John and his reply

Now even though i am a moderator, i am still not quite up to speed on all the functions of the forum (but I am still learning), anyway, if you will notice up in the upper right hand corner of your post, you will see the term "Permalink".

Having read abit about "Permalinks", my theory is that this is the reason you could no longer edit the original post after a set amount of time.

Wikipedia states that the purpose of permalinks are as follows:

"Permanence in links is desirable when content items are likely to be linked to, from, or cited by a source outside the originating organization. Before the advent of large-scale dynamic websites built on database-backed content management systems, it was more common for URLs of specific pieces of content to be static and human readable, as URL structure and naming were dictated by the entity creating that content. Increased volume of content and difficulty of management led to the rise of database-driven systems, and the resulting unwieldy and often-changing URLs necessitated deliberate policies with regard to URL design and link permanence. For example, Wikipedia's internal cgi-based URLs [1] are re-written to a more human-readable form" .

I believe the "jist" of that paragraph would be "When a information on a site reaches a volume which is not easily managed, but permanence of the content is desired for the purposes of linking, referencing or citing, it is much easier to create "permanent links" (permalinks) or URL's to the various postings. Now apparently one drawback to this method as far as the individual actually doing the posting would be the short amount of time to edit the post before it becomes permanent.

If you belong to other forums i believe you will notice the trend of most all of them going to a "permalink system" for the simple fact of making it much easier to archive and store useful information within the database.

I once saw a Phrase on a website while making a post, which said something to the effect of "You cant change history, but you can change this post provided you do not leave this page, if you leave this page, your post becomes history"...ie... meaning that my post would be "set in stone" so to speak lol. Now that was on an US gov. website and so the use of permalinks are very widespread.

Now for my disclaimer lol

I might be totally wrong in this "theory" about why you cant edit after a certain amount of time, if so, John can clear it up for both of us . (But hey, my explaination sounded good anyway lol).

have a good day,

Greg

[Greyhead]

Thanks Greg, I see now, or at least I think I see!

It’s so if some “sweet little innocent” has forsaken her My Little Pony in favour of Radio Control Scale Modelling and linked to one of my posts I can’t go and do something really nasty that will give her nightmares for a fortnight; very laudable.

But I think we could trust our Moderators police the forum.

[Guest]

Howdy again,

Well, like i said, I may be totally wrong in my "theory" lol Hopefully john will either confirm that i was spot on or totally destroy my ego by telling me I am way off base lol.

Have a good day,

Greg

[Guest]

Not Sure if anything has changed but the "Edit" button is still definitely there as can be seen by my screen shot.

Maybe John can answer this one.

Regards.......Mark

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[John]

You can not use the edit button after 1440 minutes (1 day), after this time you should really make a new post that way it will show up when the "new posts" button, and it wouldn't show if you just edited it and people may miss info.

The edit button will never vanish for moderators

[Greyhead]

You can not use the edit button after 1440 minutes (1 day), after this time you should really make a new post that way it will show up when the "new posts" button, and it wouldn't show if you just edited it and people may miss info.The edit button will never vanish for moderators

That makes more sense, I hadn't considered the fact that an "Edit" isn't treated in the same way as a new post.

Thanks John

[Guest]

Howdy Guys,

Yeah.......I was trying to say exactly what John said lol But I am more "long winded" lol.

So i guess in a round about way, I was kind of right

have a good day,

Greg