By now, we’ve encountered a handful of mass post deletion/wipe efforts or requests that have made the mod team think more about how we handle changing/deleting past posts.
We believe our job as mods is to maintain the health of the website and community. Editing and deleting large numbers of historical posts goes against that goal. It leaves big holes in site history and broken links. Plus, deleting one person’s topics also deletes other users’ posts.
To that end, I’ve changed the edit time limits back to the Discourse default of 3 days and 1 month depending on your account trust level. In the past, we had it set to unlimited to support the use case of Script Collections. I would recommend you change these into wiki posts if you would like to keep editing them. If you have a use case where this does not meet your needs, please message me and we can try to figure out a workaround.
When we’re requested to delete an account, we will default to discourse’s built in Anonymize feature, which randomizes your account name and wipes login information, but retains old posts (with the new random name).
If you have an extenuating circumstance where deletion of old posts is critical, please contact us with the reason why and we’ll discuss.
And if there is any personally identifiable information, we’re obligated to remove just that information upon request to comply with GDPR.
The post must be converted into a wiki within the edit windows specified in the post edit time limit site setting that is relevant to the user’s current trust level
Unfortunately, looks like only mods or trust level 4 users can make old topics into wikis after that time period. There aren’t that many topics in Script Collections, I’ll just manually update them to wiki posts today.
I’ve also updated the category setting so that new topics created will automatically be wikis.
What are the consequences of that change? Can everyone edit my script collection since it is a wiki or can the original poster be set to be the only one editing the wiki? Please check the behavior before you start changing a lot of threads. I want to be in control of my script collection page. This discourse page speak against that: What is a Wiki Post? - users - Discourse Meta
Technically yes, anyone can edit a wiki post. However, practically I don’t see that as a problem. People rarely editing existing wiki posts in howto today. Edits have an audit history. And we can enforce rules to not edit other people’s script indexes.
imo it’s a necessary compromise based on my opening post and limitations of discourse
For me, the main problem is DELETE. I don’t see editing on the same level at all, especially with the available audit history.
I would be 100% on board if disallowing deletion only (if it’s possible in discourse).
Removing editing is another story. I often edit my old topic, not only my collection topic. To add subtitles, update some info, link, etc.
Using a generic message board to manage something like funscript is already a bit ‘clunky’ and limiting. If we can’t modify the OP anymore, it will be even more limiting and frustrating.
As a ‘creator’, the solution (i.e. disabling delete and edit) seems worse than the stated problem (but I’m not the one that deals with the problems so it’s easy for me to say).
I think this is a good idea. while I personally like to have everything archived on my personal drive. it is nice having the original still available on the site somewhere if i needed it for some reason.
unfortunately editing and deletion are in effect the same thing. You can edit your post title, tags, and body to remove all useful information and make it effectively unsearchable as well, even if it technically has edit history
Although the loss of some information or script is a problem. But I believe that deletion and editing should remain the personal choice of the creator of the post.
I’ve been updating some themes for many months, and recently completely updated the scripts for 2 videos written over a year ago
Do you know if it is possible to roll back to a previous version with a click using the history or is it just possible to view older versions of the post?
Yes, often more than a year, in the case of adding subtitles or if I made a new revision of a script. In those cases, I guess we could create a new topic for the new revision/files and leave a comment in the old post (and hope people are seeing it).
What are you trying to fix exactly? Personally, I don’t see the problem if someone makes his topics unsearchable, as long as the info is still there in the audit (and the comments of other people are still on the ‘unsearchable’ topic). Even if someone is trying to ‘rewrite’ an interaction with someone on a topic by editing his previous comment, he could be ‘called out’ when people look in the audit.
In short, as long as the person can only modify “his thing” and that it leaves a trace, I would be happy. For example, this topic always bugged me a little bit because the context for my answer has been completely deleted.
I don’t like the change. Without a script collection and all time editble posts, I can’t decide whether a script remains online or not anymore.
Thats a massive no go for me. I hope the team will help me delete all my hosted scripts here.
I can’t optmize my scripts list, because 1 post has not enough chars for a nice list with all my scripts. So i have to make comments, comments are not editable.
Eroscripts has no SCRIPTS AT WORK category, so where I should do this in future? How should I keep it up2date if I can’t edit a post.
Not sure if this was related to a certain user decided to vanish and editing all of their topics to Delete 10 characters xx…
If that’s the case perhaps it’s better to talk with this specific user? Cuz other than that I’ve not seen an issue. Though observations may differ as a user.
Another problem… Not only can’t I edit the content of an old post, I also cannot change its category, title and tags.
I don’t know whether trust lv 3 users can do it to others post. If they couldn’t, then only moderators can fix old posts and carry out tag operations.
I assume this isn’t a good thing…
Imagine a 1-month-old script topic getting an multi-axis upgrade, either by the topic owner or another member. They couldn’t include these scripts in the topic, nor could they add the multi-axis tag to the topic.
Or that one of the link in the topic dies. People will have to add it down in the comments. Newcomers will have to scroll down to look for the link as the one in the topic will remain broken.
To me these setbacks aren’t worth the gain of preventing users from randomly D.F.E… If that is a gain at all.
