I have not left yet, but I will be out starting tomorrow so I leave it up to the other mods to make any further decisions. But I do have other obligations, so I only check this site like once a day.
No, we’re not selling out or anything. Nothing has changed about site administration or funding. I’m extremely grateful that user donations have been covering the hosting costs over the last couple months.
Normally, I would prefer to take time to consider changes and get feedback first. This change was a knee jerk reaction to stop the bleeding of a seemingly random mass deletion of someone’s topics/scripts. Genuinely not talking bad about that user, just that after some back and forth and a bunch of edit-deletions, they changed their mind and no longer want to delete everything. Had we not made the edit changes and allowed the deletion or allowed the self-edit-deletes, I would argue that the site would be worse off for it minus the controversy.
Regarding editing/inability to edit, I’m not sure if the whole editable wiki post recommendation was missed or not. If you have a topic that does need frequent updating, a wiki post should get the job done. If needed, we can raise the trust level requirements for editing wiki posts to prevent griefing, though I doubt that would actually be a problem. (It might be that much older topics need to have a mod turn them into wiki posts unfortunately)
I still think that the edit length issue is more complicated than just allowing anyone to edit forever into the future. Remember that edit privileges are not too far off from delete privileges. If I had to put it simply, allowing it gives the topic creators a ton of power, potentially to the detriment of everyone else. And consider what effect this has to the forum across a longer period of time. Is that the right dynamic? Hard to say. For example, if I were to nuke my entire account, things that would basically disappear are the rules, announcements, and the entirety of the Archived scripts from RTS. Or if someone else made an old topic on an open source software or a howto guide (and perhaps those topics had a lot of community engagement/contribution), that might effectively be deleted too.
There’s a lot of implicit rules that were never discussed in the history of this forum. For example, if we were any other (discourse) forum with default settings, you would have never had this edit ability. Many other sites operate with and without long term user editing/deletion, it’s kind of a tossup.
IANAL, from a purely legal perspective, I believe anything posted on a discourse forum is considered creative commons. GDPR applies only to personally identifiable data, which the large majority of content posted here does not contain. And a general thought is that anything you post on the internet, you should assume will be available on the internet forever. Again, is this the right setting for this site? Hard to say, but it’s something to think about.
Note: I’m reading both this and the boycot topic so I may be mixing up my responses to both