[wp-meta] [Making WordPress.org] #6722: Support Forums: Timeframe to edit posts or to add further posts should be longer

[Making WordPress.org]

#6722: Support Forums: Timeframe to edit posts or to add further posts should be
longer
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 Reporter:  abitofmind      |      Owner:  (none)
     Type:  enhancement     |     Status:  new
 Priority:  normal          |  Milestone:
Component:  Support Forums  |   Keywords:
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 == Timeframe to edit posts
 - Currently limited to 60min.
   - Enough to correct a typo which you spot when looking at your post
 immediately or soon after publication.
   - Most often not enough to add content corrections which you realize
 only later.
 - Proposal: Lift that limitation totally (ideal for thread creators,
 discussion participants, passive readers coming via search engine) or
 prolong it significantly (acceptable regarding moderation/monitoring
 effort, min. 7 days)

 === Pros & Cons

 ==== Participants or passive readers
 - Only disadvantages when editing is disallowed too early
 - Must read (lengthy) original and corrected version, inbetween possibly
 other posts. A lot of scrolling up/down, re-establish context, and putting
 things together mentally. A lot of redundancy. Unnecessarily hard to
 digest.

 ==== Contributors
 - Many mistakes you only realize later (e.g. after you found out by
 further research or experimentation, or after a certain mental heureka
 moment) and as a responsible content creator you want your facts straight,
 and errors corrected.
 - If you know your audience anyhow will only read it at earliest in X
 hours (timezone differences, working hours, holidays, etc) you could spare
 them the whole information genesis and serve them just the evolved result.
 But you can't.
 - With unlimited editing of the original plus a new post you could provide
 your forum participants the best of both worlds: Correct in place (and
 therefore WITH context) plus write a short new post below "I updated the
 instructions how to do XXX in section YYY in my [original-
 post](#post-1234)." Your readers get both advantages: A notification + a
 link to a corrected message WITH context. (No need to put this together
 mentally yourself).

 ==== Forum moderators
 - I don't know your POV, but one rationale I read on #forums on Slack was:
 - Longer timeframe is a longer possibility to edit in new spam links.
 - To me this feels not like a strong argument: Putting spam repeatedly
 gets you blocked anyhow.
 - The profit of this strategy is very low for spammers: Put a legit post
 somewhere. Wait until it gets popular in search engines (and receives a
 high SEO rank). Then somewhen later edit the legit link to a spam link.
 And then you are caught and blocked. A lot of (almost conspiratory) effort
 for a one time opportunity (at max 2-3 times) which gets caught
 sooner/later anyhow. Sounds not like a realistic strategy one needs to
 fear. But I know little about spam moderation, so correct me if I'm wrong.

 ====  Users arriving via search engine or consuming information IN the
 context of search engine results
 - Significant disadvantages without post-correction:
   - When trusting only the search engine context, they may only get the
 outdated variant (naive to do that but some certainly do). Search engines
 are not always that smart, sometimes the outdated info remains stronger in
 the index than corrected ones. Experienced that far too often on the
 Internet in general, that I arrive at the irrelevant post, only to learn
 the corrected solution many posts later.
  - When arriving to the forum, these users have to parse the whole
 genesis.

 - I see almost no advantages in limiting editing, and hence keep errors
 frozen as-is.
   - Getting useful information is the prime goal in a tech context.
   - Tracing the genesis of ideas/discourse may be more interesting in
 political/social discussions.
   - But in a support context, which is sometimes complex and lengthy
 anyhow, that just feels as a unnecessary burden, which could be avoided
 simply by being more liberal with the editing timeframe.

 == Timeframe to add posts to a thread
 - I don't know the limitations.
 - I can just say from observation: In ca 10-20% of my research situations
 I end up in a forum which is already closed for new entries, which dealt
 exactly with what I was looking for, but which was left unsolved or with
 no outcome. And it was maybe only a few months old. Not years. I then
 sometimes also checked out the plugin or its changelog and it became
 evident that the situation was still the same. If would have been perfect
 to just add one more post to already well articulated posts, than to start
 fresh.
   - Was "gravedigging" a real issue, which could be countered only by the
 measure of a shorter thread lifecycle?
   - Have you also considered what negative impact this may have? Missed
 discourse opportunities, higher barrier of entry, etc.

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Ticket URL: <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6722>
Making WordPress.org <https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/>
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