Edit old posts in a slow topic

Very much appreciate you raising this issue, @Elvith – I’ve been following along with the discussion of “Slow Mode” since it was introduced, and we immediately started using it in many places in the community I’m part of.

(For context, many of our users are arriving from some frankly-toxic mailing lists that our Discourse forum is replacing, and they are in very bad, repeatedly-validated-on-the-mailing-lists habits of engaging their keyboards before hearts or their brains when things start getting heated).

From what I’ve read in “Issues when using slow mode on a topic forever”, Discourse developers believe that the risk of edits being abused outweighs the potential benefits:

@codinghorror (and anyone from the Discourse team who’d like to comment) – our experience on our forum matches @Elvith’s, where the current behaviour means that “Slow Mode” interferes with the moderation workflow: folks can’t edit their posts to bring them within guidelines, whether in response to auto-hiding after a sufficient number of flags, or even when moderators actively hit “Agree + Hide”.

Would y’all accept a PR to add a site setting to determine whether “Slow Mode” prevents edits, so that folks like myself and @Elvith can restore the request-to-edit behaviour, and take our chances with “edit wars”? If so, would you want to see those edits counted as someone’s post in the topic (i.e. only allowed as frequently as their posts would be), or would it not make a difference in that you don’t personally foresee using this?

2 Likes