I can’t edit it anymore! but @erlend_sh did it for us.
if this is a giant post, how do you call that one you’ve linked?! 
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We’ve got two excellent use cases for this.
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Personal journal outlining a member’s trading strategy (think stocks or options trading). Majority of members change their strategy often over the course of their trading lifecycle, and that definitely happens outside of our edit window of 10 days. We have members that are going on 5+ years membership, who still tweak their strategy and want to journal that for themselves or for the rest of the community.
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Informational posts, where the first post is edited to reflect changes to say a list of companies that caters to our members. The company names changes, some stop catering to us, etc. We have a topic that’s been running for over 8 years. The first several posts are a running list, with company information. The remaining posts are the discussion about said companies.
The workaround has been the wiki post, but that doesn’t give the OP complete control over the post, and leaves us open to spammy actions.
We’re looking for a hybrid approach, give the OP indefinite edits on at least the first post, or allow the OP to set how many of the first several posts he can edit (as long as he’s the author of those posts, so something like the first 5 posts, for instance). All existing permissions/rules about the edit window would still apply, except for the OP.
vBulletin had/has this in a plugin.
Not really, since spammers are quite unlikely to reach trust level 1, and that is required to edit wikis.
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We’ve experienced… committed spammers who’ve done that in the past. Not at any large scale, but it’s happened. We’re actually dealing with a web of such folks (a company) who purposefully created 10+ accounts to legitimately discuss the topics at hand while name dropping their most favorite broker (their company) every couple of weeks. We just uncovered this going back over a year on a handful of accounts. It’s very subtle, but upon further investigation, IPs are similar, locations are close, email address are created in the same style (name+number@domain.com), and the accounts exhibit the same posting behavior (times, frequency, categories they post to, who they like, who they reply to). It’s pretty crazy the lengths they go to.
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Here on Meta there have been spam users who earned the wiki editor badge, but as wiki edits aren’t shown in activity I wasn’t able to revert whatever it was they changed before reporting them.
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The Elixir Forum has some categories (e.g., “Community / Dev Profiles”, “Your Libraries & Projects”) whose content tends to be persistent, yet evolving. So, they would benefit from finer granularity on the edit time-out limitation.
Recently, AstonJ made the following comment in the (members only) thread Can you increase post edit time limit?:
It would be great if Discourse allowed certain sections to be set so that the thread starter can edit the first post in threads they start indefinitely. This would also be handy for things like library threads
I’d be willing to take a shot at creating a PR for this, but first I’d like to find out if the general idea is acceptable. Suggestions for how and where the configuration should be made would also be appreciated.
-r
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Why? Wiki posts already meet that goal.
Wiki posts don’t allow the original poster to control subsequent edits.
Has this been a problem in theory, or in actual practice? I find that the two are often quite different.
Beyond that, why not just extend the edit timeout by trust level (TL2+) to something really long like 2 years?
Not sure why we need yet another setting here.
I just had this problem today. About a year ago, I posted an entry in Elixir Forum’s “Community / Dev Profiles”. It contained a URL which I’m deprecating, so I wanted to substitute the new one. Although AstonJ was kind enough to perform the edit for me, it would have been more convenient to do so myself.
Beyond that, why not just extend the edit timeout by trust level (TL2+) to something really long like 2 years?
That would work for some use cases, but it doesn’t seem like a great idea, in general. (If a post has accumulated replies and is then edited, the flow of the discussion could get confused.) So, only certain categories should act this way.
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Perhaps the easiest option would be to modify wikis so they can also be set to only allow the post-creator to edit (so in a way would become a personal wiki).
This would enable us to use the existing feature of wikis (where we can set categories to automatically make the first post a wiki) while avoid the pitfalls of using them in cases such as these where anybody could potentially edit what is otherwise someone’s personal post/wiki.
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I think that wiki does allow control.
The post owner is notified on every edit. If a bad edit is made they can roll it back. If a fight ensues post can be flagged and moderators correct.
A giant motivator here for a new feature would be that we tried the above yet mountains of pointless work is created.
Are there real world examples of issues here?
Wouldn’t a footnote of : “this is a personal wiki, please only correct for typos” work here?
One interesting twist I kind of support is auto flagging of wiki posts where the post owner is no longer around, in cases like this mods should either de-wiki or reassign ownership
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Quick query for “Absent Wiki Creators”:
SELECT (current_timestamp - users.last_seen_at) idle_duration,
(current_timestamp - posts.created_at) post_made_ago,
posts.id post_id, users.id user_id
from posts
join users on posts.user_id = users.id
join topics on posts.topic_id = topics.id
where posts.wiki = true
and posts.deleted_at IS NULL
and topics.deleted_at IS NULL
and users.last_seen_at < CURRENT_TIMESTAMP - INTERVAL '90 days'
order by idle_duration desc
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Just a small update on this one - this has been possible for a while and can be set within the category settings. 
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