When I make an edit to one of my posts (as a regular user) I can see the edit icon changed to orange with a count of number of times an edit has been made. Do the old versions ever disappear to the public, or can people always look back at previous versions of my changed post?
Afaik, the edits are there and will not disappear. The only difference is the that once you edit the post again, the pencil icon turns orange indicating that the post has recently been edited.
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Why would previous edits suddenly disappear over time? I am not understanding your goal here?
Sorry. Maybe I’m not explaining it well.
Say, in a fit of passion, I write that John stinks. Next day I realize my indescression and go in to edit the post to remove the “stinks” bit. My question is, how long does the original text about John’s stinkiness stay around for people to go back and see.
If I delete the whole post then I think within 24 hrs it disappears. I’m just wondering if there is a similar threshold for previous versions of a post. Sorry if I wasn’t clear.
Yes, thanks for that additional detail! Edits are visible to everyone by default in Discourse.
(Bear in mind that if you edit a post immediately after posting, it will not be considered an edit. There is a 5 minute editing grace period built in, to keep noise down – everyone makes silly typo mistakes after they post, so they don’t need to be immortalized forever!)
If you are the site owner, you can make edits visible to staff only in your site settings:
edit history visible to public
Allow everyone to see previous versions of an edited post. When disabled, only staff members can view.
However, what you’re describing is more about the editorial decision to delete something instead of editing it. Rather than worrying about a hypothetical problem, I’d wait and see if it’s a problem in practice, first. 
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