Maybe it will help to spell out the example in more detail.
Our forum is about online games. Nonetheless, we have an off-topic section where people socialize, and folks wanted to have a Covid thread there. As you might expect, a thread like that bears the risk of getting heated and political, and in particular runs the risk of “flaring up” at odd hours when our moderators aren’t necessarily available.
So we said, “why don’t we turn the Covid thread into permanent slow mode?” We set it to (I think) once every 24 hours (and we did not set an end date for slow mode, like this:
Let’s imagine a user Jane who posted something incorrect, then later went back to edit it, and found that she couldn’t, due to slow mode. (Of course, Jane couldn’t post at that point, either.) While Jane waited, other posts came in telling Jane that she was wrong, and she wished desperately that she could update her post to stop the bleeding, but she couldn’t.
Eventually, Jane’s 24-hour timer ran out. The thread was still in slow mode, because it’s in permanent slow mode, so what did she do? She posted. “Sorry, everybody. I wanted to edit my post, but the moderators have configured the Covid thread so I couldn’t edit my post. I agree that I posted a wrong thing. Furthermore, I want to respond to X, Y, and Z.”
Now, at that point, Jane’s 24-hour timer reset again, so Jane still couldn’t edit her original post. Each time her timer would run out, Jane had to decide whether to edit her original post or to participate in the ongoing conversation, but she didn’t understand that. And as long as you take every opportunity to post, you literally can’t edit your old posts.
(Even if Jane had understood it, if forced to choose between editing an old post or creating a new post and keeping up with the conversation, she might well have decided to post.)
This kept happening. After half a dozen users have said “I can’t edit my posts in this thread, so I’m just making a new post instead,” it because a public fact.
“No, no,” we tried to clarify. “You can edit your posts, you just have to wait for the timer to run out, and when you do edit your post, that will itself reset the timer, so if you want to edit anything, you’ll have to wait two full days to post instead of one,” some people replied saying “nuh uh, you’re wrong, I couldn’t edit my post” “yeah, me too, I couldn’t edit my post.” “You suck for turning on this mode where clearly nobody can edit posts, and you double suck for not listening to us when we’re telling you that editing doesn’t work.”
So, back to your question.
Your phrasing here is a little ambiguous; I think perhaps you’d incorrectly assumed that we turned on slow mode temporarily in response to the conversation briefly getting heated. But slow mode was permanent in our Covid thread; 24-hour slow mode never turned off.
But, in the case of this Covid topic, which used permanent slow mode with a 24-hour timer, it is correct that people told us, with frustration, that the no-edit restriction lasts forever for the Covid topic, and they didn’t understand why the mod team would be so foolish as to permanently disable editing posts on such an important topic.
Surely now this example makes sense??
