Suggestion - Don't time-limit Editing and Deleting posts
I think for personal privacy reasons (at least) and for other circumstances we should have the option to edit and delete our posts at any time instead of making them time-limited. I know I regret some of the things I've posted in the past, including links to personal information that I no longer wish to share and am unable to erase or modify references to such information.
I understand the idea of keeping people from changing the initial question when starting a thread but that should just be something people should know not to do on a regular basis unless they want an unpleasant experience in dealing with replying members of the forum.
The active members of the internet, if anyone, should understand the sensitivity and value of personal privacy.
I think the problem with allowing this is the propensity for abuse. A member could (and have done so before) just go in and blank out all of his posts at any date/ time, rendering the rest of the thread in ruins.
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Another reason worth mentioning is spam. Some spammers will post legitimate(ish) posts so as to fly under the radar, then attempt to modify spam in. Seen that one done before as well.
I would ask an admin to remove my personal links but the problem is there's a lot of them from where I asked questions about my personal portfolio website. I don't want to inconvenience someone that much.
Maybe a way around spammers would be to allow editing / deleting after reaching a certain rank (other than mod/admin) or number of posts similar to how you can't link until you've reached 10 posts. Or, when editing after a certain amount of time, don't allow links in the new edit.
Or how about giving temporary access to make edits / deletions upon request? I would REALLY like to make a lot of changes that don't affect the informative nature of the threads.
Do mods have the ability to "Find/Replace" text throughout the forum? I would really appreciate if someone could replace a few phrases (including in replies from others) referring to my websites and personal info.
Nope; beyond the search menu itself, there is no way to do a mass search and replace. We can do mass purge, but that's typically not desirable either.
I can discuss temporary permissions, but I'd guess that the consensus with the powers that be will be a no. And unfortunately with near 500 posts I can't see any moderator going through each one either. There is a way that I can think of though that would work. If you search for your own posts (via the search menu you can select individual posters), and provide it the criteria you are looking for (I don't know if the search menu assumes an OR or an AND, so you may need to do many searches), then you can at least see post by post. You can then use the report option to indicate what you want removed.