Droolie wrote: ↑Sun May 29, 2022 3:56 am
Was the edit feature really being abused to the extent that edits had to be disabled?
It's a rather limiting change - I think editing old posts should still be allowed for various reasons: updating OPs/posts in general with new information (e.g. fanwork threads, mod threads, things like the Rayman fonts thread...), updating dead links, removing information you once posted but don't want people to find easily anymore...
Maybe an idea would be to allow editing, but have edits show up in a list somewhere for mods to screen, along with new posts?
I would not go with the post-based exemptions/OPs only idea. It seems really annoying to do in practice since IMO almost every post deserves being exempt from this, so I think you would get a lot of requests to apply this to certain posts.
There have been two concerning trends that have led us to implement this protection: first, users massively vandalizing their old posts, rendering conversations illegible for no legitimate reason, and second, spambots inserting content into older messages, whether their own or those of inactive accounts with weak passwords.
So, while nothing bad actually happened, we identified a strong risk of abuse here and preemptively introduced this change to ensure the safety of our users. Not a month passes by without us hearing of new drama taking place on the Rayman communities of Discord, Twitter and other platforms, and we want this place to remain the safe haven it is now.
The rationale behind this protection is that, in practice, there are very few legitimate reasons to edit a message over two years old, and that, when such a situation occurs, people can reach out to us and we'll obviously allow them to submit the changes they're looking to make, be it updating posts with new information or removing personal information. Because, to clarify, the intent is not to forbid such changes, only to have them run by us in the first place.
Time appears to have proven us right: in the six months that have passed since this protection was implemented in December of last year, we have only received two requests, yours being the second one. Compare that to the hundreds of malicious edits we observe every year and that cost us countless hours of investigating and recovering posts from old dusty backups, and one can easily see how that's a major improvement from the previous situation.
Of course, we are well aware that the current system is far from perfect. It is but a quick fix that we know is slightly confusing and lacks in flexibility. An ideal system for me would probably:
- allow users to directly edit their older posts, but the change would only be published once validated by the moderation team
- allow moderators to whitelist posts on a case-by-case basis, for example topic first posts that are likely to be edited regularly
Sadly, the mere volunteers we are have no time to develop such a system as of now, but we'll take this opportunity to keep listening to your feedback so that, when we finally have the time to work on this, we can integrate it into the new system and hopefully provide an experience that is not only safe for our users but also less confusing and more flexible at the same time.