Sorry about that. Yes, the time limit for editing a thread/post is 5 minutes. Just enough time if you see something immediately after posting to make a quick edit.
This time limit is in place to help ensure a better and smoother experience for everyone. It is in place for quite a few reasons, here are a couple:
1) Spammers. Spammers can sign up and make a few innocuous posts, let some time pass and then edit them to include spam links or other inappropriate content.
2) Confuses readers. An edit of a post which already has one or numerous replies can easily put the posts beneath it out of context which can be very confusing.
3) Disgruntled Members. It stops disgruntled members from deleting/editing their posts, which would again put a bunch of posts beneath it out of context.
3) Rule Breakers. It stops members from editing a post which was originally a site rule breaker, then claiming innocence.
Although none of these thankfully have ever been issues here on Cruising Earth, it is best to be proactive in these cases because inevitably they will occur at some point. For instance, we block dozen of attempted spam registrations every day. We spend numerous hours every week on maintaining and increasing site security. As much time as we do spend on security there are hackers out there spending the same amount of time trying to flood forums all over the world with spam.
Even though our forum posting is just starting to take off, there are already thousands of users reading these forums daily and the likelihood of someone reading something that was posted more than a few minutes ago is already pretty high. It is best to just add another post than to edit the original. It can be very frustrating for members and guests to go through a thread they are interested in and see a bunch of "edited" posts and then try to make heads or tails of it figuring out what information they read before is no longer valid and what may still be. It is just a much smoother forum experience for everyone to not allow (or in our case have a very short time limit) for the editing of threads/posts.
I will have a warning message added when editing a post about the 5 minute time limit. It should be in place within a couple days.
Sorry again for the inconvenience.
...now I'm curious as to what was in that thesis!
