As long as we’re tinkering with the board mechanics, can we extend the edit window to at least 10 minutes? For long posts, five is simply not enough to proof-read, let alone come up with a new idea.
Surely proof-reading can be done in the actual post screen, rather than afterwards in the actual thread?
I think five minutes is a reasonble time.
Sure, but I often miss things the first time through, and at a point I think people want to get the conversation going instead of staring at the preview page for 15 minutes looking for typos.
I don’t really see the upside of limiting edit to 5 minutes. Just how much shenanigans is someone going to get away with (or even want to get away with)? We really think we’re going to have a significant problem with posters changing the record and then lying about it with a 10 minute window?
As recent events have proven five minutes is more than enough for some people to edit their posts two or three times.
With all due respect and with absolutely no offense intended to anyone, five minutes is plenty.
This is a board where most people don’t worry about minor typos. (I make them all the time, and people very rarely comment on them). If you make a serious error that affects the meaning of your post, and you miss the 5-minute deadline, you can always follow up with, “Whoops! – What I really meant was …”, and no-one will hold it against you.
But I do appreciate the 5-minute period, and often edit minor typos that I only see after I hit the “Submit Reply” button.
I like to think that reasonable people here understand that a typo or two is not the end of the world.
5 minutes is enough. It’s the perfect line between “Oops, I left out a ‘not’ which totally changes the meaning of my post” and “Man, I can say this, piss everybody off, then delete it, and no one will ever know.”
Besides! USE THE PREVIEW POST BUTTON. It’s all pretty and shiny and just waiting for you.
The mods have access to the edit history.
Impeccable timing for this request.
I think we’ve managed to get into enough trouble with five minutes. (Preview is your friend. Jeeze, it’s been a while since I’ve seen that. 
)
Semi-serious response: I actually saw that thread about 7 minutes after I posted this one. With a longer edit window, I could’ve modified the OP to reflect my new knowledge.
Actual response: Yeah, but editing wasn’t really the issue there, as I understand it. The only way a longer edit window is a bad thing is if it encourages people to change what they posted and then lie about it, and to my knowledge we’ve never had an issue with that here.
Five minutes is long enough. I would hope that people use Preview to minimize the need to use edit at all.
Five minutes would be long enough, if the board was not at times rather unresponsive - sometimes most of that five minutes is spent waiting for the server to respond, leaving no time for the edit to be made and posted.
This isn’t a complaint, just an observation.
