It’s an arbitrary choice. Some vBulletin boards don’t have it at all.
I would bet that this is the shortest of all vBulletin’s. Why? Just to annoy us?
When you edit, your second thoughts involve researching facts and that takes time.
Give us 15, not 5, or whatever it is.
{pedantic on}It’s not short, it is brief{pedantic off}
Who am I kidding, pedantic never goes off here…
:dubious:
Sounds like you should work on having your second thoughts first.
It was years and years before we had any editing timeframe whatsoever. Used to be, you clicked “post” and whatever you’d typed, that was it!
(ALSO: it used to be uphill both ways, especially in the snow)
The rationale is that you should not be able to change what you posted after other people have read and responded to it.
Five minutes gave people time to correct their typos or slip in an extra thought but not time to change their position and how they’d represented it in such a way that it could make subsequent posters look incoherent or unreasonable in their response to your now-edited post.
I had the same thought… Maybe the edit window isn’t as short depending on your screen resolution? 
Yeah, I’d not like to see the chaos that could result in Great Debates from unlimited editing.
In the end, you are responsible for your words. Five minutes - could be two - should be sufficient to correct typos and such but not so much that one can rewrite history after a discussion has been had.
There are spammers that will post some innocuous but vague crap to outwit whatever is used to eliminate spam, then come back and add their spam to the post.
I manged to catch one of 'em mid-edit and report the post before it changed.
I have poor internet connectivity on my commute to work, and the five minute window often ISN’T sufficient for me to correct a simple typo. I would also favor a longer edit window.
Preview is your friend.
The 5 minute edit window is to give you time to correct typos and whatever. If you notice a typo after the 5 minute window has expired, you can always report the post. I don’t mind correcting simple spelling mistakes or typos. I’m only going to correct simple typos, though. I’m not going to make any edit that changes what was written (no adding sentences, etc). I’ll also correct formatting issues, like quote tags that got borked or an incorrect attribution in a quote.
The edit window is not designed to give you second thoughts and have you spend a bunch of time researching the topic so that you might change your post. The usual suggestion for this sort of thing is to compose the post in ye ol handy word processor of your choosing. You can check spelling, stare at it for a bit, think about it, etc. Then, when you are finally convinced it’s the way you want it, just copy and paste it into a reply.
Uh… none of that makes sense on a phone. I mean, researching before posting makes sense in any format, but the idea that you will be composing in a word processor with spell check is kinda silly in the cell-phone environment.
But thanks for the offer to fix swpyos. I doubt I’ll bug you about that unless it changes the meaning (I sometimes get “now” when I intended “not”, for instance). But of course, that greatly increases the odds that someone responded to the misleadingly typo-ed version, as compared to my being able to fix it in 10 minutes.
Not a huge deal, but it is something I find frustrating about this forum.
Not that we ever get pedantic around here, but I typed “short” into Google and got some of the following synonyms, among others: brief, momentary, temporary, short-lived, impermanent, short-term, cursory, fleeting, passing, transitory, transient, ephemeral …
I might have more to say about this shortly, but right now I have to go out for a short time to get a short-term loan. 