Other forums I've seen handle it in a few ways:

- Allow users to edit any post, without limitation.

This is sort of a bad design, even if a good idea. In previous version of idkfa, the logic against this was that people could go back and change their points, their wording, whatever they needed to invalidate the points made in a later reply. If somebody's really trying to hold a good debate, this would be infuriating, and would be hard to track down, and would take away from what was supposed to be discussed.

More argument against it would be that people wouldn't so much give a shit what they post if they can just go back and fix it. It also sort of goes against what the model of a conversation is like: people can't edit what they say once they've said it.

- Allow moderators to edit / delete posts

Previous version of idkfa allowed deletion of posts by members of the Moderator group. This worked, sort of, but caused a lot of drama, not only on the "What was deleted?" front, but more destructively when somebody posts something, somebody else sees it, suddenly disappears, and everybody hears about it anyway.

Allowing one person, even myself, the ability to edit something brings into suspicion the legitimacy of what people posted. People are forced to trust me, and I try to be a good custodian of people's writing (I take the Gabe approach: "Tough, but Fair"). I edit things when people ask me to, and the reasons are usually good (maintaining one's privacy, etc.).

But it doesn't scale well. Larger forums have dozens of moderators, usually one per section. It again creates drama, starting with jealousy at not being a moderator, and also because people have different opinions on what should and shouldn't be posted, and who should or shouldn't be a moderator.

I purposely left out most of the original "privilege" features from previous idkfa in lieu of simplifying the featureset and trying to do a few things well.

- Allow users to edit their own posts, but permanently tag the post as "edited"

This puts the badge of "I fucked up" on a post that sort of detracts from what's being written. It's also rare in a forum the poster or the forum itself will indicate what has changed, leaving users to wonder what was the modification.

This seems to be a little more balanced and scalable, I'll admit. But there's no limit on how much one can edit in the original post (one word? one sentence? the whole thing?), and doesn't answer well what would occur if somebody wanted to retract their post entirely.

- Allow users to edit their own posts, perform message tagging, but limit the number of posts one can edit, and how often.

This... sounds draconian, but it's probably the most flexible, and maybe the one I'd be most willing to implement. I would put rules in place, such as "One cannot edit a post more than once" in addition to "One cannot edit a post more than once a day."

This would sort of give users a get out of jail free card for a single post, but hopefully inspire them to proofread the first time through, given limited editing capability.

The deletion question is unanswered though. This go-around, I've instead implemented thread deletion as "tagged as deleted," rather than removing something from the database. Essentially, it will never display on the idkfa interface, but the original record will be stored.

This I would try to limit considerably, possibly with a rule like "One cannot delete more than 5 of their own posts during their use of idkfa." This would eliminate the severest of mistakes. It wouldn't delete the messages in reply... not sure how I would handle those cases.

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Ultimately, I want people to value the time they spend reading stuff on idkfa. Yeah, not all of it will be Shakespeare, but it doesn't need to be vacuous either. We made it through plenty of years on the original revisions without post editing feature, and still managed to maintain a decent community. We're now a fraction of that size and quantity of activity, so... I guess every post counts.

Anybody have further thoughts?