forum changes? can't edit old posts

Status
Not open for further replies.
Yes, Paul noted that he was going to today and did apparently. Announcement likely to follow. I think the time frame is now 10 mins edits before marked with 'edited by' and 2 hours for no edits.

One reason was spammers lying in wait - then going back and editing posts that were innocent before.
 
I think it is (has been) very useful to be able to edit old posts -- to correct errors and add new information. Also a number of us have used the old-post edit feature to maintain "sticky posts", a poor man's web page, allowing you to update a particular topic without an endless chain of disjointed posts. I, for example, edited my K66 beta test sticky post on Ethernet testing more than 50 times over many months ....

I don't like the new policy.:(

maybe "senior members" can be granted ageless editing of old posts
 
maybe "senior members" can be granted ageless editing of old posts

I'll talk with Robin and see if we can do this. Some things are easy with vBulletin, and other stuff you'd think should be easy, well, isn't.

If not, I do know we can add you to the "Senior Member+" group which gives you the ability to edit any message.

Formerly we were calling this group "Moderators". On a technical level, that's pretty much the access you get. From a PJRC customer service point of view, we've recently had a few people get confused by the forum. So in addition to the editing time limits, we made this minor rename of the special group. Technically it's only a cosmetic change, but those sorts of little details can really matter for customer service issues.
 
Spammers don't have much of a chance here for their stuff to do them any good

But not being able to fix code errors in example posts could be a negative.

E.g. all those MIDI.gettype() = 7; changes we'll need soon will have to live in the tail of the thread
 
I'm looking into forum settings that would allow some users (like senior members) to edit their posts. Give me a couple of days to investigate and test some settings. I'm confident I can come up with a solution.
 
vBulletin version 4 is still getting critical security updates, but otherwise it's pretty much never going to change. The original company/authors sold it to another company which hasn't done a good job. They stopped working on version 4 and started a whole new version 5, which has received terrible reviews. We're definitely not upgrading to version 5.

Someday we're going to migrate from vBulletin to Xenforo. This has actually been in the planning for a couple years, and realistically it may be 2019 or 2020 when we actually make the change.

In the meantime, we're avoiding "mods" to this forum as much as possible. There are a few for anti-spam purposes. But every change that isn't a standard vbulletin setting will make preserving all the accounts and messages harder when we make the import to Xenforo.
 
Yesterday morning I got a spam email on my google account, that had full information about the thread I am subscribed to. Either the forum software or Paul's email seem to be compromised somehow.
 
Yesterday morning I got a spam email on my google account, that had full information about the thread I am subscribed to. Either the forum software or Paul's email seem to be compromised somehow.

Not sure what you saw - but the FORUM/PJRC will send email to address of record when a subscribed thread gets posted to ... even by a spammer? If that was it, it is a compromise of the Forum by a SPAM user signing up and posting.

This is a known issue - the solution was to empower a few active folks to quickly ban those users to minimize the abuse. After the fact - but at least it typically stops quite quickly now. New forum software will offer better protection - but see post #11 above.
 
Unfortunately I killed the message too early to do the proper investigation. But it was a normal notification of a new message in a subscribed thread followed by 2 pages of p* ads. The header and the trailer of the text body were exactly normal for a new forum message notification.
 
No. I subscribed to many threads which makes that I get a lot of emails with notifications from these forums which is fully ok. From time to time I get also a notification if an unfortunate spammer posts in one of my subscribed threads which is expected behavior but which will end in a Senior+ action... ;)
 
I used to get several notifications for spam in subscribed threads... But these days I mostly don't subscribe as I look often enough to find most things...

And also luckily with more of us up on the forums who can do something about the spammer, I have not seen many where the user has a few messages before they are removed.
 
Another quick test. We're turning on the click-this-link-from-email-to-activate-registration feature. Most forums use this, but we turned it off years ago during a time when the emails weren't going out properly. It never got turned back on, until today.

Some of the spammers are using email accounts that have already been shut down or don't work. I see bounce messages, and then a few minutes later there's a "free streaming" or other spam. Not all the spam is this way, but some sure is. This change could at least cut down on some of their new user registrations, or at least force some of them to work harder.

:)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'll talk with Robin and see if we can do this. Some things are easy with vBulletin, and other stuff you'd think should be easy, well, isn't.

If not, I do know we can add you to the "Senior Member+" group which gives you the ability to edit any message.

Paul, can you add me to "Senior Member+" group
 
Robin - I added a smiley to your post - I expected it to MARK IT edited - but that won't happen until the 10 minute timeout I see now. I edited a "reported Post" yesterday that was 'old' and it automatically added my name and time/date as normal. Paul noted that the other day he wanted to be sure we did that.

I just did the same to Paul's post #21 above and it puts my name on without question.

<edit>: I removed the :) from the Above post by Robin and now that the 'free edit' period passed it auto signed it as edited for me - like it did for post #21.
 
Last edited:
It seems like editing came and went for non-'plused' members (I was able to edit messages only a few days ago).

Is it coming back?

I don't want to be able to edit the posts of others or otherwise have any moderator-type responsibilities but I am hoping editing posts is restored for regular, long-standing members.


EDIT - Ah... there's a time limit on how long you can edit old posts. How long is it?
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top