Alexis – if you ever think I do anything contrary to the guidelines then please let me know. I am very careful about that – as any admin/mod should be.
In the meantime, enjoy this very good community, and contribute as much as you can because that is what makes it what it is 
off the shelf blog software because their main USP is allowing reader comments
In WordPress you simply SWITCH OFF the user comments :-)
Yes, I can see that you like “total control” (;-)))
There are different solutions for different requirements.
The reason I started my own aviation site over 10 years ago was that I wanted total control over the trip writeups etc and to be able to update them (stuff like airport opening hours or whatever) potentially years later.
And I am not the only one who has done that.
Plus I wanted the site to be totally immune from abuse. I didn’t use any of the standard off the shelf blog software because their main USP is allowing reader comments and that then allows abuse – unless you moderate the comments. Or they can just trash it via some PHP bug…
But that is not the same concept as an online community like EuroGA.
I think the 2 hour window is right. Too many subsequent edits beyond that period mean any responses to that post by someone else soon later become out of place, and just strange looking. However I do think it’s useful to be able to delete a post yourself – though I appreciate also that you lose the continuity of a thread if the deleted post just dissapears and there is a post# out of sequence, or there is a message which says “post deleted” and then people start asking why.
Hi Peter,
I am not about to tell you what you have to do with your own forum, I understand that you set the rules – and we either accept them or stay away.
I just want to add: It is not your business “why” somebody wants to delete what he wrote, or posted, or a photo maybe. It can have a thousand reasons and (for me) it’s part of my personal freedom to be able to modify or delete any posting I ever made. It just FEELS better. It is less important in my opinion that a thread has 100% integrity than that I have personal rights about what i write.
But I have accepted the rules, so be it was you wish!
Fair enough… I can only come back to why the edit window exists: to stop somebody making a discussion thread meaningless.
This leads to the wider issue of why somebody might want to delete their old posts. Surely nobody would want to do that if they are in a nice polite community?
The only reason I can think of is that there has been a lot of personal abuse and the person wants to get out of there and remove any trace of their posts on the way out.
We don’t have that problem on EuroGA, partly because any would-be troublemaker can see there is very little to get their teeth into here. We don’t have the “fighting threads” which are a common feature of pilot forums. And any abuse will just get deleted.
I know of a case where one resident of a pilot forum left in an apparently very unhappy state and deleted all his several thousand messages on his way out of the door. He happened to have had admin rights so it was easy for him to do, but anybody could do it with a script. The result is loads of disjointed threads. I have been in such situations myself, having participated on some forums over the past decade and seen them descend into personal abuse, with the obvious consent of the mods.
That isn’t going to happen here, and surely that is a better way to work it than to give people the option to delete their posts in the event of abuse?
I cannot do anything about that, iike if somebody made a screenshot or copied what I wrote. And there is actually NOTHINg anybody will ever want to "get me " for. I do not post or produce porn, I i have a valdid pilot licenes and i pay my taxes. I also never insult people on the internet (okay I can be a bit sarcastic, but that’s still legal… still :-))
But I like it much better when I can delete my postings. Period :-)
I can delete my postings because David and I are admins here.
Somebody has to have admin rights, for all the obvious reasons.
I can’t recall when I edited my own posting after the 2hr slot but if I did it would have been for the same reasons for which I would be happy to edit somebody else’s upon their request, as previously mentioned. I can’t edit posts invisibly (including mine) and you always see the little note about it having been edited.
Facebook can edit or delete what you write – in fact I have recently had an interaction with them on this very topic, in a matter unrelated to aviation. But once somebody has copied, screenshot or printed off something you write on FB, you can’t edit that anymore. It’s out of your control, for ever. And you can be sure that if somebody is “out to get you” they will have made a copy.
Facebook is actually a god example for success, Peter: I can delete any posting I ever did. (While you are right in theory it is not very likely that somebody will doa Google search on something I wrote and deleted)
I understand what you are saying, but it’s all less important than having authority over your own postings.
Can YOU delete your postings? :-) Why?
I still fail to understand what a deletion authority actually achieves.
Every website is indexed by google (usually within hours – community sites such as EuroGA maybe faster) and if you edit your post, the old version will turn up with a suitable expression search. The usual technique with google is to pick an unusual text string known or believed to be in the post and search for it literally i.e. within double quotes. I use that all the time to find the original source for text which somebody quoted somewhere without giving the source.
There are also several websites which store textual web archives, and do a snapshot each month, so if somebody is “out to get you” they can work out what was changed, which is usually more compromising than having access to the original post.
Today’s facebook generation will discover this at their great cost one day.
