User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-188432-20121202033808/@comment-188432-20121202093701

Well, if forums are used to actually discuss serious matters about how wikis are edited, then people must be able to trust that the earlier posts remain substantively unchanged. Otherwise your comment might be made moot, hostle, arrogant or just plain silly by retroactive fiddling.

In the old forum system, people could — you're right — change their earlier remarks. At w:c:tardis, we couldn't enforce our local ban on that by any other means than just saying, "Don't change or delete your comments substantively or we'll be forced to block you." Our one actual tool was the rollback button. And that worked pretty well. Simply drawing a hard line in the sand prevented most people from being tempted to go back in the discussion and redact their earlier views.

But I worry that it'll be harder to enforce with this new system. If we locally say, "Don't delete your comments," — but you give people a big, shiny button that says "delete" — or a button that lets them edit their remarks indefinitely — will it be any wonder if they press it?

Instead of doing that, though, you could give us actual tools to ward off the ex post facto crowd.

I think it would be a simple programming matter to:
 * put a timer on the ability to use the edit button. Give people an hour and then cut 'em off — even admins
 * delete the "delete" button. Ordinary users don't have deletion rights over other pages.  just remove the temptation to try to hide their behaviour, their knowledge or their swearing.