• Anything ‘published’ on the web is viewed as intellectual property and, regardless of whether it displays a copyright symbol or not, is therefore copyrighted by the originator. The only exception to this is if there is a “free and unrestricted reuse” statement associated with the work.

    In order to protect our members and TFL from possible litigation, all members must abide by the following new rules:

    1. Copying and pasting entire articles from another site to TFL is strictly prohibited. The same applies to articles from print or other media, and to posting photographs taken of copyrighted pages or other media.

    2. Copyright law provides for “fair use” of portions of a copyrighted work. You can copy no more than a SINGLE paragraph from the article to your post (3 or 4 sentences at most).

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    Posts that do not follow these new guidelines will be altered or deleted by staff. Members who continue to violate this policy may lose their posting privileges at TFL.

    Thank you for your cooperation and your participation in TFL, the leading online forum for firearms enthusiasts.

Editing an OP

All posts are editable for 4 days, after that time the edit button is removed from the post. That should be plenty of time to get a post "just right". If you need to make a major edit to a post, ask a moderator to help with the edit. But, a continual need to edit a post probably won't be accommodated.
 
Just a suggestion: Please don't go back and answer questions by editing the OP, or otherwise update the OP with too much new information. I find it extremely confusing when people do that. In my opinion, it messes up the entire thread because all of a sudden it seems like people are asking questions that look like they were already answered in the OP. But they weren't originally, it just looks that way because of excessive editing.

A thread is a timeline of a discussion. Altering that timeline by constantly updating your OP can mess up the thread and just confuse everyone else.
 
My intention would be to add the update in a spoiler or, at the very least, a direct link to the updating post. Reviewing things in online forums has been a hobby of mine for a long time and any instance in which the review is on-going I will update the OP with the new information as well as a new post saying there was an update.

This way a new viewer isn't scrolling through pages to find updates. Each range report and discovery would be available in the OP. Some people new to the thread may not even know there is an update, let alone where to find it.

As a long-time forum warrior I find the "4-day" rule a bit odd and wonder what happened to implement such a policy. It is the first forum I have ever been a member of that has such a rule.

But, rules is rules!

Thank for the response, guys!
 
One of the main purposes is to prevent people from retroactively deleting or severely mangling their posts, screwing up the continuity of threads they participated in, if they decide to ragequit TFL. It's happened.

Many forums have editing time limits of much less than 4 days.

Editing the OP is fine if it's done correctly. The form should be familiar, as it's commonly used for blog posts or as-it's-happening news stories.

BLOG BLOG BLOG

NEWS NEWS NEWS

(edit 4/25 1pm disregard the BLOG section)

(edit 4/25 3pm NEWS incorrectly referred to NEWS when it should have been talking about NEWTS)

How easy is that?
 
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