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More than once it happened to me that I found I could improve my comment or wanted to add something, reopened it at a timestamp of "3 minutes ago", and tried to save the edit only to get notified that editing is only possible within the first five minutes after posting, whereas after cancelling the edit the timestamp read "4 minutes ago". This is somehow embarrassing because a user is lead to the wrong conclusions as to the time left to alter one's comment. But as Wrzlprmft suggested, this might be a bug.

Wouldn't it be a better solution to enable opening the comment within the exact timeframe, allowing to exceed it eventually by some extra time when the user wants to save it even after those 5 minutes have gone by (perhaps with a warning that the edit will be rejected after ...minutes), and refusing access to editing exactly after five minutes?

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Reset to default
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If the system refuses you to edit your comment with the timestamp reading four minutes ago after cancelling, this is a bug (and should be reported as such).

As for your suggestion: The reason for this time limit is that there is no history for comment edits (see here) and thus late edits of comments may cause a lot of confusion and are also prone to abuse. As far as I know, access to comment editing is not granted by the server but happens browser-side, so implementing what you suggested without allowing for abuse or at least effectively rising the comment-edit deadline would be quite difficult.

As a sidenote: If you want to edit your comment after the deadline and somebody posted another comment afterwards, it’s very likely that you best not edit it anyway. If there are no newer comments, you can as well delete your comment and repost it.

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  • With answers to a comment not coming too quickly, your last suggestion would be in fact the easiest way to do it.
    – Martin Schwehla
    Apr 5, 2015 at 9:41

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