As several members who've approached us privately with a request to delete one or more of their posts have learned, deleting posts is not something that's taken lightly or done without a lot of thought and consideration. The only times when it's considered an option is when/if a post might violate something in the forum's guidelines or the rules for a particlar board. In this particular instance, nothing that's been posted in this topic violates any guidelines. And as victoriawinters rightly points out, it's not like others on the Internet hadn't already figured out that they can change their IP addresses if/when they might want to try to mask the fact that they're "stuffing the ballot box," as it were.
As far as the time limit that's been set on editing posts goes, unfortunately it became necessary once one too many people began to edit their posts long after they'd been submitted, often completely changing the thrust of what had originally been said, causing replys to the original content to look odd at best and at worst leaving readers who'd never read the original content with the impression that the people who'd written those replys had completely misinterpreted what they'd commented on. And those are certainly not circumstances unique to dsboards because for some time many forum moderators had been requesting that the YaBB SE/SMF developers introduce an editing time limit into their software. Once it became an option, it was something that we frankly jumped at the chance to activate - though, in fact, I've made modifications to the feature to keep the window of opportunity open longer than the developers actually intended. The original restrictions were far more stringent. We can understand that at times the limit might be a bit of an inconvenience - but at the same time it's always possible to make a follow-up to an original post to help clarify a point. And, of course, a good rule of thumb across the board (after all, there are many places on the Internet where editing after the fact for content isn't an option at all
) is to try to consider what's about to be posted before it's submitted rather than afterward.
