Slight topic swerve - other forum sites have very narrow edit/delete windows. I'm accustomed to the generous time afforded here at The LAB/Lounge, Control Booth dot com, and Soundforums dot net. I was very surprised when, as a new participant in hobby/recreation forums, a poster had minutes - not hours or days - to make corrections, additions, or retractions.
It's a setting that the admin can change. You have to balance between allowing people to fix their post, and not derailing a thread after 100 replies the OP deletes their post, making the whole thread irrelevant. The setting should be set based on the activity of the web site. If you typically get several replies within a day, then the timeout should be hours, if it's a smaller forum that replies dribble in over days, then you should allow a couple of days for editing.
In a modern forum you can have different settings based on the history of a poster, like if they have been a member for a while they can get a longer time to edit or delete their posts compared to someone who just joined.
