"Modify message" question

[tpir04]

I do not understand why there is such a short time limit for modifying my posts. There are times that I post my thoughts on a subject and then a little while later I think of something else. Because the time limit has passed, I end up having to do two separate posts, sometimes consecutively. Could you explain why there is a short time limit? Thanks for any help.

[GameShowFan1987]

An incident happened a while back when someone edited a post that Marc, the owner of the site, had already responded to and the edit ended up completely ruining the perfectly valid point that Marc was trying to make.  As a result, editing was disabled entirely.  After some time, people were complaining about not being able to edit posts to fix spelling/grammar errors or to add something they didn't think of in their initial post so a 10 minute edit period was added and has remained to this day.  Basically, it's to prevent such incidents from happening again.