How can I prevent people from editing their content after a period of time has passed?

Say a person writes a blog post, a wiki document, an article or a forum post.

We can lock down a forum post after <x> number of days to prevent replies.

However, I want to be able to stop people from editing their content after <x> number of days.

What I am seeing is a prevalence of people creating content and posting it to the site, sometimes it's really good, and we even share it on social media, boost it among companies we know, use it in PR, and they're onboard with it.

We have a policy that says any content contributed, we're allowed to do that with, and we have procedures in place to have moderators or admins delete user content upon request.

What we're seeing though, is that people contribute content, and then sometime later, they edit it and wipe it out, the title's still there most of the time, but the content of the post itself is wiped out, leaving something like "soft 404" in its place.

People also do this with comments, leaving chains of conversations behind, while I'd want to also prevent people deleting comments after a time, it's mainly the ability to edit this content that I'd like to time gate.

What's the best way of doing so to prevent this?

  • Hi  

    Unfortunately, there's no easy way to achieve this without manually removing users' editing permissions after a set period, which would also mean they can't create content—far from ideal.

    I suggest suggesting this idea if it hasn't been raised already. We've made similar automations in the past, and it's possible to create one in the future to stop users from deleting comments after a certain time.

  • Hi Christopher,

    Verint has this functionality OOTB only for forums , you can prevent editing & deleteing the form threads after x number of minutes.

    Unfortunately this is only available for forum threads as far as i know. Although this is achieveable for all the other content type by creating a custom automation that fire upon the before update events that checks for the age of the content and cancel the content from editing or deleting.

    For forum threads these settings are under 

    Administration > Applications > Applications > Forums > Under Editing Tag .

     

  • Hi Satish,

    We already use the functionality on forum posts:

    We can lock down a forum post after <x> number of days to prevent replies.

    it's for other content that I am asking about.

    Although this is achieveable for all the other content type by creating a custom automation that fire upon the before update events that checks for the age of the content and cancel the content from editing or deleting.

    Have you done this? If so, what actions do you have the automation doing? As Sara stated:

    there's no easy way to achieve this without manually removing users' editing permissions after a set period, which would also mean they can't create content

    Which is not something we would want to prevent (creating content).

  • Hi Christopher,

    We didnt have done this yet . There are ways to achieve this.

    One way would be setting up an automation that triggers on before edit or before delete events (Easiest or recommended way)

    a) Check for the age of content based on the created date & current date , if that meets the criteria you can simply cancel the event using the code below providing some reason why you are cancelling the event.

    context_v2_automationTrigger.CancelEvent("You dont have permissions to edit this");

    b) When some one tries to edit the post on submit the event will be cancelled showing the reason that was mentioned above as a warning.

    This way you can simply restrict the user from editing , deleting the content