Seems I’m unable to unlike a post if I’ve interacted (i’m guessing it’s replying triggering it) with it. Hovering over and trying to click the heart to unlike gives me a negative sign (imagine a no smoking sign), so this is likely a coded intentional interaction, not a bug.
From the Discourse cofounder (the program that intfiction is hosted on):
You can pretty effectively grief people by liking and un-liking forever. You could also get mad at someone and rage-unlike all their posts. In general unlimited user actions are dangerous as a rule.
This is a setting that mods can change using post undo action window mins. The default is 10 minutes but it’s 24 hours here.
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Seems like it’s several hours if not longer on this forum. Thanks for the info. No intention to grief! Not sure why that was implied; wasn’t my intention but I guess I’ll take that meta knowledge of this community onboard.
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I believe it’s 24 hours here.
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Nobody would think or imply that was your intention. The stuff Hidnook was quoting are from other sources, and those sources assume the only reason to revoke a like after a time limit is to grief. Those sources have not taken other possibilities into consideration, but those sources are the ones that created that part of the system, so it makes sense to point to their reasons for creating it to answer your question.
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I think that line about liking and unliking being a potential avenue for griefing came from the forum devoted to the site software, not here - I don’t recall anything along those lines happening or being commented on in the last four or five years, at least. Which is just to say no worries, people like and unlike stuff and it’s no big deal!
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The community is on top of things here, thanks @hidnook!
I sort of agree with Discourse’s reasoning - if you like a post, the only reason to un-like something (other than “I fumbled this click and didn’t mean to hit like”) after a longer period is as “retribution” for someone you’ve changed your opinion about. An “I’m going to take back all my hearts I gave this person” rampage involves a lot of work and really isn’t going to cause them any damage after the fact. Hearts do contribute to climbing trust levels, but you’re probably not going to affect much.
I’m curious: Do you have a different organization or mechanical reason for un-liking posts? If you’re using it to keep track of posts you want to come back to, we have a bookmark function that is meant for that, and they appear under the “Bookmarks” tab at the to top of the screen for you personally, and can be cleared when you no longer need them.
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I can think of plenty of valid reasons—from “this seemed like a good solution to my problem, it worked well at first, but two days later I’ve realized that it causes dozens of headaches and I no longer recommend it”, to just “I agreed with this post but it was edited in a way that I no longer support”—but hopefully they don’t come up too often. A single like isn’t the end of the world.
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If I was given information that ultimately didn’t work out, I’d still like that the suggestion was given. I don’t think removing a heart communicates useful information to the original poster or the community. It would be better to reply and explain why the suggestion didn’t work after the fact. I don’t really keep track of hearts on messages and would never really notice if the number incremented down. It’s good micro-engagement to see people are reading the message.
Hearts are a quick thumbs up; or like pennies in a fountain. If your wish doesn’t come true, removing your penny from the fountain isn’t going to observably punish the fountain nor be noticed by the person who cleans them out once a week.
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The only time I ever noticed the “no take backs” rule was when someone gave one of my games a mediocre review. I hit “like” to acknowledge that I’d read it. Two days later the poster added edit and a follow up blisteringly bad review of the same game within the same thread, saying he’d “changed his mind about his experience of the game” I tried to “unlike” his edited post but couldn’t.
Not that any of this matters. Like or unlike, who cares.
However I do tend to think the discord “no take-backs” policy is over-cautious. If someone is consistently abusive either in what they post or how they interact with the system, there are more effective ways for admins and the community to address those transgressions.
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The creators of Discord are on the record as saying, “Liking a post is a solemn trust. It’s practically a marriage. Our goal at Discord is to enforce every such marriage by shotgun and with extreme prejudice.” (*)
(*) This is a lie.
-Wade
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We also used to have a time limit for how long people could edit posts. People of course hated this, and it caused problems for people running beta tests who wanted to keep updating the initial post over a period of weeks, so editing is unlimited after the first initial trust level.
One of the goals of this forum besides communication is to archive historical discussion, reviews, etc., and that can be difficult when someone gets on a bender and decides they want to remove messages they posted a year ago. We understand there are legitimate reasons to edit history (and we will help people if it’s a matter of security, copyright, personal privacy, safety, etc) but we’d much prefer annotation if someone changes their opinion later. The edit history of messages is available to forum Staff and users I believe.
I suppose if people want to micromanage their historical likes that doesn’t really go against that. I personally have never had the urge to un-like something except in a rare case where I am looking at who liked a post and mis-click the heart.
I assume you mean “Discourse” our forum software and not “Discord” which is the elaborate chat and gaming app. (I have totally said one when I meant the other multiple times! 
)
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Oh, I’m the same, and then I followed what Doug had typed and it’s made my joke look silly! (or sillier)
-Wade
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To clarify, I just wanted to be able to unlike posts because I scroll on mobile and accidentally like posts - in a thread like festival reviews the posts are going hella fast and I tend to use likes to track where I’ve read up to, and I missed an entire chunk of content because I had accidentally liked a post while scrolling.
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