you’re right: you need to first find your old subscriptions before you can mark them with watching/tracking/bookmarks. a good way to get started is to review “topics” (threads) and “replies” (posts) in your activity here:
https://budgetlightforum.com/my/activity
@sb56637 may have more advice.
If you delete a post, it isn’t really deleted, and everyone can still read it if they click the edit icon. And you cannot then re-edit it to undo the delete, having discovered that delete is useless. So it’s even worse than useless.
Not only are deletes always visible, but SO ARE EDITS. Any previous versions of a post remains available.
This means that you can never remove any statement by editing it, or remove a web link that you no longer wish to be publicly available. No longer can you correct yourself if you posted something in a poor state of mind, etc.
Hi @Sirius9 , great to see you here.
All of the old threads and posts and private messages are still here. As mentioned in the tips that others have mentioned, I would recommend that you start here:
This forum software has been proven to work well for large forums with very active members that want to keep track of everything that’s going on, both previous activity and new activity. It’s definitely not lacking in features compared to the old forum engine. But I do need to do a better of job of explaining some of the new aspects and features, so my apologies for not doing that yet.
Hi @Hoop , regarding the functionality/behavior that you describe, it’s an optional feature that I can disable. I’m still on the fence, but I’ll definitely take into account your comments.
With the “reply” button integrating a “quote” every time it is used, there’s inherently less of an ability to edit and redact statements than there was on the old site, where I felt the quote feature was already overused. Now practically every reply in a thread features a quote of a previous post.
The aforementioned features in aggregate mean that I need to alter the way I use the site as compared to before. I used to edit my posts a lot in order to refine statements, correct information that I further investigated, and so on. It was like a living document, a work in progress which I refined over time. I used to delete a lot of posts too, when I considered it redundant, or if I decided I was not sure enough about some of the statements I made, or if in hindsight I decided it was rude, and so on. I’ve probably deleted close to half of my posts historically, none of which were quoted prior to doing so.
Being able to view past edits and deleted posts has advantages and disadvantages, so the choice will be difficult.
Theoretically I appreciate having the ability to view past edits and deletions, but practically that may not be the best overall choice for the forum and there have been times that I was thankful my edits and deletions were no longer visible.
To use a marine metaphor, I am glad sb56637 is an experienced “Sea Captain” capable of “steering large ships” and making these important decisions.
Seconding Hoop regarding edit and deletion, beeing able to see every edits and deleted post is just silly.
Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful replies. It looks like there are more disadvantages than advantages to the post revisions button, so it’s been removed.
Regarding quoting, it’s another case of weighing the advantages and the disadvantages, and the software offers an additional option:
I chose to disable that default behavior to avoid giving the impression that the new forum is buggy or is disallowing users from quoting. Posts containing entire or partial quotes of previous posts that have since been edited or removed have always been a frequent occurrence on internet forums, including with our old forum software.
With that being said, the new software is much better at showing the threading (who is replying to whom) in long discussions, plus it has the user @ping feature to indicate who you’re replying to, although that shouldn’t be abused since the pinged user will receive a notification. It also shows a preview of a post if the link is pasted on its own line:
If Hoop were to edit or delete that post then the preview would reflect that.
So I won’t enforce any new rules on quoting, but there are now more ways than before to avoid unnecessarily quoting entire long posts while still indicating who/what we’re replying to.
Can there be more tools in the tool bar ? I’m not fluent in markdown, BBcode or HTML, nor are many people I think.
Like for inserting image from third party host, and is it possible to resize them ? I want to edit some of my old posts because now the pictures take the full width.
How do I resize internally hosted picture ? there are numbers but changing them crop the image instead of resizing it.
There are some additions that I could install, but I need to make sure they’ll be viable in the long term.
Simply put the image URL on its own line. For example:
https://getwallpapers.com/wallpaper/full/b/5/f/563687.jpg
becomes
Regarding image resizing, it’s generally preferable to let the forum software deal with the image size for different screen sizes. But there might be some easy options, I’ll get back with you on that.
I noticed something that I don’t really care for.
In the blue scroll bar on the right of the thread, you can use the slider to choose what post you want to look at.
The thing is, there’s a huge difference between Feb 22 and Feb '22.
One refers to February 22nd, 2023 (the current year) and the other refers to 2022.
I think that '22 should be not be shortened and it should be extended to “2022.”
Maybe 22 should also be lengthened to “22nd” to further avoid confusion.
It looks to me that when the scroll indicator reads something like ‘Feb 22’ that is the day of the (current or near past) month, and if the scroll indicator is referring to a date longer ago it would be something like ‘Feb 2021’, 'Feb 2017" and so on.
BLF was working differently for me earlier today. 
I had the same issue and found something that I used to edit some posts/threads with images and videos:
For images: url - How to resize quickly a imgur image? - Super User
You can specify the small version of the image by appending
sto its base URL.
For example, the URL of your original image ishttps://i.stack.imgur.com/Brjd7.jpg.
By addingsthis becomeshttps://i.stack.imgur.com/Brjd7s.jpg: […]
Some images may have an ultra-small version of the image, accessed by addingss, thus making ithttps://i.stack.imgur.com/Brjd7ss.jpg, but your image does not have one.Here is the list of all the modifiers for dimensions (not all are always available) :
s = 90× 90 = Small Square (as seen in the example above) b = 160× 160 = Big Square t = 160× 160 = Small Thumbnail m = 320× 320 = Medium Thumbnail l = 640× 640 = Large Thumbnail h = 1024×1024 = Huge Thumbnail
For videos: Youtube embed size, revisited - support - Discourse Meta
Hmmm just tested and it looks like that method still works? You just append
&width=690&height=400to the first part of the URL e.g. […]
This is what I did in older posts and it worked. From now on, I will learn how to add videos and photos into the new website in a way that they can be well organized and that I don’t need to use these codes everytime I need to add something!
I hope it helps 
Being able to see the edits mostly means two things:
On the old site, people edited and/or deleted comments quite a bit, often in ways which were really not okay. Like, they’d say something terrible, wait until it caused problems, and then delete it and pretend they did nothing wrong. Or there were people like kreisler, who would post, wait a day, then delete… pretty much every day, every post. It was a big nuisance. That’s part of why I ended up making a daemon to automatically archive every page I viewed, since it was the only way to keep a record of what happened.
On the other hand, there’s something to be said for the “right to be forgotten”. Data privacy is a huge and complex topic, and there are lots of situations where information really should be deleted instead of just being tucked away in the edit history.
On the other other hand, almost nothing on the internet is ever truly deleted. There’s usually an archived copy somewhere, especially in places like this which are published for the entire internet to read. People need to understand the difference between a private conversation and a public post, and be careful about what they publish.
The common case of editing a post to fix typos, update old info, or add extra info… isn’t really affected much by this. It’s pretty much fine either way, just normal edits. The main factors in determining which policy to use are the more difficult cases, like when someone acts with ill intent or has an atypical situation.
I really could go either way on this… because instead of having a clear solution which always works, there are tradeoffs. However, I think I lean slightly toward visible edit history. It helps reduce some of the abuse patterns the old site had, and special situations can still be handled by asking an admin for help. Like, contact @sb56637 and say “Hey, I got really drunk and s##tposted last night and I feel terrible about it… could you delete the 7 posts linked below?”.
Or perhaps there are other solutions; I don’t know exactly what features Discourse has for this, or what other communities have found to work best.
Very helpful, thank you sir!
Oh Flying Spaghetti Monster, the self deleting squirrel 
I don’t miss him.
I agree, this is a pretty complicated topic.
I remember when i had asked for being able to edit posts right way on the old forum as i tend to make many spelling mistakes, i felt bad that SB had to pay someone to add that functionality though 
This post shows another bug i have been finding, sometimes when you choose a smiley it puts it at the beginning of the post even when the cursor is in the place i want the smiley. And it glitched the quoting which i am leaving as is for analysis.