Some follow-up on three points in this thread:
* GoSeigen asked "
Is there no other way to tell that a mod has edited a post e.g. no history list of edits?". I have done an extensive skim of the phpBB documentation for other posts - it's at
https://www.phpbb.com/support/docs/en/, in the PDF linked to by "Download user guide PDF for phpBB 3.2.x". It does contain a section 9.1 "Forum Logs" section on page 96, which says that they include a Moderator Log which "
... records the actions performed by moderators ..." and goes on to mention moving topics and locking them as actions it records. It's clear though that this is just a couple of examples, as page 106 mentions deleting a post as another example, so editing a post might be yet another. It should be noted though that it's in the "Administration Guide" chapter of the manual, so presumably only properly accessible by administrators; the "Moderator Guide" section only indicates that moderators can see its last five entries. Also, I wouldn't normally expect a "log" in computer software to record more than brief details - e.g. if log entries are created for moderator edits, I would expect them to say that moderator M edited post P at time T on date D, but not what the detailed edits were (so it wouldn't enable edits to be undone). Complete history records as used by wikis are a much more sophisticated software feature!
* I'd guess the matter of moderator names appearing in a different colour is done using the stuff about "Group Management" starting on page 78 of the same PDF, specifically using the "Group colour" attribute described on page 81. If so, no, there doesn't seem to be any similar thing to change other aspects of how the name is displayed or to change the name itself. But the "Group rank" attribute does look as if it is probably used to produce the "Lemon Slice", "Lemon Quarter", "2 Lemon pips", etc, descriptions of posters that appear below their name in the author description panel to the right of each post, presumably with the aid of an extension that moves users between groups according to their post count. I'd guess it would be possible to extend that to take whether a poster is a moderator into account as well, though it might be difficult to make it really work well when new moderators are appointed or existing ones resign or otherwise leave (as is bound to happen in the fullness of time!).
* On the matter of moderators possibly ceasing to edit posts and deleting them instead when something has to be removed, I'm strongly against such a change of policy. As far as I'm concerned, editing a post to deal with a problem in one bit of it is a
big improvement on the TMF situation where the software simply couldn't do it and the moderators had to either do nothing to it or delete it in its entirety. I would like to see a solution to the issue of the author having no access to the pre-edit text once it happens, and that would make the TLF setup even better than it is, but even as it is, it's IMHO better than a delete-or-do-nothing setup would be. (Any such solution would have to be technical rather than being implemented by often-in-a-hurry moderators, I think. E.g. an extension to the phpBB software that emails or PMs the previous source of a post to its author if someone other than the author him- or herself saves a new version of it might well be possible, provided someone was willing to put in the time nd effort to develop it.)
Gengulphus