Actually editing a post is limited to within 30 days of posting.
I can't remember, but deletions may be similarly restricted. There are few reasons for this. In the classifieds section, it seems to be an even tug of war between those who place the ads and want them deleted after they are sold, and those people on the other end of the spectrum, maybe buying such merchandise, that want the security of knowing that the evidence of what they thought they were buying is still available for review after the fact.
From my own perspective, I have found that all ads, no matter how old they are, are beneficial for a site. Search engine spiders are a big help to sites to bring viewers to the site when key word hits link to a post of thread. So even though a post may be a couple of years old, they are still providing a sort of passive advertising for the site that they reside on. Especially when the number of hits a keyword has on a site may help the search engine rankings to put the site higher up on the list of relevant webpages for that keyword search hit.
So there are a lot of issues involved in what at first blush seems to be a very simple topic.
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