This is one of those things that should probably be made a new feature on the forum, the ability to switch back and forth between moderated/unmoderated threads. It would probably piss a lot of people off if members started switching normal threads to self-moderated ones and deleted all the posts
I hope that will never happen! I don't want random users to have delete-access on any post I ever made in their topic. It would also greatly benefit scammers.
I don't know how many times I've meant to create a self-modded thread and forgot to.
That's easy to fix: create a new thread, tick the self-mod box, wipe the old thread, and move it to Archival.
It really would be nice to be able to switch, even if there were a time limit for a member to do so, e.g., you can't change a thread to self-moderated more than a day after it was started or whatever.
In my experience, 20 seconds would be enough to realize I forgot to self-mod the thread.
why not do it?
Users should know what they're up against
before posting in a topic. That's why any self-moderated thread shows this warning:
If you do not want to be moderated by the person who started this topic, create a new topic.
If it's changed afterwards, this warning makes no sense anymore.