Discord error 30046: Maximum edits to messages older than 1 hour reached

Discord limits how many times a message that is more than an hour old can be edited within a window. Fresh messages can be edited freely (subject to normal rate limits); old messages get a much smaller budget. When you exhaust it you get 30046 and must wait.

This was introduced to stop bots from using a single long-lived message as a constantly-refreshing display. Server status boards, leaderboards, stock tickers and "last updated" embeds that patch the same message every 30 seconds all run into it within a few hours of the message's creation. The exact budget is not published; in practice it is on the order of a handful of edits per hour per old message, so anything more frequent than every few minutes will trip it.

The message itself is fine and can still be read and deleted. Only further edits are blocked until the window resets.

{
  "message": "Maximum number of edits to messages older than 1 hour reached. Try again later",
  "code": 30046
}

Design status displays around message age: edit freely in the first hour, then switch to a slower schedule or rotate to a new message. Store the message's creation timestamp (decode it from the snowflake) and branch on it in your updater.

Message age is decodable offline from the snowflake, so your updater can switch cadence without an extra fetch. Pacing patterns for exactly this kind of long-lived display are in chatbot API rate limiting, and the announcement-channel variant of the same protection is 20022.