This is a statement on recent topic locks you may have noticed. The forum is a very new thing for the project, and we all have so much to learn from each other to make it a better place for everyone. All locks have been lifted as soon as moderators cleared things up inside topics affected.
This forum topics may have different states. The most popular you may notice are:
- Locked Topic
- Archived Topic
We don’t see sporadic topic locks as a “nice tone”, given the fact we would like this place to be community-managed as much as possible. That’s why, in such cases like going off-topic, the lock should be temporary temporary, required to stop users from replying to the thread and be able to clean things up, either removing the off-topic posts or moving them to new or existing topic, which would better fit the conversation.
As soon as the topic is cleared, moderators should unlock the post to let people continue discussion on the topic.
We may introduce systematic topic locks for things like feedback requests, whose section will get a total revamp in upcoming releases, which we hope you will like. These locks would end the request discussion in case the feedback or issue was Resolved or Rejected.
Archived state is a totally different thing. We may find it useful when the topic lost it’s actuality, like news & other stuff. In addition to that, many topics will be self-archived automatically after some considerable time passes since last reply.
Further reading:
- A great explanation from Discourse team on how Locking and Archiving affects the topic.
