Forum question on why discussion threads are locked though question is unanswered

[pseeburger]

Hello!

I am trying to figure out the reason why some discussion threads are locked even though no answers have been submitted. It does not make any sense to me that people are being asked not to post to a thread that may be a few months old when their comments belong linked to this thread and the owner of the thread would want to know about the related posts, at least I do.

I read the new members guide and the forum rules and I don't see anything about this topic. It seems that locking a thread and telling others not to post to a thread that is a few months old makes it impossible to find an answer on that thread and encourages posters to need to post again on the same question. How is this supposed to work? Is there simply no hope of finding an answer at that point using this forum? This seems quite restrictive and unhelpful.

Thanks for shedding light on this question!

Paul

[DarrylBurke]

I've replied to your PM, but I'm reproducing the reply here for wider viewership and discussion.

It also does not indicate what to do if your thread is locked but you still want to find an answer to your question. =)

Now that's a different issue, one that could possibly be included in the rules. I'll need to go through the forum owner for that, so it may take some time.

The best thing is to ask a moderator to unlock the thread, either by starting a thread in Feedback or via PM. I've reopened the thread.

You may perceive this behavior as somewhat arbitrary, but in the days before moderation we've seen endless and mostly meaningless resurrections of threads, more often than not for the worst possible reason: gimmedacodez™ So the general policy is to lock first and wait for reactions later. You hadn't posted anything for 4 months; in most such cases, we find that the OP never does return to the thread and the forum ends up with a large number of ancient threads near the top of the listing: threads which are mostly either difficult or impossible to answer. That isn't a good thing.

db

[pseeburger]

Thanks, Darryl!

I appreciate your quick and clear response to my question. I can appreciate the reason for some threads to be locked, but I have found it confusing why threads are often locked before a real answer is posted. In my opinion, if the original poster finds an answer somewhere else they should post the answer to their own question on the forum to be helpful to others searching for answers to the same problem. I assume the original poster is also not allowed to post again to a locked thread.

Hopefully I will find an answer to this menu issue in Java applets on Firefox on Macs. If and when I do I will post the solution I find to my thread.

Thanks for your help!

Paul