by funkyboris » Sun Jan 11, 2015 12:16 pm
Short version Please reconsider your thread locking policies.
----
Long versionYesterday, I wrote a question of sorts on the Raspberry Pi subforum, the contents of which is irrelevant to the point I am about to make:
http://archlinuxarm.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=8246I created the thread at 1:10 CET. There were replys at 5:35 and 9:40 CET. That was when I was asleep.
I woke up and tried what had been suggested in the last reply. By the face of it, the suggested package seemed to mitigate the situation - just the kind of solution I was looking for.
At 12:20, I tried to reply to the thread saying that the suggested solution seemed to have worked and thank pepedog for suggesting it. That didn't happen. Instead, I got this message:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')his topic is too old to reply, so, it's locked now. Thanks.
The topic was (and still is, at the time of writing this post)
less than 12 hours old.
The message does not specifiy whether this has been locked by an admin manually, or automatically. Either way, I find this practice annoying to say the least.
The reason I made the post in the first place was, that I had tried google first. As far as I recall, nothing useful came up. My thread thus had two distinct purposes:
$this->bbcode_list('1')
To (hopefully) fix the problem at handTo (also hopefully) rank in google with an answer to a problem that others might have.The last one is the reason I take exception to the practice of such swift locking of the thread: There is no
conclusion. If someone else finds the thread while looking for a fix to a similar problem, they will have no way of judging the suggestions offered in the post because they were never followed up. If the thread is to be of use to anyone, they need to be able to deduce the following about it:
$this->bbcode_list('1')
Here's someone who has a problem which is similar to mineSomeone else on the thread suggested a solutionThe original someone commented on whether the solution was of any useThe threads usefulness to a person looking for a solution to a similar problem certainly drops a considerable amount of points if the last step is conspicuously absent.
In Summary: See "Short version" (top of post).