Locking old threads

[Scott-Copywriter]

Kat, just to conclude what was discussed in the earlier thread:

Unfortunately there are no system hijinks that allow us to lock older threads! Plus I dread to think what would happen if I tried to edit 4200 General Business threads at once. There's also no way to limit members posting on certain threads I'm afraid.

Believe me, this pains me as much as you; manually finding and closing ten year-old threads resurrected for the sake of a "this is gud" is not the most thrilling part of my day.

This would be a very easy feature for any developer to implement into the forum - whether this forum is bespoke or off-the-shelf.

Plenty of other forums have systems like this in place which automatically locks and archives very old threads, and doing them all at once for the first time automatically (which I presume would involve a MySQL database run) would take minutes without any downtime.

It's worth inquiring about this, I'd say.

 

[UKSBD]

Looking at this another way.

I find it really annoying when I find something on Google, it's a forum thread, I read it, want to respond only to find it locked.

It's not always a case that old threads shouldn't be replied to, I would rather have choice than it be automated.

Let's face it most posts, after a reply to an old post, are just from people moaning about an old post being replied to, I think some people just wait for old posts to be replied to, so they can be the 1st to jump in and moan about it

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Looking at this another way.

I find it really annoying when I find something on Google, it's a forum thread, I read it, want to respond only to find it locked.

It's not always a case that old threads shouldn't be replied to, I would rather have choice than it be automated.

Let's face it most posts, after a reply to an old post, are just from people moaning about an old post being replied to, I think some people just wait for old posts to be replied to, so they can be the 1st to jump in and moan about it

Just to clarify, this type of system generally locks threads after a period of inactivity, not necessarily age.

So those threads which might be very old but are still "active" can keep going. It's only those which are old and haven't had a response in, say, a year or two, which are then locked.

In my view, if there's a thread which is very old, and hasn't been replied to in that long, members would probably be better off making a new thread anyway. More exposure and less complaints that way.

 

[Ian J]

Have you looked at this auto lock

 

[Kat Haylock]

I'll look into this - thanks!