[Answered] Closing Threads

[Gentoo]

I was curious if there's a specific reason why certain threads are closed.

 

It would make sense to me that heated threads that aren't going anywhere get closed to resolve conflict. It also makes sense to close rejected Admin Apps and Ban Appeals obviously. It doesn't make sense to me why certain suggestions, rules discussions, etc. would be closed.

 

Suggestions have tags to mark if the idea is being reviewed, accepted, or rejected; since they are already answered in the tags, they could be left open for people to give input on applied suggestions, or share ways in which rejected suggestions could be feasibly implemented including sharing links to existing plugins.

 

Similarly, and more importantly, I feel, rules discussions have tags to show if a question has been answered. People may have related or similar questions that could be asked in the context of the thread rather than making a new thread. There also seems to be a small number of questions that have been answered improperly; the person answering may have misinterpreted the question and now

OP must duplicate their thread to have it answered properly.

 

I would understand locking threads of answered questions to prevent them from derailing, obscuring the "official" answer, but I think we'd be better off adding a way to highlight these "official" answers and leaving threads open to discussion.

[fantastic]

A big reason why suggestions and rule discussions are locked are to prevent topics that have already been discussed and thoroughly debated from coming up again, and having discussions repeat themselves. These threads are always open for a semi-long period of time to ensure community input is thoroughly received and reviewed, and an official answer comes up and the thread is locked appropriately. We can always talk about rule discussions and suggestions forever, but at some point the discussion gets stale and any point that can be brought up has already been brought up.

 

If threads are being pre-maturely locked and OP needs to open a new thread regarding a "new" discussion point or to steer the thread back towards its original intent, I don't see any problem with this. If the first thread was locked because it went off-topic, making another thread that's on-topic seems like a good idea as opposed to keeping everything in a single thread with multiple people answering their own interpretation of what they think OP is talking about.

 

I think Rules Discussions should have similar "Rejected", "Answered", "Applied", etc. prefixes, but at the same time having the existing "JB", "TTT", and other prefixes are important as well so the appropriate ATs can easily see what threads they need to read. It's an unfortunate limitation that only one prefix can be applied at a time - hopefully the new forums can fix this since I think this suggestion of adding the Suggestions Box prefixes to Rules Discussion threads is really good.

[delirium]

A big reason why suggestions and rule discussions are locked are to prevent topics that have already been discussed and thoroughly debated from coming up again, and having discussions repeat themselves. These threads are always open for a semi-long period of time to ensure community input is thoroughly received and reviewed, and an official answer comes up and the thread is locked appropriately. We can always talk about rule discussions and suggestions forever, but at some point the discussion gets stale and any point that can be brought up has already been brought up.

 

If threads are being pre-maturely locked and OP needs to open a new thread regarding a "new" discussion point or to steer the thread back towards its original intent, I don't see any problem with this. If the first thread was locked because it went off-topic, making another thread that's on-topic seems like a good idea as opposed to keeping everything in a single thread with multiple people answering their own interpretation of what they think OP is talking about.

 

I think Rules Discussions should have similar "Rejected", "Answered", "Applied", etc. prefixes, but at the same time having the existing "JB", "TTT", and other prefixes are important as well so the appropriate ATs can easily see what threads they need to read. It's an unfortunate limitation that only one prefix can be applied at a time - hopefully the new forums can fix this since I think this suggestion of adding the Suggestions Box prefixes to Rules Discussion threads is really good.

 

Pretty sure any of the BD's could add these prefixes if they wanted. It wouldn't take more than an hour. Having two tags on a thread is another discussion though; not sure if this is easily implemented with vbulletin but haven't personally looked into it so who knows.