I'll assume you meant locked topics.
Topics are locked if being able to post in them would produce more noise (alternatively, fruitless work) than information.
Imagine if there's a good topic for a subject, then a new one is posted. People interested in the subject would have to read both to learn about it, and for someone new it might not be immediately obvious which one to post in. Thus, we lock one topic to divert all traffic about it into the other.
Imagine if a topic is devoid of content or misleading. Posts in it become pointless as they riff on the topic's existence, then joke with each other. Locking it saves other people the trouble of thinking the topic is legitimate.
Other forums also practice things like locking topics that are too old (because people have a knee-jerk reaction to necroing - it's not always bad though. Here it's useful, since we try to keep one topic per game for all eternity) or that are too long (either because long topics bog down the forum software or because they make it intimidatingly long for newcomers to the subject - making a new topic allows for the opening post to be updated with the most relevant and up to date information, and for the newcomer to know that everything they read will be fresh and reasonably new)
As a general rule, any topic that exists for its own sake rather than to provide some kind of useful resource to others will get locked.
My personal recommendation is that whenever you join a new community, you not create any threads at all until you can figure out how the community functions. Each community has their own rules on how these things work.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Look at the bottom of the page while looking at which forum you want to visit. It has:
White (No new messages)
Orange (New Messages)
Lock (Locked Forum)
Joined: 8/14/2009
Posts: 4083
Location: The Netherlands
wellbe6 wrote:
Look at the bottom of the page while looking at which forum you want to visit. It has:
White (No new messages)
Orange (New Messages)
Lock (Locked Forum)
Such forums would be locked for whatever reason the admins would want them to be locked. The reasons could be the same as for locking topics, as was posted above, or because they're out-dated.
Also, TASVideos doesn't have such forums. The icon's only there for completion's sake.
http://www.youtube.com/Noxxa
<dwangoAC> This is a TAS (...). Not suitable for all audiences. May cause undesirable side-effects. May contain emulator abuse. Emulator may be abusive. This product contains glitches known to the state of California to cause egg defects.
<Masterjun> I'm just a guy arranging bits in a sequence which could potentially amuse other people looking at these bits
<adelikat> In Oregon Trail, I sacrificed my own family to save time. In Star trek, I killed helpless comrades in escape pods to save time. Here, I kill my allies to save time. I think I need help.
Topics are locked if being able to post in them would produce more noise (alternatively, fruitless work) than information.
Isn't it highly subjective what is "noise" and what is "information"? Some post might be completely out-of-place and off-topic in a certain group, but then the proper course of action is to move it to the appropriate group rather than locking it.
Imagine if there's a good topic for a subject, then a new one is posted. People interested in the subject would have to read both to learn about it, and for someone new it might not be immediately obvious which one to post in. Thus, we lock one topic to divert all traffic about it into the other.
Wouldn't topic merging (which the forum software actually supports) be the proper course of action?
Imagine if a topic is devoid of content or misleading. Posts in it become pointless as they riff on the topic's existence, then joke with each other. Locking it saves other people the trouble of thinking the topic is legitimate.
Again, it's quite subjective what can be classified as "devoid of content or misleading" so badly that it deserves locking.
Other forums also practice things like locking topics that are too old
Replying to very old threads which have not had any activity for years is quite commonly frowned upon, but personally I have never understood the rationale behind this. Why is it frowned upon? What's so bad about it?
Granted, in a few cases the new post might be completely obsolete because the original post is not relevant anylonger. For example, if there was some 5 years old thread with someone making a question about how to do something with famtasia, and then today someone responded to that question, it would be quite a useless and obsolete post. However, why would it be bad per se? The person who made the post 5 years later was probably just trying to be helpful. Is that a bad thing (even if the help happened to be misaimed)?
However, from what I have seen (elsewhere, not really here) is that responding to any topic which is very old is frowned upon, regardless of what that topic might be and how relevant answering to it may be. This could become especially jarring if someone actually comes up with some recent and interesting new information about that topic in question, and rather than creating a new topic with a lone post and an obscure reference to the 5-year-old thread, he responds to the thread in question, to keep the context clear, and then someone would criticize him for posting to a very old thread. I really don't see the problem.
(Maybe in extremely popular and high-traffic forums where there may be something like 50 active threads per group at a time, it might make sense to lock old threads for the simple reason of keeping the amount of active threads down to a manageable size. However, the tasvideos forum isn't such a high-traffic one, as there are typically a dozen or so threads active at a time at max, and it's quite easy to follow.)
A locked board can be used for storing locked topics, of course.
One might be an 'announcements' board. Depending on the forum, this might be locked to prevent people from posting in the announcements topics.
Another might be a holding ground for topics that have been locked for being disruptive/pointless. Just to clean up the board.
Alternatively, it might be to keep historical or particularly noteworthy topics intact.
@Warp: I'm not so much justifying the use of locking topics as presenting rationals as for why people might do it. Come up with your own reasons for how people might decide why to do this/when to do this, if you like.
I assume you mean the workbench and stuff?
Those exist for submissions as listed in the Submission queue. One thread per submission, computer controlled. Threads are made automatically when a submission is made and the wiki content is mirrored to the forum.
