Post #72884 by aquarj on Tue, Jan 27, 2004 1:43 PM

I'd say my own opinion on locking threads jibes with thejab - he said it pretty clearly.

But there is a reasonable point there from Hanford that I didn't catch before - suppose it wasn't considered such a big deal to lock a thread, and the purpose was mainly to encourage the posts to continue on one of the existing previous threads. If the moderator doing the locking made it clear that they're not trying to shut someone up, but just encouraging them to move the discussion to an existing thread, then it might not result in so many ruffled feathers. Maybe this was even done in the case of the font thread, but I missed that part of the reasoning.

Still, the problem with this is consistency. If I'm a new guy and I post a redundant thread, and it gets locked, but I see a bunch of other redundant threads that don't get locked, then I'm gonna wonder what's special about them and not me, especially if some of them are apparently friends with the Mod Squad (moderator squad, that is). They're an honorable team, so it's probably not favoritism, but it's hard to escape the fact that it can appear to be.

About the "glory days" of TC and the higher ratio of on-topic posts back then, I'm not sure I remember it that way. My impression is that it's about the same ratio now as it was then, but there's just more of everything. I believe many of the current "old timers" also had quite a few off-topic and repetitive posts when they were new too. I'm not complaining - I think it just goes with the territory when you have a group forum.

Hope this is constructive,
-Randy