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Posted by: UL7IM4 G33K
Posted by: Demerzel
Nobody's disputing that you would have written the post. The point is that nobody can see your post until you publish it to the forums, so until you click the Submit button and the thread is added to the public listing, it is yours and yours alone. However, once the thread is published to the listing, it becomes the property of the community because you decided to make it public and post it in a place where the entirity of the population can interact with it.
Granted, you do control the subject matter of the thread by being the OP, but having the ability to lock your own thread would negate the purpose of the forum itself, which is to have a place to hold discussions.
In conclusion: Threads are locked because they violate rules or other things of that nature; it is not at the discretion of the OP to end that discussion, because the purpose of the forum itself is to be able to discuss things with other members.
Now, as far as a Report Thread button goes, I think that that would be a pretty useful tool. I believe that's on the slate, actually.
Its your thread, you made it. Another good example of this is basically like saying if you built a house, and let other people inside, its no longer your house but their house as well. It doesn't work that way. Even if you can't lock the door to your house, its still your house, everything in it. However, that house must abide by the community rules. The community has a right to complain about what you do inside your house and even have you change it, but they in no way own the house.
All adding a self lock feature would do is give people the ability to lock their doors. Locking your door doesn't hurt anyone outside, it just doesn't let them in. While people could post and then lock their thread, that would 1) keep people from spamming it from idiots posts 2) save some time for the mods and 3) probably give them a one way ticket to ban since it is easier to see locked threads than normal unlocked spam threads.
Im not saying I want the feature, I am just trying to explain that the feature in itself really cannot be abused. Especially without post counts around.Ultima, I disagree.
In general, I try to discourage people from using analogies to make their point. Only a tiny handful of people on this site are able to effectively use them in a way that actually fits, and the rest of the time the analogy just confuses the issue -- both in the poster's mind and the minds of anyone who reads the analogy. I am going to completely ignore your analogy because it does not work, and instead keep this grounded in the literal.
A thread is a discussion, not a house. Nobody lives in a thread, there is no expectation of privacy in a thread, and nobody has to have a thread in order to protect them from the elements and to sleep in. On this forum, there are no blogs. A person has no right to write something with the expectation that nobody will be allowed to rebut it. A thread here is created for the exact purpose of sparking discussion, and an ability to lock your own post would turn this place into a locked-thread spam war. To that end, I am rather stunned that you say that the feature "really cannot be abused." In my mind, the potential for abuse is overwhelming.
Mostly, I think that people are worried about the possibility of people creating a thread saying something obnoxious or provocative but then locking the thread to prevent any replies. But there is another problem too, which is obvious even (and perhaps especially) in the context of this very thread. See how you are having a disagreement with several people? What if one of the people who is disagreeing with you made a really great point, but then you thought of a good rebuttal? How frustrated would you be if you typed out a lengthy, well-written response to that great point, only to hit "submit" and find that the thread had been locked by the guy who originally created this thread, so that not only have you wasted your time, but you can't even respond?
What I'm saying is that it seems both ridiculous and arbitrary to allow a person to have complete control over a thread merely by virtue of the fact that he or she was the first person to post in that thread. Some of the best discussions have been in threads where the original post is a one-liner that says very little and the discussion was actually an evolution of subsequent posts within that thread. Do you really think that the person who created that one-liner post originally deserves to come back a couple of days later, see the discussion going on, and decide to end it for no reason whatsoever except that they can?
I hope you're able to see, Ultima, how your analogies are a bit broken for this situation. In sum, a thread, once published (provided that it isn't against the rules), becomes a discussion which, as a whole, belongs to the Community (even though the particular posts within the thread certainly belong to their creators, with some limitations). Because we have no rights here, we similarly do not have the right to arrogantly decide when we deem a discussion to be over, merely by virtue of the fact that we were the first ones to post within that particular thread.