This seems like a good, lightweight option. It’s in an early draft stage, but I’m working on a theme component that will let me add the “published” tag to a topic in order to strip away all the user interface widgets I don’t want people to see.[1] I got the idea from this post:
It shouldn’t be hard to disable the reply button based on a tag or category.
It’s part of a project to replace a company’s static pages with Discourse. Surprisingly, the Discourse version performs better on the PageSpeed Insights metrics! ↩︎