Can I effectively make a topic read-only?

Last year I installed a Discourse instance set up on a Digital Ocean droplet. It has worked fine, but now I want to make a series of related posts on a certain topic over a period of several months and make them read only.

I would like discussion of these posts to take place in a separate topic so that the original ‘diary-like’ posts are kept apart.

Is this possible or indeed desirable?

Thanks
Dan

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Close them? The Reply as Linked Topic will still work, or you can customize the close message to point them to the Discussion topic.

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I do this for challenges (aka assignments) that are presented in categories that are read-only (everyone can “see”, admin can create/reply/see). Students are instructed to reply-as-linked-topic and post their responses in a different category. It works pretty well, though the reply-as-linked-topic button is hidden if your mouse isn’t on the message, which some people find confusing.

This solution has each student create a new topic for their solution. If what you want is a single conversation about the read-only message, then what you might want to do is reply-as-linked-topic yourself and put that new topic into a category that is see/reply for everyone.

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Archiving a topic would be closer to true read only. Closing a topic only prevents replies, it still allows other actions (likes, edits within the allowed edit window, etc).

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