As of this commit Discourse staff members now have the ability to lock posts.
Locking a post prevents its author from editing it. Why would you want to do this? Sometimes a user posts something bad, so a staff member will go in and change it. Before this commit, there was no way to prevent a user from maliciously changing it back.
To lock a post, click the wrench under it and select “Lock Post”
When locked, a lock icon will be displayed on top of the post and the poster will not be able to edit it until it is unlocked.
Other Notes:
There is a new site setting staff edit locks post - if enabled then any time a staff member edits a non-staff user’s post it will lock it. This is meant for large forums where having each staff member lock every post after editing it would be tedious.
The lock icon is only visible to staff members and the creator of the post.
Staff members can always edit posts, even if they are locked.
I predict we’ll soon get moderators asking us what is the difference between “Closing a topic” and “Locking a post”. Couldn’t we at least spell the whole thing out as “Lock post editing”?
Hello from 11 months later. I was indeed confused by “lock” vs “closed” because “lock” is the terminology I am most familiar with from other forum software. I ended up having to go through all of my “locked” posts on my forum and change them to “closed” when the realization hit that “lock” here just means “lock from editing” not “lock from replies”. I agree with @erlend_sh here and urge you to reconsider the UX by being more explicit in the naming.
It’s a very rarely used function. To be honest we only implemented it because a certain very large, very important customer demanded that we have it. I’m not really a fan of it as a general feature, and I’m not even sure it makes sense as implemented.
Anyway, it sounds like you misunderstood “closed” first, and this wouldn’t have made any difference in that case.
