Hmm, how about this: do we even need to indicate on the topic list (or even in most of UI) that a category isn’t public?
Displaying this information only on the category page (and category settings) would be enough.
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With this new idea on a “no icon for reopening topic”, couldn’t we go back to this one?
I think it was nice.
The do not enter would work great for a private category imo, and we could keep this comment-slash or lock icon for the topics.
Let’s aim for 100 replies in this debate 
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It’s a Friday so any excuse to get lit here on Discourse Meta!
I think Jeff should allow and perhaps even encourage one bikeshed topic per month, for 24 hours only, just for kicks. But after, must make a final decision and live with it for a year.
Agree I like the speech bubble with slash best of all the options so far. Filled or unfilled I like em both! I never use “quote whole post”, but very different context anyway so doesn’t feel like a source of confusion to me.
I like this idea too:
You gotta give it more than a few minutes. Must I bring up pink hearts again? 
And yeah, it does kinda mean, “why enter” since the road is closed. Where are you gonna go? Can’t reply… a stop sign means stop. No replies, topic is in fact stopped…
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This is far worse than my reaction to initial experiments here. I doubt I will change how I feel over the next week, but I can bookmark this and reply again next Friday
When a topic is solved, we close it, we very much want people to enter so they can learn about the solution
Our release notes are closed, we very much want people to enter to learn about the cool new Discourse features
If I drive into a street with a do not enter sign I am expecting a car crash
If I enter a topic that has a padlock on it I expect that I will not be allowed to reply.
Every single other community platform uses this, I challenge anyone here to look at the top 20 community platforms to find departures from the padlock.
And I did not even get to mentioning how the glyph looks like a letter so it feels extra bad in topic lists
Anyway I am not in a mega rush here, just kind of wish we did all this experimenting in meta prior to making the sweeping change everywhere
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Seems to me that icons like this are a personal choice and since one size does not fit all, should be configurable in the admin settings.
Or…
If not in the admin settings, in a simple theme component.
Permitting users to select their own icons for this kind of “bikeshed” subject matter is a very simple change for the programming talent here on meta.
This is 100% not on the table, we will not be making this user configurable
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I don’t believe the proposal was to make this user configurable, just poor word choice. The idea was site-wide (admin) configurable.
Correct.
By “user” I meant “system admin”.
Sorry, I thought this was obvious.
It is already site admin configurable using a theme component so there really is nothing to do here in that regard
In all my years working on Discourse, I saw zero requests for “please make it a 2 click thing to swap the padlock glyph”
Closed with no clear consensus or viable next steps