Hi Team 
We have set up a community for our members to partake and engage with our Product and Developmet team as we develop new and exciting features on our platform.
We have an ideas and feedback category where members can submit suggestions in which we manage the status of these ideas using tags. i.e “under review” “Planning” “Declined”
If an idea is pervasive enough for the business and has a lot of backing in regards to votes, we then create another topic in a category called planning where we can then engage the wider community on how this feature might work.
Once development starts on a feature, we then create a new topic under the upcoming features category, again the status of these topics in this category is managed using tags. i.e “in progress”, “in testing”, “ready for release” etc
Once the upcoming feature has been developed and released in beta, we then create another topic inside the Labs category where users can offer feedback upon evaluation of a feature.
The problem we are having is that once we progress a feature idea through to the next stage/category this is typically where we would want the conversation to continue, however, we still find some members posting replys in the topic under the ideas section for the same feature.
We have tried locking the topics for the feature in the previous categories and linking to the most recent stage for the development of that feature, however its not clear enough for our members and often causes confusion as to where the conversation should continue.
So I was wondering if I was missing a trick here and thought maybe someone could offer ideas on how to manage the progression of ideas through the different stages of software development while minimising confusion
Feel free to check out our community, your feedback and suggestions will be most welcome.