It has happened more than once now on our forum that the first time I see a new post, it is already locked. I am unable to figure out how it might have gotten locked. I am posting here in the hope of getting some tips about what might be happening.
Can normal users (not moderators) lock their own posts?
The moderation history is empty. If another moderator had locked it (by accident), if would show in the history, right?
Does the system auto-lock first posts which appear to be of low quality? The locked ones were like this.
A user can dustbin the OP if there are no replies. This locks the topic. It should replace the OP text with ātopic deleted by authorā, or something similar. I think that leaves an edit history though.
(Most) other posts in the same category did not get locked, so I donāt think thatās it. I checked the category settings and found āAuto-close topic after: ā¦ minsā. It is not enabled.
I found this as well, and it is not enabled.
I have seen this before, and indeed it looks different. As in your screenshot, it shows (topic deleted by author). In this case, the topic simply had a padlock icon next to it, but otherwise everything looked usual, and there was no sign of an edit history.
At the moment itās not a big deal, as itās only the second time I notice it, and it was easy to unlock the topic. But Iād like to avoid unnecessary frustration for our forum users, so itād be good to understand what is happening.
Did you delete, then undelete again? It does not seem to show the usual (topic deleted by author).
Either way, this explains what happened. Thanks so much!
It seems to be Discourse 2.8.0.beta6. This is an installation managed by Discourse-the-company on the discourse.group domain, so I never had to deal with updating, or even checking the version.