On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 6:02 PM, svetlana <svetlana@fastmail.com.au> wrote:

...
S Page wrote:
> * We're going to rename Close topic to Lock topic. This better matches what
> it actually does, which is prevent new posts and changes (with lots of bugs
> currently). To make it more obvious what Lock does, we'll remove the Reply
> and Edit links from a locked topic, instead of them failing on submit.
>
> Note many use case of "This topic is closed" fit well with the Summarize
> topic action. People can and should put {{done}}, {{abandoned}},
> {{answered}}, etc. templates and markup in a topic's summary.

This wasn't discussed with people at Talk:Flow before, but I plainly think that's a wrong way to do it.

The reason is that I follow-up a resolved topic rather often. "Hi this template is broken" "I fixed it in this edit" "thanks!" "[locks thread]" - and then I want to ask how to fix another one a day later, I tried the same fix but it didn't work?? I should spend hours of my time pressing UNLOCK when nothing should have locked it in the first place???

If you trust other people to delete (which is harder to revert), why not trust them to use Lock appropriately?

Social norms will develop around the facilities Flow provides, just as they have done for wiki edits to talk pages.

Hm. On the other side, with Flow, we don't have archives. We don't want old topics to resurface with 'thanks!' and go all way to the top of 'recently active' list.

(The requested "+1" feature, if we implement it, could avoid this.)

OK, please redesign the LOCK feature a little. :-)
0) Please add a 'this answer solved the problem' button - anyone should be able to click it. It could go to 'this topic has 3 comments and 1 solution' subtitle in the topic title.

Right now, putting a {{Flow-closed | #<UUID>}} template in the summary could display "Topic solved \o/ _Jump to the solution post_" in the summary. That gets us 75% of the way there. (Someone who wants to contribute could write a gadget that appends a "This post is a solution" button to the Reply * Edit * Thank or the post actions menu.)

Flow has the notion of workflow_types, but it's probably premature to develop a workflow for Q&A when Flow isn't yet on use on any Q&A pages. We need to get general-purpose features working well.

1) When a thread is active recently (less than N days), it can't be locked. People are able to follow-up within the same thread.

That feels more like a social norm that communities will develop than a rule we should embed in software.

2) When a thread is inactive recently (active more than N days ago), it's automatically archived. This means it takes extra effort (and warnings dumped onto your head) when you try to reactivate it.
3) The number "N" should depend on a page activity. If a talk page of an article is dead, it makes no sense to archive anything, even if it's a year old.

2 and 3 describe Lock and suggesting it happens automatically. If a Flow topic is inactive, why do anything? It will be pushed out of view by newer active topics. If communities want this then it sounds more like a role for a bot, not Flow core code.

4) It should be possible to 'HAT' a topic if it's inflammable before the N days time.

I'm not sure what you mean, can't you do this using Summarize?

I hope this will ease usability too - it's much easier to click a specific message and click "it solves the problem" than go through the process of locking down the entire thread.

"It solves the problem" seems orthogonal to locking and unlocking. (/me fights urge to try to write first gadget.)

Thanks for your interest and suggestions!

=S Page Features engineer