You have misunderstood everything I said. However, I also had put it in a clumsy and ugly way.
My suggested changes are: - that 'lock' is renamed to 'archive' and is only available after the topic is inactive - that Flow provides a list of reasonably inactive topics to volunteers who would like to archive stuff -- the archival process should be semi-automated - that 'reasonably inactive' depends on the board activity - that portions of messages are possible to {{hat}} (hide from view with a 'show' button) where they are inflammable, to offset for lack of 'lock' means while a discussion is active - that 'this is solved' gets marked in individual posts and has nothing to do with locking topics
Rationale behind these changes is: - people should be able to follow-up a topic easily instead of being locked out and left confused - for this reason, 'reasonably inactive' should be a pretty high time frame - the 'this is solved' mark may be needed to be put early -- so due to the above it needs to be a separate action from locking/archival
svetlana