Suggestion: Lock posts for comments after they have been answered

[RedNectar]

To the community moderators,

Many forums lock discussions after they have been answered - not necessarily straight away, but after a week or so.

Similarly for discussions that have never been marked as answered after a long period of time - I'd suggest 3 months.

This prevents people putting SPAM comments on posts that have already been answered, and stops people tacking NEW questions onto already answered posts

I'd like to suggest the following

• Posts that have been marked as Answered be locked from ADDITIONAL comments being made
  • EXCEPTION: Anyone who has contributed to the post should still be able to add and edit their content
• Posts older than 3 months that have not been marked as answered be locked from ADDITIONAL comments being made
  • But allow the original author to re-open the issue if they want to

[riaan.vanniekerk]

Hi Chris. I appreciate the reasoning behind locking discussions after they have been answered (spam or not relevant information on the thread where a community member should have opened a new thread). However, the advantages are outweighed by someone who may have a better answer, an alternative method to achieve the same result, or information relevant to those following the thread. If someone missed the original (editable) run of a post, they have no way of adding their 2c. (By your principle of locking a thread, I would have not been able to respond to this post 7 months after the fact )

Since Cisco does not have a conventional public knowledge base like some other vendors do (the closest I could find were this list of posts that are flagged as knowledge base articles), many of these threads become very authoritative about the topic raised and discussed. Very frequently, searching for something UCS-related brings me to this community, Reddit r/CiscoUCS or r/Cisco, and I gladly contribute where I deem it still relevant. 

The biggest issue I have with the threads is that, despite users' prompting, so few community members who ask a question, flag the question as answered (I assume they are either not engaged enough or not confident with the quality of the responses to pick an Accepted Solution). I wish

1. The moderators or community members above a certain level could flag an answer as the Accepted solution.
2. If an answer receives 3 (to pick a number) or more helpful votes, it becomes the Accepted Solution (may be a bit of an issue if someone contributes something very useful related to the original question, even though they do not answer the question directly, and get many votes for it). 

(the last bit is somewhat related, and maybe I should started a new thread).

[balaji.bandi]

sure i like that, this was suggested some time back to Lock it "Answered one" - so users can refer this post and open a new one - rather comment on 10 years old POST.

Some poster post the mesage not even return back after months..years...so on - so we need to have some cut over time for that kind of post to be locked.

cisco forum do not much advanced capabilities like others "example i take Graylog" how to post the issue with an order - like basic information "rather my router not working" no idea what router that is or "my Internet not work "