Why are threads being marked READ ONLY?

[greatmidwestcoin]

I have been here for decades and have never seen so many posts being marked READ ONLY. One must ask themself what is the purpose of this. Wouldn't it be better to simply remove the whole thread? I do see quite a few threads that are months old that can't seem to die. A community board is supposed to be a two-way conversation tool. Not being able to reply with a question or ? does no good. Just my little ol' nothing opinion. Most likely this post will be marked READ ONLY. If it is, it will only prove my point further.  Thanks all for taking the time to read my concern. I wish you all excellent sales and higher profits. 

The definition of a PUBLIC FORUM is shown as:

Public forum. A public forum also called an open forum, is open to all expression that is protected under the First Amendment.  A forum is a place, situation, or group in which people exchange ideas and discuss issues.

Disclaimer: This post does not mean to imply anything and should only be considered as asking the opinion of others regarding the above concerns. To do otherwise you are assuming something that the original OP did not intend to make. That would be your error, not the OP.

[albertabrightalberta]

So many old dead threads are being bumped so the mods are locking them with the suggestion to start a new thread on the topic.

[ebooksdiva · Accepted solution]

The reason you may see a lot of read only threads are either posts from eBay employees and they don’t require comments as they are meant to be informative.

A thread will be read only because the mods closed it due to the age of the thread. 

Or the original poster of a thread can also ask the mods to close their thread. 

[greatmidwestcoin]

Actually, all of the ones I have seen are fairly new and have nothing to do with eBay employees.

[greatmidwestcoin]

Most of the threads I am referring to are fairly new. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the people doing this would simply explain why?

[greatmidwestcoin]

I have never seen a thread as you mention - "locking them with the suggestions to start a new thread." If you have an example of such a line I would enjoy seeing it.  Thanks

[ebooksdiva]

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@greatmidwestcoin wrote:

I have never seen a thread as you mention - "locking them with the suggestions to start a new thread." If you have an example of such a line I would enjoy seeing it.  Thanks

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https://community.ebay.com/t5/Returns/So-tired-of-eBay-customer-service-lying-to-me-If-you-are-a/td-... 

Here is one example see page 4 of the above thread. 

[nobody*s_perfect]

Here;s an example from 3 hours ago:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/reporting-for-taxes/m-p/31673031#M1710704

Like many locked threads, the original post is really old and the content is obsolete.

[wastingtime101]

Some are marked read-only because it's essentially just a shadow saying the mods moved the thread to a different board and they post a link to the new location. Those shadow threads disappear after a while, but I don't know what the timeframe is - few hours? A day?

Some are marked read-only because mods locked them due to age (eBay set a timeframe that anything 6 mo or older qualifies) and that's because, from what I've gathered, many regulars complained about old stuff coming back but also because old threads can have old policy info that's no longer relevant so to keep them active might give sellers/buyers outdated info. But mods will lock anything old even if it's "timeless" in content, like what's the best way to pack a set of wine glasses. Seems a little strict in application.

Some are read-only because the OP wanted it locked and others are because they're announcements from eBay not open to replies - you can start a new thread to discuss the announcement.

[inhawaii]

They are old threads. I saw one the other day that was almost 2 years old.

The real question should be ...

Why are people reading and responding to threads that are 2 years old?

[wastingtime101]

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@inhawaii wrote:

Why are people reading and responding to threads that are 2 years old?

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When you search on this board it's a "best match" default without pushing recent posts to the top. It doesn't default to "recent first" though you can change it to sort that way.

In external search engines it's based on best match without factoring in date. That's why so many old threads have been archived by eBay onto private boards that we and the search engines can't access.

That's why old threads are so often pulled up. Why do people post on them? Because they don't look at the date or don't care that it's old if they're interested in the topic.

[pjcdn2005]

Probably because they do a search for the topic. The search function gives results by ‘best match’ so threads are often outdated.  I bet we would see a lot less old threads if they just changed the search result to show the newest threads first.

[wastingtime101]

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@pjcdn2005 wrote:

Probably because they do a search for the topic. The search function gives results by ‘best match’ so threads are often outdated.  I bet we would see a lot less old threads if they just changed the search result to show the newest threads first.

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I recently asked Sheila if it was within the realm of possibility for Khoros to factor in past 3-4 mos into the best match search algorithm.

[chapeau-noir]

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@greatmidwestcoin wrote:

I have been here for decades and have never seen so many posts being marked READ ONLY. One must ask themself what is the purpose of this. Wouldn't it be better to simply remove the whole thread? I do see quite a few threads that are months old that can't seem to die. A community board is supposed to be a two-way conversation tool. Not being able to reply with a question or ? does no good. Just my little ol' nothing opinion. Most likely this post will be marked READ ONLY. If it is, it will only prove my point further.  Thanks all for taking the time to read my concern. I wish you all excellent sales and higher profits. 

The definition of a PUBLIC FORUM is shown as:

Public forum. A public forum also called an open forum, is open to all expression that is protected under the First Amendment.  A forum is a place, situation, or group in which people exchange ideas and discuss issues.

Disclaimer: This post does not mean to imply anything and should only be considered as asking the opinion of others regarding the above concerns. To do otherwise you are assuming something that the original OP did not intend to make. That would be your error, not the OP.

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First amendment rights ONLY pertain to government restriction.  This is a corporation and they can set their own rules.

[cosmicvisitors]

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@greatmidwestcoin wrote:

Actually, all of the ones I have seen are fairly new and have nothing to do with eBay employees.

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They don't want you to know how Ebay's users really feel. Especially after their takeover of the payments.