Dylan wrote:
From now on I will go ahead and do a search and see if someone is already talking about it. If I happen to miss it, the mod could kindly explain to me, not just lock it.
The mods will usually (if not always) explain why a thread was locked on a post or an edit before they lock the thread. The only exceptions are when the post is something blatantly and deliberately breaking the rules, in which case the thread may be deleted or locked without bothering to explain why as its obvious.
This is their way of explaining what went wrong. Its not placing blame, its not insulting or harrasing you, all it is is explaining why the thread was locked and usually pointing you in the right direction (most explanations will link to the appropriate threads)
We lock threads in order to stop the discussion continuing on in that thread. Sometimes (on the rare occasion we miss it for a while), mods will merge the two threads together to keep the discussion in one place. So when you ask for us to explain it to you rather than simply locking it, we can't. If we did just explain it to you, people would see that topic and post on it, then we'd have to explain it to them and so forth. We do our best to explain it when we lock threads, but sometimes we just assume people know the rules as intimately as we do.
For future reference, the
rules do state that
Quote:
You should then make sure nobody else has already started a similar topic which you could post your message in. If not, you are free to post
Please don't take offense to a moderator locking your thread for this reason, it keeps the clutter down in a forum. You are free to post in the other thread, there's nothing stopping you from doing so. It just means forum-users don't have to search through 4 or 5 similar topics to find where they should post.
Its nothing personal, its just house-keeping