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If a question or answer is locked, one cannot comment on it either. One can flag it to share one's thoughts with a moderator, but one cannot address the specific moderator who locked it, or the user who asked for it. Also, locked posts seem to encourage one to post on Meta when feeling the need to discuss the locking, or anything else about the locked post:

This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved. For more info visit meta.

But when posting on Meta, one cannot @notify the author/editors/commenters/locker/viewers about doing so, lacking commenting on locked posts. (Note that one can notify a moderator who closed a question.)

So: wouldn't it be better if locked posts could still be commented on?


(Background: I am curious why a specific answer in The Many Memes of Meta was locked, but that example is not the subject of this question. Would some posts yield a comment-war if comments would be allowed "while disputes about its content are being resolved"? And: I am not really feature-requesting this, but to allow for [status-declined] I'm still posting as one for future reference.)

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    You may have missed the comment war yesterday that spilled into three different posts, requiring two to be locked and eventually the whole question to be deleted. Usually comments are why a post is locked, at least here on Meta.
    – mmyers Mod
    Commented Jan 13, 2012 at 19:51
  • Ah, @mmyers, I certainly did not take comment wars into account that cause a lock. But apparently that specific comment war continued in another post? Shouldn't the users be suspended then? (Still, please feel very free to downvote if you're saying that allowing commenting is not a good idea!)
    – Arjan
    Commented Jan 13, 2012 at 19:55

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I for one think that allowing comments would certainly result in many devolving into a comment war, even if that wasn't the reason the question was locked. There's no easy way to restrict comments to only "Please refer to this meta discussion", etc.

A better solution might be to create an automatic Meta post when the post is locked and have it auto-linked in the post notice (or perhaps posted as a comment itself), while keeping the comments locked. Hopefully there aren't so many locked posts that it would cause a lot of clutter.

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