Can we get a comments only lock?

Question

Currently moderators have the ability to lock posts, for any of the following reasons:

• Content dispute (~ edit wars),
• Historical significance (to prevent great but off topic questions from being deleted), and
• Offtopic comments
• Wiki Answer

The locks can be applied for an hour, a day, a week, or permanently. This is all great, but:

1. Locking a post also prevents voting and (more importantly) editing, and
2. If the locked post is a question, there are other ramifications, such as preventing new answers from being posted.

Those side-effects aren't always desirable for posts that generated a lot of "offtopic comments" and I think we could use a lock that would only lock the comment section. The lock message should point to chat, and ideally should also give the option of migrating the comment thread to chat automagically.

Additionally the comment lock, being a lesser lock, could be available to the OP as well, not only to moderators. Perhaps only after a certain rep level (3K? 5K? 10K?) and perhaps without the option to lock permanently. Getting spammed with inbox notifications on an irrelevant discussion happening on one of your posts isn't fun, and it's perhaps the only thing I truly hate on Stack Exchange.

Similar feature requests:

• Make locking posts more granular (duplicate?)
• Automatically lock long comment threads

Relevant discussions:

• Provide a tool for moderators to migrate comments to chat
• How should long comment threads with important information in them be handled?

Answer 1

As a moderator, I deleted thousands of comments and left many links to chat for people to follow. I've had to apply off-topic comments locks to many posts to get comments to stop. Unfortunately, as this question clearly explains, this is not without consequences, which made me very reluctant to lock otherwise good posts in all but the most extreme cases.

So, you might imagine that getting such a lock type has been very high on my priority list!

A comments only lock!

Today, I'm happy to announce that as of posting, the "Off-topic comments" lock has been renamed to "Comments only lock" which, as you correctly hypothesize, only prevents comments while allowing voting, editing, closing, reopening, answering, flagging ... etc. Like other locks, the Comments only lock only affects the post that is locked, so a question being comment locked won't prevent comments on answers.

What about questions currently locked for off-topic comments?

Lock types are defined by their post notice. We've redefined what an Off-topic comment lock does and gave it a new name. As such, posts that were already locked for off-topic comments will convert to the new definition. This means that, from now on, only comments will be prevented on these posts.

What does it look like?

The lock itself looks pretty much the same as the rest of the locks though this one specifically states that non-comment interactions are still possible:

The moderator lock menu has been updated, too. We've adjusted the wording to make it clear that only commenting is prevented. The default duration for this lock remains 1 hour but mods can override this to be a day, a week or permanent.

_{(click for full size)}

Finally, we updated the help center article about locks to mention the Comments only locks and how they're different.

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Additionally the comment lock, being a lesser lock, could be available to the OP as well, not only to moderators. Perhaps only after a certain rep level (3K? 5K? 10K?) and perhaps without the option to lock permanently.

I understand this request, having been on the non-participatory end of a long discussion about why carrots are orange, but this isn't how we want to solve this problem. It's reasonable for someone to not want to get notified of these messages but we don't think that blocking them entirely is the correct solution - at least, not without moderator intervention. We're hoping to look into following / unfollowing posts in 2020.

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Thanks to Meg, Adam and Lisa for making this happen!

Answer 2

We had a case of this recently on The Workplace. A user's first question had been put on hold and edited and was on its way to being reopened, but it was also attracting non-constructive (and sometimes rude) comments at high velocity, so the moderators locked the question temporarily to stop that. Unfortunately, that lock also prevented voting, including reopen votes.

So we had an OP who was trying to do the right thing -- he actually fixed his post in response to it being put on hold! -- who was being blocked by stuff that wasn't his fault. Somebody raised it on meta and the question got unlocked and reopened, but the whole process would have been a lot smoother and easier if we moderators had been able to lock comments while permitting edits, close/reopen votes, and up/down votes. (In retrospect, suspending one user might have stopped the problem, but that wasn't as clear in the midst of the action.)

On The Workplace we get a lot of temporary comment explosions, cases where locking the post for a day would be enough to get people to move on, while allowing future requests for clarification. But we don't lock these posts because of the collateral damage, and instead purge vast numbers of comments on these hot-button posts. But every comment that's made and purged is a ping to the post owner and maybe another user, and an invitation to continue the argument. I'd rather hinder it than clean it up.

I don't agree with the OP being able to lock comments, though. If you ask a question you should be prepared to respond to requests for clarification; if there's something else going on, like an argument or sniping or a tangential conversation, then a moderator should act on that. I've seen too many cases where a comment thread is an argument between the post author and somebody else; letting the post author regulate that wouldn't be good.

Answer 3

The ability to stop comments (without stopping other activity like voting, editing, or answering) would definitely be useful. We see questions on Server Fault where the comments are used to extract troubleshooting information, but the person asking the question is not familiar with the "Edit the important information into your question" etiquette of Stack Exchange sites.

Locking comments (after a mod leaves one saying "Please edit your question") in such a case would encourage them to use the site in a way that more closely maps to its intended functionality.

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^{Yes, we could just do this for them - but frankly I don't want to wade through 30+ comments picking out what's useful, what's not, and figuring out how to work it into the question. That's really the job of the person seeking an answer, not the rest of the community.}

Answer 4

Honestly, I think that this would be better addressed by a more streamlined diamond-mod only "create Meta discussion about this question" and "migrate comments to chat" functionality, and an improved visibility of chat and chat room creation to the allowed users (associating a chat room with a question, a tag, or a set of tags, and having it visible on the appropriate question and tag pages, for example).

Something that would help would be to reduce the barrier of entry to Meta (let 1 rep users post on Meta) to encourage people to bring their discussions about questions from the comments onto Meta.

In short: Make the non-comment options for discussing questions more visible, reduce barriers to discovering and using them, and let more users have access to these options.