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I recently ran into this locked question and noticed the bottom part says:

locked question

It suggests I visit meta for more information. That does not seem very informative to me.

Suggestions:

  1. The word locked should maybe link to this post here in meta.
  2. For more info visit meta could be re-written to be more informative.

What do you suggest?

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7
  • 2
    I agree with your solution #1. It's totally weird that you currently just fall on the MSO home page
    – Hugo Dozois
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 14:52
  • 16
    I've always thought the visit meta link could point to the exact post that is discussing the content (if one exists). The first time I clicked that link to see what the discussion was about, I was disappointed to find it just took me to the front page of MSO
    – psubsee2003
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 14:53
  • Is there a discussion going on?
    – hjpotter92
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 15:02
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    For the record: I locked this post because it was asked while the OP was in a fight in a certain chat room. I locked it to prevent the tension from there to affect the voting on the question. Although the question likely is too localized, the initial reaction felt a bit like ganging up/punishment.
    – Gordon Mod
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 15:15
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    @BackinaFlash In this specific case it was related to the JavaScript chat room. Gordon later explained that he locked the question because it was asked by a user who is generally disliked in the chat, and someone linked to it so he wanted to avoid bias. However, the solution I am looking for is more general. I'm using SO a lot for over a year now, I had no idea what locked questions were. What I ended up doing was going on google and searching for "StackOverflow locked question meta" and clicking the result.I would have appreciated having that in the question. I had no idea about locked posts.
    – Benjamin Gruenbaum
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 15:16
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    @Jim I saw that question before posting this question. I'm asking for the bottom part added when locking to the mention what locking is. That question is about a discussion about why the question was locked to begin with.
    – Benjamin Gruenbaum
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 16:39
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    Oh, I see. Didn't notice the difference. Not a duplicate. But closely related. Possibly could be one feature request to implement both changes.
    – yoozer8
    Commented Mar 26, 2013 at 16:40

2 Answers 2

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First of all, as I suspect that this message is placed when no more reason found, I think it could be better customized. Second, change the title of a link to the description of a locked post

This post has been locked due to abuse of editing. What is a locked post?

This post has been locked due to continuous closing and reopening. What is a locked post?

This post has been locked because of attracting spam (or inappropriate answers). What is a locked post?

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1

My suggestion would be a combination of nicael's answer and psubee2003's comment:

Whatever interface moderators use to lock questions should have the option to provide a link to a Meta post where the question is being discussed. The wording would change slightly:

This post has been locked while disputes about its content are being resolved. For more info, see: < link to relevant meta post >

If the moderator locking the question doesn't provide a link to a Meta post, the wording would be the same, but the link would point to the What is a locked post? question on MSO. This implementation would require a one-time change of wordiing, but from then on would just require a default link incluson when one isn't provided, so I think it would be simple for the SE team to implement (no new dialogs to write code for).

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