Word usage
What does "Frozen" mean?
Given that this isn't a discussion board, why do we care what "locked" means to them - are we not allowed to use words just because some people coming from a particular type of community might be confused?
What work has been done to find out what "locked" means on other community sites (ie, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc)?
As far as I'm concerned, "Locked" is fine shorthand for "Voting is Locked - no further votes and flags are being accepted," or "Post is locked from editing."
But the reality is that if you compare our terms with terms used in other forums, nothing else matches - why are we so concerned that people might be confused with "locking" when every other term diverges from what they may be used to as well?
So if we come up with a new term, it should related to what is happening.
Frozen vs Locked vs ???
I don't know that "Voting is now frozen" really gives the same impression as "Voting is locked."
In reference to voting, you usually use the phrase, "The polls are now closed" - but we use closed for a different, though related, form of question 'locking.'
But I think we might want to dig down into the roots of 'locking' to understand what's really going on -
What is locking really all about?
Generally Locking results when an official moderator has made the determination that the community is no longer able to responsibly determine a post's fate - the option for the community to self-moderate is removed due to the community's own behavior.
Given this definition, "The community is locked out of moderation" is fine.
Does it matter?
But it doesn't really matter anyway, does it?
We receive nearly 40,000 posts per day. How many are locked? A vanishingly small number. They are outliers, and as such don't even need to be understood by the majority of new users.
It would be nice if the site were designed from the ground up so that every term was immediately and painfully obvious. Perhaps at some point in the future when all the kinks have been worked out a mass re-naming can occur so that things are a little more intuitive. In this particular case, though, I'm not sure that there's much to be gained by a name change.