RailFanning is a gift you give yourself. - Varun

A new feature has been introduced to help our admins to moderate the site better.
Sometimes, a discussion or topic starts well, but goes off into a tangent, gets unfocused, and sometimes continues forever into an unending insult/flame war. Admins cannot keep monitoring such a discussion/thread and keep removing unwanted posts at the tail end of that topic, and subsequent responses.
You will now see a new link called "Lock" next to "Add Bookmark". Using this, admins can "lock a blog entry". This will prevent users from continuing that thread. That whole entry...
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(main + replies) does not need to be monitored anymore, since nobody can reply on that thread. Nothing is removed/deleted.
A discussion/topic starts, the main questions are answered, and then it is locked. We all can now move on to other blog entries/topics.
Note to admins: Please lock blog entries when you feel that all open questions have been answered, and nothing more of value can be added. Preferably, reply with a summary of the main points or a conclusion, and then "Lock that thread".
Hopefully this feature will help our admins control discussions and keep them focused.
@all other bloggers: This feature might help everyone in that threads won't get too long going, and then we don't have to waste time reading extra long discussions going nowhere or degenerating into an insult war.

@moderator**: Re# 19756-0
As can be seen above, the Archive/Lock feature was introduced 1.5 years back to control runaway discussions. At that time, we used to have many more flame wars and abusive, emotion-laden arguments going nowhere. Requests to stop commenting were not honoured. People would keep adding to the discussion, and such comments at the tail-end had to be repetitively deleted. The only alternative was to remove the whole entry. Otherwise, that entry would keep bubbling to the top and someone had to delete the last post.
Archiving/Locking was a way to...
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forcefully stop such discussions and stow it away, while the entry still contained focused and useful information.
Since those days, the forum has come a long way, and evolved to have more meaningful discussions in the majority. The Archive button need not be utilized for normal discussions. There is already an Auto-Archiving process going on in the back -end. All Blog Entries which have been dormant for over 1 month (meaning, no new replies for 1 whole month) are auto-archived, and can be seen in the Archive tab. This process gives each new question/discussion a full month of airtime where it can be answered or discussed. Only if there is complete lack of interest in that topic - wherein none of the members/guests had anything more to say about that entry - is the entry archived.
Thanks.