So this morning, saw a thread, it was locked, but I didn't know this. I got to it from the 'last reply' link on that board, which gives no indication that its locked, and when in the thread, the new reply button just goes poof, as opposed to turning into say, a plain-text thing that says "locked" or something.
So I'm going along, going to reply, and so I click the left-most link on that set of links on the right, some firefox confimation panel pops up, I think its just FF asking some routine thing again, and then ... nothing happens. And then I'm all like... ok... and I look at the link and it says "notify" and then I panic because I confused it with "report" and thought I just accidentally reported the thread, but then I realized, oh wait, nevermind, its the email notifications, so I just turned it off, and then looked for the reply button. It wasn't there.
D: *even more panic sets in*
The two logical explanations I came up with were: "My account has been locked! What did I do!?!" and "I'm losing crucial parts of my memory! How could I forget where the reply button is!?!?"
I did not get: "The thread is locked"
Why? There was no post saying the thread was locked.
So I think... either and/or:
1) there should be some more evident way of telling that a thread is locked from within it & from the index
2) a post should always be made stating that its locked
I know that it can be something of a bother to do the second option, from first hand experience, but its been the transcendence forum's policy for quite some time now (and with over half the policies there, one I proposed), and I think its worked out quite well in mitigating confusion and panic attacks. >.> Not to mention PHPBB (Admittedly one of the /few/ things it has over SMF) changes the button to a "locked" button.