Can I suggest the following improvements to the community administrators:
Splitting topics:
- Only split when a new question is added to a thread that isn’t relevant to the OP or after 1 month (some long period of time) of the previous post or where its completely different to the OP
- Organised in chronological order
- Add a reference in the OP so everyone knows where it was branched
Locking topics:
- Done when a subject in discussion has been borne out. Just because a solution has been assigned, doesn’t mean its a forgone conclusion
For example, an interesting post on the Python IDE has now been bastardised as a result of splitting the thread and the comments don’t even follow chronological order. To make matter worse, its been locked and the thread hasn’t even reached its logical conclusion - now the thread is going to be fragmented more since the only option is to create a new post just to respond.
Its not the first time the community administrators have made a pigs ear of things or acted inconsistently; its about time some rule’s were hammered out.