Just confirming that it wasn’t a Dev who locked the thread… it was the community itself.
One of the upsides of our forum software (Discourse) is that it allows the community to self moderate.
So if something happens while Devs are offline, the community is able to lock threads and hide posts by reporting it.
There is a trust system to protect against the system being abused, if you make false reports your trust score is reduced so that your reports won’t affect anything.
So the forum bot can take action based on community reports and flags and then during business hours a dev can check the reports that were made and check to see if the community guidelines were really broken or not and unhide the posts or unlock the threads.
Community self moderation is our preferred type of moderation, we would prefer to only step in when there’s guidelines being broken badly and community members haven’t moderated it themselves or if we see that the community moderation is being abused falsely.
Having said all of this, I’m leaving the thread locked because it did get quite politcal and abusive in there. Re-opening it would just be inviting more of those sort of posts. Thank you to everyone who posted in there civilly though.