Clearly indicate that thread is locked, to help warn unsuspecting users

[Stephen Gornick]

I'm seeing more and more where an offer is put out there, possibly fraudulent, and then the thread gets locked.  This usually happens before any negative comments occur or follows with a lock as soon as any replies are not supportive.

Historically, anyone selling something and then locking their thread (while the offer is still valid) is up to no good.

Here's an example:

 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=115531.0

In that instance, the title reads "[closed]" but the offer still appears to be open.  Neither the thread opening post nor any reply says that the offer has been withdrawn, and remaining yet is the solicitation to PM to do the deal.  The thread is locked so nobody can add a bookend to confirm the offer is no longer open.


There was another similar thread like this today for something that seemed shady but the thread was locked after just the first post.  I had reported it but I can no longer find it.


I don't necessarily have a big problem with them doing this (locking), just that it isn't easy for a person seeing the page to see that the offer was made but then a lock was applied where no further replies by the community can be made.

If there ws a big read indicator at the top that reads THREAD  IS LOCKED, then that would prompt a person to question why a thread with an open offer is locked.

I was trying to think of an alternative way of preventing this.  Perhaps removing the ability to lock a thread by those with a lower post count or those recently registered (in past 30 days, perhaps).  But there are just way too many valid reasons why they should be allowed to lock their own threads so I don't think restrictions are a good idea.

So simply giving locked threads the scarlet letter is probably sufficient.

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[Raize]

To add to what you've said, I think potential scammers are dealing or trying to deal in PMs now, which they know are less likely to cause them problems. They can spot multiple offers in threads, then try to deal exclusively in PM with each of the multiple individuals, all none the wiser about the number of "transactions" taking place.

I had this happen to me a while back when asking for custom coding. I received a PM to do it privately, and they asked me to withdraw my public bounty so they didn't risk losing it to someone else. I complied, and gave them a week to do so.

A week passes and no work is done, so I found someone else independent of the forums to look into it, and asked the person to send the code they did have and I'd throw them some BTC anyway. They seemed to ignore that I asked for the code and gave me an address. Then followed up a couple days later and asked if I was sending the coin. When I basically told the user they were acting like a scammer, and again requested what little code they did write, they simply stopped responding.

The conversation I had seemed to indicate he was seriously working on it, but it completely boggles my mind that he didn't have any code. I would have given him 2.5 BTC for just having headers or psuedo-code, I just wanted some sort of proof.