Why is this answer locked?

Question

I found this at the bottom of this answer. I've never seen a locked answer before. And despite the claim that disputes about its content are being resolved and a sign post pointed toward the meta, I saw no existing questions in the meta regarding this specific answer (I only looked within the last 5 hours... which is how old the answer is) (and I know mods have their secret backroom). I see no comments on the answer signifying any sort of dispute. And, I can't quite see any reason why this answer should be available for voting/commenting/editing.

Can someone please explain why this answer appears to be in some sort of limbo? Why is it I can't downvote it or comment on it to show my disagreement with particular parts, yet it is still posted and available for anyone to see and read?

Answer 1

This answer is currently locked by Jamal. Why?

I suggest taking a look into the edit history:

Reading in chronologic order, this is what happened:

1. The user wrote an answer
2. They edited the answer to include a few quite long passages of questionable usefulness
3. Jamal stepped in and removed the questionable content ("removed noise and useless ranting")
4. The user rolled back
5. Jamal rolled back to the cleaned revision and locked the post to prevent a rollback war.

The answer in its current form is not "bad" enough to warrant deleting, but on the other hand OP seems to plan on making it that way.

But someone has largely edited the answer to allow it to stand (since its content is after all a contribution) and to prevent this answer from being lost. But OP seems to disagree with that. This is the "content dispute."

To prevent rollback wars and back and forth with emotional involvement the answer was (temporarily) locked.

This is to allow a cooldown for all involved parties.

Answer 2

All lock post notices mention meta, yet most of the time there's never anything on Meta. As far as I know, this has been around for a while. Regardless, when you see this, it likely means that a mod needed to stop all edits and comments for some period of time. It just didn't warrant deletion in its current state.

Locking also prevents all voting. Although a mod can still edit or comment on a locked post, even they cannot vote on them. It's just a way to keeping more interaction away from it.

Time-wise, these locks can be set to be temporary or permanent. Even if they're set to permanent, they can still be unlocked at any time. If you ever feel that a locked post is ready for unlocking, you may flag about that. This excludes historical locked posts, which cannot be flagged by anyone, even mods. Of course, this may only be the case if the post was mentioned on Meta but wasn't addressed promptly by a mod.