For anyone interested, I found a way to both delete a thread/topic and also lock it. Normally, if you delete a thread, or any message contained in it, prior locking will fail if someone still responds to the corresponding email message, since groups.io can't connect the email to the non-existent thread or message and know that it's supposed to be locked. And of course, you can't lock a deleted thread since it is no longer there.?So here's what you can do:

1. delete the topic
2. start a new topic with the *exact same title* as the deleted thread, and write "this thread has been deleted" (or words to that effect) in the message body.
3. lock the new topic

I tested this out on the theory that since groups.io now does threading by title matching, a new thread with the same title would make groups.io think it was the same as the old one, and it worked. Any replies to emails from the old (deleted) thread will still bounce, with reason "this topic has been locked by the moderators and can no longer be posted to."

FWIW.

J

开云体育

For anyone interested, I found a way to both delete a thread/topic and also lock it. Normally, if you delete a thread, or any message contained in it, prior locking will fail if someone still responds to the corresponding email message, since groups.io can't connect the email to the non-existent thread or message and know that it's supposed to be locked. And of course, you can't lock a deleted thread since it is no longer there. So here's what you can do:

1. delete the topic
2. start a new topic with the *exact same title* as the deleted thread, and write "this thread has been deleted" (or words to that effect) in the message body.
3. lock the new topic

I tested this out on the theory that since groups.io now does threading by title matching, a new thread with the same title would make groups.io think it was the same as the old one, and it worked. Any replies to emails from the old (deleted) thread will still bounce, with reason "this topic has been locked by the moderators and can no longer be posted to."

FWIW.

J

This may only work for some limited time. I'm not sure what that time frame may be. We often get posts with the exact same title a week or two apart and they (correctly) start a new thread. You might try responding to the email from your deleted thread after several days to see if it still rejects the message. This could happen since a new topic/post will have a different ID than the original.

Duane

What about just deleting all the messages in the thread, except for one with your reason, then locking it? Seems like that should work indefinitely.

Duane

That would work, too.

Sent from my iPhone

Oops. No, it wouldn’t work. Once you delete a message, people can still reply to it via email and get around the locking. That’s the whole point.

Sent from my iPhone

The only way to both lock a thread and delete its content (or delete any message within it) is what I described in an earlier thread: you have to redact all the content of every message in the thread (or every message you want to delete). Then you can put whatever text you want into the last message.

The reason I didn't do it that way today was (a) it would have been a PITA (very long thread) and (b) more honestly, I forgot lol. So then I needed a workaround. Since the workaround so easy and turned out to be so successful (even though it lasts only about a week, which was all I needed), I wanted to let people here know about it.
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J
(Please note: I prefer not to be contacted offlist.)