Several times now, I’ve tried to reply to a comment – usually, I’m doing this on a mobile app – and when I hit “post” I get an error. Then, when I refresh, I get a “post not found” error. Until now, I just move on, because, it’s only Lemmy.
But this morning, I got the same error, and in frustration I opened the post in Firefox, and went to reply to the comment, and in the web page all of the post editing stuff was disabled. I mean, I could click “Reply” and open the reply widget, but the text editor area and all of the buttons are disabled. The post in question is this one.
Before, I speculated that the mobile app would only load so many posts back in time, and maybe they were aging out or something. Or, perhaps, some were removed by mods or the author. Although irritating, I didn’t much care.
This, though, is weird, and I wonder how many of the posts I’ve had this issue with is because of it. It’s as if the post is locked, except that there’s no indication I can find that it’s locked. On the web site, it at least prevents you from trying to reply – on Voyager, it’ll merrily let you spend ten minutes composing a reply only to fail to submit, but that’s just a Voyager bug. However, the fact that the post is for all intents and purposes locked, but the official Lemmy UI provides no indication of this … is this also a bug?
And is is “locked”, or is this some behavior relating to cross-site blocking, where blaha.zone won’t let midwest.social users post, and the server knows it and so prevents the user from trying to post? Or is it because I’ve blocked the poster, and Lemmy will show me, but won’t let me comment on, posts by blocked users? Or is this some weird situation where the poster deleted the post but it’s still showing up?
In any case, this feels like a bug. The site should clearly indicate that posts are locked, or blocked, or whatever the reason commenting is disabled. The web interface clearly knows that the post is un-comment-able; it should show this, and preferably, display why.
Or, am I missing something obvious?
Same on the desktop web interface. Just a regular locked post, with the lock icon.
I can believe I’m just not seeing it, but I just revisited it in the browser… where’s the lock icon?
“Mobile” mode:
“Desktop” mode:
The little icon directly on the right next to the “leftist infighting” title.
There’s a lock icon at the right of the title in both pictures.