Surprisingly fast locking of single thread

Question

The question in this thread
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1080275?tstart=0
was correctly answered within two minutes by Bill, and his answer was marked as correct and the thread locked, probably shortly after Bill's posting.
What I find susprising is that the Reader forum has hundreds of similar questions and answers (see Pat's complain here http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1079699?tstart=0) , but only a handful of them are marked as Answered. And, without checking, I would say that (almost) none of these threads have been locked.
Bill, was that you?

Answer 1

Locking dead-ended threads is one tool we can use to maintain an effective customer experience. Experts on the forum tend to ignore answered questions precisely because they're answered, so thread-hijackers have much less chance of getting help compared to when they post a new question. As Bill and John have said, if someone searches the forums for a keyword and hits one of the threads that were started in the wrong place we absolutely do not want them replying to it.
Locks are applied for three basic reasons:
The thread is in the wrong place and couldn't be moved due to lack of information (outright duplicate posts are removed when they're noticed - please report any you find).
The thread has deviated from the original topic or has violated the Guidelines (e.g. it's descended into a slanging match).
The post is for information only (e.g. FAQ pages).
If there is an active and pertinent conversation within a thread it won't be locked, even if a Correct reply has been selected, but there are some threads which are so old or so trivial there's no reason anyone should reply to them. These forums are used for internal reporting and it assists with that process to have a number of similar-but-separate questions in the database as opposed to one thread with several conversations crossing each other.
There are some forums which are read-only, e.g.  legacy or beta versions of software, but there will always be a new and open forum for current issues if the product still exists.
Current policy is for hosts to assign a Correct status to answers as and when they are identified, allowing time for the OP to make the decision first. Historically we didn't do this so there are hundreds of thousands of old threads which are 'answered' but not marked as such. It's a very long process to go through and retag them - and there's little benefit from doing so.