Primarily it's used for announcements.
For instance, you have a forum for people to announce events with no problem of bumping or someone starting a flame war.
I'd love to see this feature back.
In our forum we use(d) it in three instances. One, a classifieds section (we don't want bumping), and two, manufacturer announcements (we don't want someone slagging the company), and three, events announcements (no bumping or slagging).
We don't want to have to go in and manually lock everything. And in the classifieds forum, we use locking as an indicator that the transaction is done---locking to prevent replies destroys that function.
There's no good was to do this in v7 apparently.
I don't know why this feature was eliminated—or some others for that matter!
