Facebook – unable to close comments

Back in September of 2015, I commented that Facebook missed a feature to close comments. Then, in April, of 2016, I posted an article jubilating the fact that such a feature had been added. And so it had. For Pages. Not, however, for posts made to one’s personal timeline. Below, you can see how the menu looks on Pages (left) and in ones timeline (right):

I believe this is a tool everyone should have access to, and here are my original reasons why, which I feel have stood the test of time well:

As a Facebook page admin, you have a number of tools. You can delete posts, threads and users, you can add users, and you can pin threads to the top, just to mention a few examples. One thing you can’t do, is close a thread. As admin for several pages, this is becoming a bit of a headache. On the one hand, many of the users of the pages in question have long histories of solid contributions, and the discussions can get lively. We want that to happen. On the other hand, discussions sometimes get out of hand, in particular when controversial topics are on the agenda.

Every so often, the need to curtail a discussion trumps the need to have a discussion be available to the members of the page, and we are forced to delete the thread. This is, mildly put, a less than ideal situation. Now, I realise that Facebook wasn’t necessarily designed or intended to be forum software like MyBB, phpBB, and vBulletin, but that is one of the things Facebook has become; arguably the single biggest host of forums on the internet. A basic admin and moderator tool in all of the three I mentioned is this very feature, and as such, it is something Facebook should implement sooner, rather than later.