The Problems and Support area is the only area of the forum that the Support team monitors. We post specific (single) issues here that we need help with from them, and they open a ticket on it, if there is not another ticket opened through a direct email.
When they resolve the problem on their end, or when others here have resolved the initial issue with the original poster, they close the ticket, and the thread.
(They have hundreds of these things to monitor, when they close the thread, they don’t have to keep re-reading it here. It’s a more efficient use of their time.)
Subsequent discussions can be continued by linking to a post in Everything Else, if folks want to continue the discussion.
Nope. The moderators are the only ones with the ability to lock and unlock the threads.
They can link to the thread and continue the discussion in Everything Else. The Problems and Support Area is controlled to try to keep the chatter down to a minimum and actually focus on resolving issues. The Everything Else category is wide open for discussions, opinions, parties…whatever. 