Bioware does this on their support forums in order to prevent what is currently happening in the ingame bug forum. Rather than constantly locking every single topic in regards to the same issue, create an open one which asks people to post in there their character, server, area of issue, date/time of issue, npcs involved, system specs, and a brief description of what they did or what the problem was. This way people can post in the same topic rather than creating pages and pages of the same problem. When people do post separate topics about the same problem then respond with a link to the open topic and then lock their own. It really does help reduce the clutter.