I understand your frustration, but please understand that this forum is community managed, that’s why moderators will answer - and yes even if people didn’t ask for our input, because that’s our role - Suggesting that we shouldn’t just because you dislike some answers isn’t ok, just like it isn’t to suggest that we are “bored” of answering or that we want to silence users when that thread has in fact been left open for years…
We have just as much right as you do to express ourselves here, as volunteers, taking more time away from our families and friends than most people on this forum ever do. And when we have to do this repeatedly because people bluntly ignore any of our replies, frankly I can’t blame anyone for showing frustration after the 10th time when we would rather be spending our free time helping people more effectively elsewhere on the forum or in the Waze Map Editor rather than repeating the same thing again in a thread which was beaten to death…
Where I respectfully disagree with you is that the thread stopped being a ‘discussion’ a long time ago, a discussion implies constructive interaction and people reading answers and responding accordingly. Recently it was just an endless flow of complaints from people who had never read any single previously given answers, and it was simply not going anywhere nor making any sort of progress. If it had been, the thread would never have been locked.
What it is is 264 posts of people basically showing that they don’t understand that Waze isn’t responsible for Apple’s restrictions on third-party GPS-navigation apps, enough to show there is a demand along with the upvotes in the suggestion box if someone was truly wondering. However keeping the flow open for more and more makes no sense at this point.
Because you can’t deny that this endless loop pattern hasn’t had any impact on this matter in the last 4 years. It is clearly not the way to get things moving, or else you’d expect that 4 years would have done it… Perhaps it’s time to hit: https://discussions.apple.com/welcome for a change.
Another reason for the lock was that someone posted a very informative post, rather than an empty complaint for once, that was very refreshing and useful, but I knew that based on how that thread was spammed with useless posts in the past, it was only a matter of time before it was going to be lost in the flood as new pages of useless complaints would open again and again.
So part of the goal was to seize this opportunity and to give that person more visibility, in the hope that people might actually start reading, since they can’t post, realize it’s not to Waze that they should complain about it, and get things moving on Apple’s side.
Regarding your concerns about “public acknowledgment” as I’ve written, the thread used to be a “normal thread” which would simply disappear lower in the list if nobody posted in it. It is now pinned to the top of the forum where it will always remain visible and never disappear, I think that’s perfectly fine for where the average Waze user is concerned.
The ‘discussion’ you spoke of failed a long time ago, keeping a ‘complaint counter’ open is far from being a constructive solution and has proven to be ineffective, now it’s time for more meaningful attempts at getting Apple’s attention and get them to change their policies.
Keeping in mind that it’s very likely that it’s not just something they never thought about and need to wake up and smell coffee to decide to implement ASAP, but rather that they want as many people as possible to contribute to their, still young, Apple Maps service in order to improve it, be able to compete and are keeping others out on purpose until they feel like their product will be ready enough for competition on CarPlay.