I see that the post in question has been deleted. I fully understand the reasoning behind that action, but I wonder whether deletion might not be that good a principle?
Make no mistake - I believe that the post which originated this thread was, simply, past all limits of acceptable; offensive; senseless. Nevertheless, I’m always uncomfortable with plain deletion of information.
When you delete things, they disappear. People can no longer learn from them - they can no longer see what reaction they’ll get to some attitudes; they can no longer even see that such attitudes are dealt with as they should. If you lock a topic, on the other hand, everyone can see what happened, and how it was dealt with. It’s out in the open. It’s much better to deal with things out in the open.
Even things such as racism, which the Retro brings up. I honestly see absolutely no racism in the offensive post - just a very, very, very offensive post - but it’s a fair question: how to deal with it? Again, I don’t believe deleting is the answer.
I’ve been in the AGS Forums for quite a while. It’s not the best ever place in the whole wide world, granted, but it’s very nice. Very fairly moderated. A very nice place to hang out, even if you do have you share of not-really-helpful-or-even-useful posters (but you get those everywhere). I’ve never seen anyone banned - as far as I know, they never have, and CJ is very proud of that. I’ve never known threads or topics to be deleted. That’s because they’d rather instruct by punishing mistakes, not by making the mistakes go away - which is what deleting is. They also prefer to take turn between gently coaching the offender and, if he’s being an ass, being sarcastic. Some of the offenders are laughed to death. Some others learn what they did wrong and turn their act around. All of this without deleting anything, or banning anyone.
Now let’s be realistic - AGS is a place for adventure-game lovers, and it gets all sort of people, of all sort of ages. IF is a bit more elitist by its very nature, and we’re much more unlikely to get the sort of dreadful, childish behaviour I’ve seen in a few posts over there. But if they can handle it efficiently and transparently, why shouldn’t we?