Quote Originally Posted by Kallera View Post
That is why mods used to lock the thread first, which had been done in the past.
Locking prevents further escalation in the given thread. It does not prevent escalation in new threads, and believe me...a particularly heated response WILL get players to post "I wanted to post this volatile stuff in the original thread, but it was locked, so I'll bash the poster X in this new thread" threads. All over the place.

If a thread will be deleted...well, not only is the offensive content (when it is offensive) out of sight, out of mind, as they say...but people are going to be far, far less likely to make references to it...thus they won't post threads "Hey, I've been having a flame war in thread X, but it no longer exists, so here's my response to something that you can no longer read.".

Basically, deletion is done when a thread does more bad than good and simple post deletion won't change much (or large chunk of posts would need to be deleted). And believe me...a swamp of threads about the exact same topic ALREADY does more bad than good, let alone what kinda stuff can be found in some of them.