We need a community rep that interacts with the community

[Iscah]

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.

I would take a guess that mods might also be quicker to delete one thread that's turned nasty if there are multiple threads on that topic - even more so if the same actual debate-arguments are being posted in both places.