Has this thread been deleted? If so, may I ask the reason?
If it was started by Mr Happy, he’s been banned.
The thread was at http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=541972, was started by Mr Happy, and had at least 16 replies. It’s a pity that it was deleted along with the OP.
Damn. That could have been a good thread. Oh well.
I banned the OP because he was a troll, and I removed the threads and posts he made today. If you’d like to discuss that minority issue, I’d suggest starting a new thread. Or you could post to this one, which has a similar subject.
It’s a general policy that, when we ban someone for blatant rules violation (such as having multiple identities), we also disappear their posts. Our purpose is sort of devious. Trolls/socks tend to get their jollies from causing uproar, they’re out to get attention (any attention, even – especially – negative attention.) So long as their posts remain visible, they’re getting some attention, and can chortle to themselves. When their posts are gone, vanished, vamoose, we hope they don’t derive any joys from their idiocies, and will go away and leave us alone.
We used to have a friend named Vinnie who just broke their kneecaps, but we’re a kinder, gentler board now.
Anyhow, that’s why we typically cause all the posts of trolls to disappear.
What exactly was the thread about?
About actors not having to be blind to play a blind person. And so on. Ostensibly, at least. I suspect he had an agenda.
Okay, makes sense.
I also keep reading this thread title as “Hey Minorities” in the same melody as that “Hey Leonardo, she likes me for me” song from a few years ago.
It was a mistake to lay Vinnie off.
This is my yearly (or so) plea to reconsider this policy.
I understand the reasons you disappear posts, but it seems to me more often than not to punish the well-behaved majority for the trolling of a small minority.
I know there’s a feature in vB that allows you to copy a bunch of posts to a new thread…couldn’t that be an option instead?
Granted, this hasn’t been as much of a problem recently–trolls tend to get disappeared before a thread gets more than a few posts (you guys are on the ball!!), but for those few times they do slip by, I would ask that you consider other options than deleting a potentially interesting thread.
I will now drop the topic for another year or two. 
PS–I remember Lynn’s Cousin Vinnie too–I still say an exception to the “no socks” rule should be made for him alone. 
When a troll jumps into an otherwise useful thread, we’ll typically just take the troll’s posts out and leave everything else.
Actually, it’s you guys that are on the ball. When someone plops a steaming load of spam (or trollery) onto the boards, we can pretty much count on several people reporting it to us within minutes.
I think I tried to do this a year or so ago. The main problem was, IIRC, if the OP was the troll, you had a problem with how you actually started the thread. It was a bureacratic nightmare. At least, that’s how I remember it.
Right. I could attach the non-trolling posts to an older thread, like the one I linked to, but it would make sort of a mess. That’s why I suggested a new thread or reviving that previous thread. If someone else had started the thread and the guy had just trolled in it, I would have taken the post out and let the thread continue.
Would it be possible (in a vB sense–I’m not sure it’s desirable…and as rarely as this happens any more, we’re kinda just talking hypotheticals–I mean, this is the first one in how many months?) for the mod to create a new thread with a quick note summarizing the sock/troll’s OP, locking it, copying all the posts from the other thread to the new thread, then unlocking it?
I mean, it would be time consuming as hell and generally not worth it, but would it work? Or would the time stamps hose things, putting the new OP under all the old posts?
I don’t think it’s possible to rearrange a thread so the first post is out of chronological order with the rest of the thread. (For example, this thread was started at 10:30 a.m., and I am not sure if you can bump a post from 9:45 p.m. to the top of the thread.) Maybe one of the admins knows a way to do that, but I believe the mod’s OP would be bumped to the bottom of the thread.
I had an Aunt Vinnie like that. Scots-Irish, she was.
There is a plugin that does that kind of rearranging timestamps, but it’s third party, and, if I recall correctly, the powers that be try to avoid that kind of complication.