This one.
That wording almost made me go with #3 but I did stick to the second in general as being the better option.
Other - move some, close or heavily mod others.
Move the ones which *start out *as thinly-veiled rants, mod the others, like ones where the thread gets hijacked by some troll, just mod the damn trolls, don’t give them the satisfaction of a Pit thread that then becomes all about them…
Other - It’s a judgement call for the mods on a case by case basis. If the decision is ultimately made to move decide a thread to the Pit then it should be unedited. The thread would probably have to be moved in it’s infancy to avoid confusion, hurt feelings, etc…
Seconded.
I’ll admit to a little sympathy towards DrDeth’s position–one of my very first threads here was moved to The Pit, and I wasn’t happy at all with that at the time.
Deciding on a case-by-case basis makes sense. But I don’t see much reason to be concerned that the OP might not want the thread in the Pit, since they can always choose to stop participating at that point. Sure, they might not want other people talking about their thread in the Pit, but they have no way of preventing that anyway – the only difference is whether people have to create a separate thread in the Pit, or get to use the existing one.