What makes a thread get deleted, whereas another is simply locked?
A week or so ago, I posted in a thread in which the OP was obviously trolling. The next day when I was on the Board, it was totally gone. Bemused, I even did a search for it, which turned up nothing.
Other threads in which the OP was admittedly trolling are simply locked down.
What’s the difference? Who makes the call? What are the criteria for deletion veses being locked?
I would suspect posting something like “How do I download MP3’s” will get locked, while a “The Ni****s are the ruin of this country” type post that has plenty of hate speech would get deleted. It would depend on the severity of the thread.
Spam nearly always gets deleted (actually my understanding is that it is actually moved to the valley of the unacceptable threads, as places less burden on the server - deleting an object forces the server to remove all of the indexes (indices?) for it.
Part of it also has to do with whether or not the non-problem parts of the thread contain anything worthwhile for anyone who isn’t a troll or a spammer. Threads that start off legit but devolve into trainwrecks would therefore probably just get locked, as would an accidental multiposting of an OP. A thread asking for everyone to visit the OP’s new porn site, OTOH, would probably get deleted, as keeping it around only benefits the spammer.
No, I think it actually gets deleted, Mangetout, using an SQL query like: DELETE from vBMessages WHERE postID=‘XpostID’. At least that’s how tForum does it, and it’s pretty similar in many respects.
I’m not suggesting that deletion is impossible or even difficult, but I’m pretty sure that the method of choice here is to move it to a hidden forum, certainly that is my impression from what I have seen mods/admins saying on the subject in past threads of this type.
That is possible. I know that it is possible to have hidden forums, with view/post permissions set to restrict all but mods/admins. Heck, I bet they have one of their own where they sit and talk about us lowly members behind our backs. 
Deleting or moving a thread is time consuming (and server intensive). It can often take several minutes. Placing a lock on one generally requires but a few seconds. The mod may simply choose whichever method (s)he has time for at the moment.
I’ll echo UncleBeer, of course, but generally a thread is locked (rather than deleted) if it teaches everyone else an object lesson: Hey, look, this is the kind of behaviour we won’t tolerate.
The idea is to delete only when there’s something horrendously in violation of our rules – spam with links to “hot horny teens” or advertisements, say. Everyone KNOWS that’s not tolerated, so there’s no lesson to be learned from seeing it… and besides, leaving it there would be self-defeating. I mean, the whole purpose of such spam advertising is to have people see it, right? So we want that stuff deleted.
One additional complication: We are very hesitant to delete a thread that has had many responses.
So, with all that going on, it’s the Moderator’s judgement call on whether to delete or lock.
That guy in the horns really turns my crank.
