Oh please. The thread in question was a shitshow from post one. The OP clearly had no intent to debate earnestly; this seemed pretty apparent from post 1, but by post 17 it should have been clear to even the most optimistic observer that Lord Foul had zero intention of honest debate:
Then, Johnathan Chance shows up, passes out a few (well-deserved) warnings, and… leaves it open, with a warning that it has the chance to go off the rails.
Why? It’s already gone off the rails. To be more accurate to the metaphor, there never were rails; this is an abandoned boxcar rusting in a field. There’s exactly one person in the thread arguing anything other than the mainstream position, and that person, as is well-established, is either uninterested in or incapable of rational debate. They’re not even making a whole lot of claims that really need to be addressed or refuted - just one, which was refuted almost immediately. I guess I just don’t get the decision to keep it open.
I think he missed the boat here, but usually don’t mind his moderation.
He chastising the board users like children, in quite a condescending fashion, for snarking on a obvious troll.
Instead of talking to us like he’s our Sunday school teacher he should moderate the troll. Thread was clearly trolling and destined to be a shitshow, BY DESIGN.
You want us to pre-judge threads, take to ourselves an arbitrary power to close threads and intervene on poster’s behavior based solely on whether in our opinion, a thread has some sort of value?
If we did that I’d pre-emptively close a lot of threads.
Far better to allow them to go on and have us intervene when rules are broken. Your ‘not debating fair’ is another person’s ‘back and forth’. Just because you don’t like their style doesn’t mean they should be shut down. If we were to sanction people based on style each of the three of us would issue 20 warnings or more per day and Great Debates would be a ghost town.