Well, so far it doesn't happen very often, so we don't really have a firm official policy. In this case, I was somewhat more sympathetic since it was evident that at various times different people's feathers were getting ruffled, and we were really having about 10-20 different conversations within one thread, and a snippy response to one person would piss off someone else to whom it wasn't really directed, and, well, a fresh start seemed like a decent idea. Note that I'm much more likely to close a thread than I am to delete it, and new threads can still refer to the old stuff in a closed thread.
At various times in the past, some topics just get so out of hand that we find ourselves closing topics right and left to keep the peace. Or even deleting them. We don't like it and certainly prefer to avoid it, but we are primarily a
Java forum, with MD as an afterthought, so if bad feelings from MD discussions overtake the "friendly place for Java greenhorns" we try to cultivate, we have to prioritize. Our MD "culture" has gone through many different phases and moods depending on recent history and the world political situation. When people are generally happy it's more "anyting goes"; when there have been a lot of unfriendly exchanges recently, we become more draconian as we try to get things to calm down. We try for consistency, but the situations we deal with are always changing, and our ideas abotu the best way to handle these situations also evolves, and sometimes we just make mistakes.
I know, it's hard to believe.
Anyway, my own theory is that when a thread has been going on a long time and nerves have been getting frayed, closing the thread and letting new threads take up the cause serves to help people take a few deep breaths before plunging back into the fray. Sometimes it also pisses people off, but this
seems to be a lesser effect in most cases.
There's actually a UBB "feature" which allows whoever originated a thread to delete the entire thread, by simply deleting their own first post. I think this is a very rude thing to do if there are other posts in the thread, and if we had an easy way to plug this hole, we would. We're actually more interested in replacing our UBB software entirely with something like Jive or MVNForums, and we've recently made significant progress on some longstanding underlying issues with that, so you may hear more on that shortly. Anyway, any new forum software will
not give users the ability to delete their own threads, and will be a lot more customizable than what we have now. In the mean time, if someone politely asks a thread of their to be closed, I'm inclined to do so. If it starts happening to often, that policy may change.