One thing I've learned since starting this role is that you really can't please everything. You can have several people fed up with arguments going down and suggesting a thread can be closed, and then others will not like it when it is closed. Either they enjoy the arguments or they feel their voice has been taken away somehow.
Also, far too often people lose track of the discussion. This isn't just going off topic, but also concerns thread which just become a series of isolated posts without any real value. Obviously there'll always be some of that, otherwise we'd be trying to have a 100-way cross-conversation, but these days it seems like even discussion forums become a bit too much like a series of disparate twitter posts, or facebook status updates.
I think banter is fine but it's always a fine line between what is and what isn't. When it comes to football I've always felt that people seem incapable of having a proper discussion about it. Also, the text people write on the internet comes largely without any hint of the writer's demeanour, so we pretty much make it up ourselves, based on how we feel about the subject. Then that leads to misunderstandings and exaggeration.
All the above contribute to threads being locked. However, from the odd forum I've seen elsewhere, I don't think there is a vastly disproportionate amount of locked threads here. People still seem to give largely positive feedback about this place as a community too, and that's pretty much based on the values it was established with from the start. So it's only logical that whatever those values are, that we should try and maintain them. Yes we could explain things a bit more when we make decisions and stuff - I certainly always thought that - but to be frank, I've seen now that justifying every decision would basically make this a 24 hour job some times. This post itself has taken me about half an hour to write, just trying to get my message across properly and constructively. I used to try and do it more often but found it was just consuming my evenings.
I have to be honest, because of all the above, I didn't expect a football thread to stay as good natured as it did, for as long as it did. But it's not as if there's any shortage of places to discuss football now, is it?:?
