Curious. I haven't seen any respectful legitimate discussions shut down or redacted. From my experience on these fora, the only times I have seen entire discussions closed is when a flame war has erupted and the "discussion" has deteriorated into a barrage of insults pretty much having nothing to do with any material having to do with either the website or the research. I have only seen redactions occur when either non family friendly language or content has been involved.
Perhaps in your experience, you have noticed something different ?
Cheers

There have been a few cases where threads have been locked with a link to a more appropriate place to continue the conversation. In other cases, the moderator action has reflected the sorts of posts/threads referred to by Sgt. Joe and Grumpy Swede.

Polite (and possibly constructive) discussions have been seen; unfortunately, as has been pointed out more than once, it's unlikely there'll be any major changes before the handover is completed, so repetition is non-constructive (even if polite, rather than obscene or insulting!)

The primary purpose of these boards is communication -- mutual support and information exchange -- not the throwing of vitriol...

Cheers - Al.

You''ll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. :-)

BobbyB,

O.K. -- so I missed a case of one being locked because the topic had already been beaten to death... Threads like that usually seem to end up as slanging matches or like the old AOL (and elsewhere) "me too" or +1 threads; whether the extra posts contribute much to a discussion would be a topic for philosophical debate, I think!

And as for redactions, I'm not sure whether you regard them as evidence of shutting down conversation or not, so I hope you don't misinterpret this... I reckon that if one can't make a point without resorting to foul language, maybe one should try to find another way to make it! (And yes, there are times when what I'm thinking needs to be written on asbestos paper, but..)

Indeed, some forums have variants of the "14-year-old sister" rule that will result in deletion of posts once they are [eventually] noticed rather than redaction (and that often kills any non-contentious stuff that has already been posted in reply)... At least here the majority of the threads continue (even if they sometimes get moved to a different part of the forum for one reason or another!)

I would hate to be a moderator...

Cheers - Al.

[Edit - slight rephrasing...]

Yep, and it's just great trying to contribute to a thread and having to wait days for your post to be approved by a Moderator and show up days later only to be irrelevant by then.