[Vicky.]

We are a LOT more lenient in the serious debates forum than we are anywhere else, because of the nature of..a serious debate. We do understand that it sometimes getsb heated however many threads remain untouched despite becoming extremely heated

The problem comes when the posts become borderline (or actually racist)...and then we have to delete them, and then obviously other posts that quoted the deleted post, or posts that followed because without the offending post, the rest of it wouldn't make sense. When this happens, posts that otherwise are fine get deleted because without the deleted stuff it doesn't follow the discussion and would be confusing to people just reading the thread who hadn't seen all the hassle before deletion, if this makes sense.

Also we don't delete/ban/whatever simply because a post has been deleted, however, when one thread has a load of reports coming from it, from loads of different users, then you have a problem. Its obviously offending a lot of people with the direction its gone in, or the direction it was intended to go in.

In short, no threads like that aren't always going to be 'pruned'. And a great way to stop this happening (and I know this is hard, I have been known to reply to stuff I know I shouldn't before) is if you see a post that will obviously take the thread in the wrong direction or is outright offensive, completely ignore it (posting wise) and report it. This way when we deal with the report, if people have just ignored it, we wont have to delete huge chunks of conversation.