Standard for locking a thread?

[Tony Mollica]

Gentlemen:
What is the standard for locking a thread?

[RAY@HQ]

Generally, once the rules of the forum get violated.

If there's something you want locked or requires mod attention, just send me a PM and I'll take care of it.

[Tony Mollica]

I don't have a complaint about anything that needs locked, or content that bothers me. I was referring to the lock on the A. Rod/Madonna thread, and what was the reason for locking that. I'm an old hippie who tends to tune out messages and messengers who offend my sense of the way things are or should be rather than wanting an outside source to censor them. For example when Rush comes on the radio I know he's going to say some things that I think are lies and that if I listen to him it's going to tick me off big-time. So I just change the station and I don't listen to him. It's not going to be worth calling him or writing him; because I'm not going to change his mind and he's not going to change my mind. I'm also not calling the station and demanding they take him off the air. I am pretty sure that he is wrong most of the time, but I'm not positive enough to think no one else should have the opportunity to hear what he has to say.
As a 50 year old guy, I was interested in younger people's take on the 50 year old Madonna and her alleged relationship to the younger A. Rod. When that was locked I was deprived of the opportunity to further hear people's opinion and the opportunity to comment on their expressed opinions. I wasn't outraged or anything like that; I just would have preferred it not to be locked. I'm a fan of the forum's and am intending this post as a friend's opinion,and I'm not intending it to be mean spirited or overly critical. Thank you for giving me a place to express my opinion.

[RAY@HQ]

Thanks for stating your view, Tony... can certainly appreciate it. Officially, we really do frown on non-baseball-related threads (see forum rule #10), and that thread had certainly gone in that direction. It wasn't any one post there that caused me to lock it. Actually, I hadn't been paying attention to that thread, and when I did drop in, I could see that for the most part, people had successfully danced their way thru a potentially inflammatory discussion topic. The discussion seemed to have mostly run its course, but I elected to lock it rather than potentially have it flare up in a less-controlled manner when there was more A-Rod/Madonna news down the road.

The bottom line is that, in our experience, once the topic gets away from baseball, things have a way of getting into more contentious areas very quickly, so we're much quicker on the "lock" trigger once the topic strays from our core interests here at HQ.

[Tony Mollica]

Thank you for the explanation. It makes sense. I hadn't thought about it as a "non-baseball related thread", but it was at that point.