molesgallus said:
It is a hypothetical scenario. Do you mean they use the word 'wrongly', or out of context? Because it definitely applies in this scenario. If someone feels there is a potential social stigma, they were free to ignore the post. It only seems fair to leave it open for those who didn't feel there was a social stigma, though.
Quite a few people use the word "hypothetical" as a mask to say, "this is what I want to happen, but in the interests of making myself look less disturbing I'm going to try and distance myself from that by using this word that creates alternate situations". That is not to say all people do it, but some most certainly do.
It is nothing like that. Child porn clearly shouldn't exist, and endorsing it by having it on your computer is wrong.
Like having a thread that endorses killing people? You might say some of the posts are ironic (yes some, but the Michael Bay one is not ironic, so I assume the definition of ironic was misinterpreted), but some most certainly aren't.
Would you publicly act as though you are planning to commit a crime? I'm fairly certain you can get arrested for presumed intent, if not execution. That's what pre-emptive police raids are all about after all. Sure you might sound jokey, but people have been arrested for making jokes (e.g. Jokes about bombs when in an airport) before.
As a participant in a discussion, I can understand your point of view here. However, from the point of view of a website that doesn't want to attract negative attention to itself, especially if someone on here might wish to report the thread to the authorities, with a thread about killing people with no repercussions (we gamers look like real socialites now) gaining quite a bit of popularity, you can see that locking such a thread might be a useful course of action, if not for you, then for the website.
You keep arguing why it shouldn't be locked, when your question was to ask
why it was locked. This is my interpretation of why it was locked.