Good luck Sindo and Totallympics for the huge period ahead for us
I just wanted to offer my opinion on one thing:
I think it might be more constructive to have some deterrent for users posting inflammatory comments. At the moment, if a user posts something blatantly inflammatory then their post simply gets deleted (maybe I'm wrong, but that's all user see that happens anyway). This in turn makes it more likely for another user to respond in kind, possibly out of frustration and the lack of a deterrent.... if User A can write something nasty without a punishment, then User B, C, D, E might think about doing the same in the knowledge that the posts will simply get deleted but they have in the meantime satisfied their ego. If there are no repercussions to constantly dragging threads into petty fights then we are going to see it happen all the time.
I don't think it's a particular problem right now and indeed punishments or not, I still would not engage in that type of "tit for tat" but I think having at least some procedure in place in terms of what happens to users if they keep posting in a style where their comments need to be deleted to prevent a thread being side-tracked would be a good thing. But I would add that being at the other end of the spectrum of being too harsh and quick with punishments would be equally damaging and undermine the great tone we have in our forum.