Originally Posted by
peterh337
Usually there are, however, personal attacks, or moves by certain individuals to broaden the debate into areas where the original poster did not intend to go, and those individuals are well aware that the OP does not want to go there (a common reason might be that he doesn't want to identify certain individuals).
On balance, I think the feature of p p r u n e whereby the starter can delete a thread which has been thus hijacked is a good thing.
I absolutely agree that there need to be mechanisms for weeding out personal abuse (although I can't say I could see any in the deleted thread), but alternately consider say that somebody spends 2 minutes posting a brief comment, it drifts somewhat, and several other people have spent 20+ minutes each constructing some detailed discussion which people are getting a lot out of. However, the OP decides that these lengthy posts aren't what he wanted to talk about at-all, so deletes the thread.
De facto, he's stolen from those later posters the time they put into posting, constructing discussion which contained stuff they felt was worth saying, and might have created valuable discussion for other people. Even if it was off topic.
So, yes I agree that the feature should exist, but equally don't like the abuse that one or two people have made of it simply because they didn't like thread drift or the fact that some opinions differed from theirs.
G