[Super Milk Chan]

Definitely generally agree with what you're saying. The forums is more or less the dedicated space for community discussions, and closing threads willy nilly can certainly stifle that, which is not what we want. That said, it can be a fine line to to walk between facilitating an open, constructive (even if uncomfortable) discussion and sponsoring a thread for people to flame each other back and forth.

The truth is that it sometimes makes more sense to temporarily close a thread that's getting out of hand, rather than let it fester with people getting progressively more and more up in arms. Ideally if someone says something shitty, off-topic, or bait-y, people would not engage and continue with the discussion at hand. What seems to often happen instead is a multi-page derailment, which inhibits actual constructive conversation and imo mostly serves to further raise tensions.

It's (very clearly) not a solved problem, but I think threads like this are great for people to leave thoughts and feedback on how to better handle these sorts of tricky situations.

I understand the fine line view, however to me it's just not that fine and if it is fine, it never takes long to make it obvious and not such a fine line anymore. I all so think the words back and forth are getting misinterpreted, we use it to describe a argument with no valued input, but it's all so getting used to describe, you know, a conversation because you know a conversation has to go back and forth to be a conversation. Keep in mind only most of the input needs some actual meat to a comment since not everything is that complicated or needs a paragraph to be labeled as productive input to a conversation.