Fair enough, though I'll disagree on whether flames and trolls have to be tolerated (insert quip about excercising free speech by yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre here).

I am not actually keen on deleting nodes. In fact I never delete anything on forums where I am a moderator. Unfortunately, threaded forums like PerlMonks can't really emulate what flat-threaded messageboards call "closing" a thread, which leaves it readable, but precludes any further replies.

Ideally, people would simply refrain from replying and voting at all.