Apart from the obvious “personal abuse of an individual” purely for the sake of that abuse, repeated over and over, I generally find that the most “disliked/argumentative/aggressive” posts are the ones that have elicited from the greatest number of participants, on a thread, the greatest amount of logical, informative, discussion possible. Which is, after all the theoretic objective of these sailing threads/forums, isn’t it? To spread the greatest amount of knowledge to the greatest number of people as possible? (I won’t consider any commercial interests here) If threads that are seen to be “disliked” by just one or two people, who have the power to delete that entire thread, are assigned to oblivion, we must surely be the poorer? I find nothing wrong with any “obnoxious” individual being warned/censured to an appropriate degree by any moderator, but to remove the entire thread is like “burning the books” of writers whom the “state” finds contrary to the “party line” not so much that the content is wrong, but more so because the writer is “disliked”, I just don’t think that we need to go down “that slippery slope”.
In a way, when a complete thread is deleted it not only wipes clean all that was said by who ever was seen to be objectionable but it also loses all the contributions of all the counter arguments and commonsense replies made by the more informed postings which had value in their own right and deserved to be able to be read. Deletion not only rids us of the small percentage of the “bad” it also loses for us the much larger percentage of good.