“Resurrected to be killed (then maybe born again)”

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OK, I admit I thought of the phrase first then found it in a song by a metal group called Protest the Hero.

But this has nothing to do with music, it’s about Boardgamegeek (BGG) shenanigans and it’s bothering me more than perhaps it should.

Some time last November, someone on Boardgamegeek.com started a thread called “The Israel-Hamas war as a wargame” or words to that effect. The OP (original poster) was not posting a trivial or sensationalistic question, their enquiry was how one would seriously explore the problem, and after the initial fluffing and clucking about designing on a current conflict there was actually some sensible back and forth about the merits of trying to address it, then the thread went dormant the following month.

This weekend, after four months of being buried the thread was resurrected (or “necroed” if you prefer) by a one-liner post saying this topic was a travesty and this thread should not exist… this post brought it up on the subdomain where it attracted a melodramatic post by someone else agreeing with the first poster, and stating that if the BGG admins did not delete it then they would delete themselves from BGG. Cue several posts in response by me and others who were on the original thread explaining in what I thought was non-confrontational language what the thread was originally supposed to address, professional gamer relevancy, game-based journalism, etc. and comment on how the war has in the last 4 months moved away from being worthy of ludic consideration like this. I went out to lunch and returned to find that the thread had been entirely deleted.

As I understand it, this is something that I believe only the BGG administrators themselves can do. Moderators on BGG lock threads, usually after one or more warnings. Even if an OP deletes their original question or post the replies to it remain. I’ve been on BGG for 20 years and one week and this is the first time I’ve seen something like this happen to a discussion, as I said normally threads are simply locked when the conversation gets ugly.

This is a pretty minor thing, in the great scheme of things. I’m not going to formally complain to the admins (it wasn’t my thread) nor am I going to engage with the drivers-by. But it bothers me that a drive-by posting on a serious discussion that quietened itself four months ago will get it not just shut down but removed from existence entirely… to assert, in this negative way, that no serious consideration can be, should be, or will be given to the topic. I wonder what was said to the admins?

Anyway, unlike the song the thread won’t be born again. Waste of time and too many keystrokes already.