For reference, this is the thread in question:
https://crawl.develz.org/tavern/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=14765 And this was gamma's full post before he locked it up:
gammafunk wrote:I especially liked the "DESk. Mage with fire storm.", which was araganzar, a player who generally likes to do lots of both melee and magic on his characters. If you add up the action table for melee, there's nearly 2500 actions on this "dedicated Mage". Never mind that these labels are just not a terribly useful concept for making decisions about the game.
I think we've let Berder get painted into a corner with arbitrary reasoning and dubious statistics long enough. There's a report on the thread, so I'm locking it.
I agree in general that mods should be very careful (and in most cases avoid) weighing in on an issue in the thread, in the same post in which they "put on their moderator hats" and talk about why they are taking some special action against it. I'm not perfect here either, of course, but at the risk of hypocrisy I'll nonetheless offer that I've learned (the hard way) that this tends to give the impression that you closed the thread because you disagreed with what someone said, even if that is not actually the case. That being said, I don't think what gamma wrote demonstrates any unreasonable prejudice, just disagreement with a point made up-thread. He happens to be familiar with how araganzar actually plays, and points out this is not actually an example of what Berder claims it is about.
But anyway, the more important question is whether it was justified to lock the thread. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, and I do think the thread was a judgment call one way or the other (it hadn't (yet?) completely degenerated into spam/ad homs/etc.), but I think gamma was correct in locking it. I had seen the report yesterday, but wasn't sure if I should take action based on how the thread was shaping up at that time; seeing how the thread subsequently developed, in retrospect, I wish I had locked it at the earlier opportunity.
Even if people aren't calling each other shitheads or posting goatse or whatever, a thread can still be ready for locking. Even for CYC, the discussion had really run its course, and it was clear that people were (in the most charitable possible reading) talking past each other. The level of discussion was deteriorating, and it was doing so pretty quickly. I do think mods have the right to intercede early in such cases, although I fully admit that this can be a gray area that is open to reasonable questioning. But, in principle, we shouldn't have to wait for a murder to occur before taking action, so to speak.
The last thing I'll say is that the thread was locked, not deleted, and no posts were deleted, either. You can only report individual posts, but gamma (correctly, in my view) interpreted the report as indicative of the state of the thread as a whole, and thus did not single out that or any other post, but locked the whole thread.
EDIT: I'm approaching this purely from the POV of someone who is involved with the Tavern, I haven't been on ##crawl any time lately. If Berder has in fact been trolling there, then that makes gamma's decision all the more reasonable, given that context.