I have been an active member of this forum for 5 years if I remember well, and the General Discussion thread here was closed for a short period of time thanks to annoying Edelman fans coming here from other forums. So it was closed before, even if shortly.
That being said, I am strongly against closing a thread just because some people can't respect the rules, so us other correct users get negatively affected too. Instead of limiting a function for all the forum users, why notsend a warning to the ones who go against the rules, and if the violation gets repeated ban them? Sure it's more time consuming then closing everything, I get it, but the admins are here to help the forum, i.e. the correct members and contributors, not punish them because others can't respect the rules.
This is just my opinion, of course, and I respect the tremendous amount of work running a forum like this requires, but as a user that never got any kind of warning for my conduit here I don't like to get threats from the admins to loose access to some funcionalities because others didn't respect the rules.