Quote - I read the Guardian online. Lots of very strong feelings and debates over religion, politics, sex, you name it. Lots of moderation. But mods delete individual posts, along with any that specifically reply to those posts, and leave only a note that a post violated community standards. The threads go on for the most part. Of course, they likely have more moderators, but they also have the ability to lock a thread temporarily, say, overnight while a moderator sleeps. Amazing. But I guess it's not trivial to code something like that.

It's a good point / suggestion regarding the functionality being that the thread is taken offline until a mod can lock/hide individual posts.

Technically it would not be trivial to introduce that functionality... assuming it's not latently available in the Content Management System (CMS) already being used by the site, or available via a pre-existing plug-in for that particular CMS.

Even if there was a ready-made means to do it, it would be unlikely to be trivial.

However technicalities aside, I suspect it would create far too much work... and place an unfair extent of responsibility, for making micro-judgements on individual posts, upon the moderators.

The latter is probably more at issue here, I would guess?

cheers ;-)