MaineDog, no. You can delete them before opening if you want. If somebody sends you threatening messages (not just annoying ones, but ones that would be legally proscecutable as 'threats'), send a message to Joe.

Joe's a decent guy, but Joe, you're the lead editor here. You validate an opinion by taking it seriously enough to argue. People already respect you, you don't need to keep asserting yourself. If you do, you can only LOSE respect. You can't get drawn into these arguments over and over again and expect people not to change their opinion of you. You, who used to believe in not responding to trolls, can't re-open threads just to have the last word. That's how I perceive what happened, despite why you said you re-opened those lovely threads. Was that for the good of the forum?

But you can't moderate an argument and be PART of it, any more than you can referee a game and be part of it.

Personally, I don't think there's much reason to even keep the BS section open these days, as most of the posts are old grudge-matches or outright trolling and flaming.