Aaaaalriiight
I'll try to clarify a little both our reasons (which I assume was Tommy's reason too) and our positions.
There are moments where a case is a little borderline with forum rules and this is a real pain in the ass for us moderators. It is most likely walking on eggs or trying to square the circle.
In our first stance, we kept an eyes on the topic and talked about it into the backstage. We disagreed about how to deal with it, to say the truth I was the one who wanted to lock it very soon, but I was outnumbered by different opinions, saying the opposite: keeping it open or we would have come into a similar situation like this one. This is already happen before, uh uh.
I'll show you this examples here:
pirated games are better, less bugs etc. I torrented your stuff, Devs, coz you do not release any demo. People torrented because there are no demo, Devs should have released one instead. People pirated this to test on their system, I'm not buying a game if I don't know if I can play it or not. X% of pirates will buy the game sooner or lates and Devs know this, they're simply wanna make extra bucks.
Piracy is not a crime. It is nasty, and immoral, but it's not a crime. What Devs are gonna do to track them is highly immoral. X% of pirates are potential customers but with this terroristic anti piracy politics, Devs will certainly discourage them. I am a legal customers, but if Devs will follow this path I'm not gonna buy any future game from them. I do not think that piracy really hurts the sales and the incomes, since a x% of pirates are potential customers, they play the game of the big bad company scaring the lil customer.
In these few lines there are different cases of subtle\not subtle advocating piracy. It is difficult for us-mods to decide which of these are borderline and which are breaking the rules. So we simply try to take a decision case by case.
If you ask me, most of these cases are borderline and I would let em do. A few others are discussable and a few others are definitly out of the rules.
Now, excuse me, but this was the content of a larger part of the posts in the thread, like or not.
If you like, I can reopen the thread, but please lets at least admit that this is quite the truth.