If your thread gets hijacked by trolls, or someone who takes a comment badly and starts throwing around personal abusive comments, they remove thew thread, review it, and if too bad, they do not bring it back. If it has only started, and they get it quickly, they will locked it and return it to the forums, but with a warning to others to stop the dog piling or personal attacks against others.
It has probably been going only for a while, bit by bit, but the moderators seem to be up scaling the moderation and review of the posts. All it needs is for one person to report a thread, or for one person to comment on the thread, please calm down and avoid personally abusing people, calling them names, etc.
As soon as someone starts calling people Ediots, Nazzzzees, Homfobes, Rassist (all spelt incorrectly so they show up), etc, then the thread is either given the chop, or reviewed. They normally give a "in bold and large type" warning to get the thread under control, and for everyone to calm down, and stop the abuse.
You could be following a thread that was gong well, and seemed to have proper discussions, logical view points, rule quotes, and nothing over the top, and all of a sudden it goes out of control while you are at work, or asleep, and you do not even know why it was removed, and find out second hand from another member that persons X, Y and Z abused person W and ignored the moderators warnings to cease.
I was discussing a thread helping another gamer in designing a Chaos Army for 40K based on what miniatures he had purchased, and gave a few recommendations on how they could be employed, and what units he should probably invest in to make his army a little more survivable and competitive. Because of 2 suggestions I made, I got dog piled on about the merits of the units. Even after explaining why I prefer those units and how they improved my own CSM army giving specific examples of how they survived where similar units with a different Chaos Mark were wiped out quickly when played against Eldar and SM type armies, I was called an idiot, and other names by one person.
I then asked the person to word their replies in a more civil manner and answer the question with facts and reasoning, not abuse. A few trolls then dog piled in on the thread, without getting abusive, and the next day (afternoon) when I checked the post again after replacing my keyboard and mouse which locked up after the computer system auto-downloaded a software update from Windows, the thread had been removed. Not locked - removed. I found out from someone else it went down hill very quickly, even with me not there to reply to the persons abusive reply comments.
I wonder if BOLS will ever get that way with some of the threads we get on this site?