I keep one eye on this forum because of some past issues that were rather volatile, and CoachB25 and Rosy also keep me updated.
A few points that I wanted to make:
Moderators (including me) are volunteers who have real jobs. Sometimes, as CoachB25 said above, they/we will need to lock a thread just to keep it from spiraling out of control while we are away doing real work, and come back later to investigate and deal with it. Other times they/we may need or choose to close a discussion because we've already been down that road and strongly suspect how much time it is going to take to keep things reasonably clean - sometimes that's just not worth it. And more often than members might like to think, we may have to put a halt to something because of past problems involving threats of lawsuits. I typically receive at least one such threat per month.
Being a moderator is mostly a thankless job, but I'll say it here again: Thank you so much to our moderators!
Julie