In meisdavidp's defense:
Many other forums have had provisions against bringing back old threads... and, in fact, so have we in the past. Our decision to treat our archives as something that can be used to help people instead of some kind of precious record is a recent enlightenment, which certainly doesn't jive with the make-as-many-threads-as-possible attitude that most boards have.
While it certainly always seems to moderators that a regular user enforcing rules without authority is an attempt to suck up in some manner, I think there's more to it - I think it's usually an honest attempt to let people know what's *right*. It's a natural thing - if you see someone breaking the law in-real-life, you react in some manner... that doesn't transition quite right to the we-fix-things-you-have-fun system that most internet message boards run on. So I think, however wrong, it's a noble attempt in a sense.
Now, obviously, he made a few mistakes beyond trying to do the right thing -- he's not enforcing a real rule and even if it were real he's talking about it in a thread where it couldn't apply anyway... but that's common human stupidity, which infects us all at some point or another. I think that meisdavidp is a good poster who tried to the right thing, however wrong he was - and Chris' slap on the wrist is enough, we shouldn't need to attack him beyond that.
