Nobody said you could not post on things that are considered humorous. This is why we have an area of the forum dedicated to just these kinds of threads. That section would be the campfire.
And there will always be some threads that one would accept there to be humour and jokes. Take for example Ted and Shaun's thread about getting together in GZ. With the common shirts being worn, it was screaming to have jokes made of it. Using another example of how a thread can go sideways in a bad way, I will use Arnold's thread about his new life with Qing. Somehow, this thread got talking about electricians stuff.
The squat toilet topic is of use to new members. For myself, I had never heard of one, and obviously had never seen one, until I stumbled onto a blog from of a
woman in China. I posted questions about this, (a long time ago), and got the answers I needed. This thread has long ago been buried over on the old facebook site. It stands to reason that it is going to come up again. And naturally, there is going to be some humour attached to it. But it has to stay somewhat on topic.
If you think threads are being "hive off", maybe you can be a little more specific. I am not personally aware of this trend, but I will look into it. I did delete some posts from Han's thread about "sex". The posts I deleted were in regard to one of the mods talking about closing the thread. I felt this was not the right course of action, so I deleted his post, and all subsequent posts that were in regard to his posting. All other posts on that thread I did not touch, because I felt it was an interesting subject, and was bringing on some good healthy debate. It is an opportunity to understand the different brothers, and to see different peoples opinions on the subject.
Shaun...what occasions have threads been closed? There are a few in the Site Feedback section that Irishman closed, because they are no longer being posted to, or have already been resolved. In the past, the only other threads that were locked down, were ones that were going to cause major problems...where someone has gone after another person. We have shut it down, while the mods debate what the next step should be. I know in one instance, I wrote both members to explain why it was closed, the offending post deleted, and then the thread was re-opened.
I have attached a screenshot of the moderator logs, so you can see that rarely are threads deleted. I hope this will satisfy you that we are not heavily moderating this forum.