[drharris]

I've seen this effect in other "heated" discussions, and I wonder if it's the effect of moderation. Primarily, what happens to a thread as the percentage of moderated messages increases? Is that metric involved in the positioning? I could see a topic like sexism (or emacs v. vi) getting an inordinate amount of moderation, and thus might be flagged more often, moving it down the list. Maybe that has nothing to do with it, but I've seen this effect before.