Agreed. I can't think of any other footballing community site that doesn't allow you to discuss players in their own threads.
RAWK isn't unique in that it attracts morons. It's only unique in the way it tries to tackle them. How do the other sites and their volunteers manage to curb the idiocy while maintain the threads? Sorry this seems overkill.
We're stopping it because it doesn't work for us. If you could point us to a site with as many members as RAWK that effectively manages it I'd be interested to see how they do it. We have 40,000 members, the most online at one time was 12,700 earlier this year.
For comparison, On the Kop has 500 members, The Liverpool Way has 5,000, The Rattle has 1,500. The closest comparison to us in terms of size is probably RedCafe which has 25,000 members.
We know people knock us and we know all about the RAWK threads on RedCafe and the meltdown Twitter feeds, but frankly we don't worry about conforming to what other people think a forum should be. We try and find ways to give our own members the best site we can, given that it is unsupported by advertising (and will remain so) and the moderation team is completely voluntary. It makes no difference to us whether we have 40,000 members or 400 (not strictly true as it would be much easier to manage) but it means we do what we think is right rather than what others might do or what will drive traffic. If we're popular because of what we do, that's great.