Just to give you further 'food for thought' why censorship does not require merely deleting or removing speech - but does include blocking speech -
consider this, the words were never deleted or removed. But because new posts couldn't be added, it never again appeared at the top level of the site - that's inhibiting the ability to find the post. It's 11,000 reads show popularity, but we all know this thread has been killed. Without the ability to float back to the top level page and become a 'recent' it's going to die.
What if instead of deleting or removing any post, it was simply removed from amiga.org entirely and nobody could find it at all - or see it again.
The mere fact that it exists on a hard drive somewhere, means its not censored?
Imagine a government agency, said you can't talk about politics unless you pay a $100,000 fee. Is the fact that talking about politics is legal and allowed - mean no censorship occurred or did the fee have a chilling effect on speech?
Of course, it should be plain and obvious that locking a thread is censorship - the proper course of action is to defend the censorship.
The real counter argument is that by censoring the site, the overall quality of the site improves. (which is absolutely true - by deleting spam, by not allowing porn, by prohibiting discussion of illegal activity - the site is a higher quality site).
So did censoring this off-topic and tedious thread improve the site - that's the counter argument, if you ask me.
Denying the censorship, that is just either intellectual dishonesty, or just some kind of quick response that wasn't well thought out.