@sandaoguo, thanks for the quick and reasoned response

On deeming something as a "game" rather than "random posting" — There exists plenty precedence for what could be intuitively judged as the latter, in the form of threads such as Last Person to Post Wins II, which is just about spamming until an admin pulls the plug and archives the thread, or Random Thoughts, which is literally about posting random stuff. Furthermore, I argue that a policy for making a distinction is near impossible to make without collateral damage; furthermore, one interesting feature in the Taco Island forum I mentioned in the OP is that sometimes a thread that is started has no rules, and they develop organically from what is posted in the thread (a sort of implicit spam-thread-based nomic, if you will). This is a surprisingly fun way to play.

On appeals, I agree that our forum culture hasn't made an appeals procedure strictly necessary (if something does come up, it can be handled "out-of-band" usually). I understand the intent of the rule on final decisions that you explained, though I would hope regardless that the forum administration clarifies that rule, as a by-the-letter reading does mean an appeal wouldn't be allowed even in other cases. It's the one place where the topic is mentioned, and it's an explicit denial.

@Yuno, the threads are all merged and therefore it's no longer possible to be able to separate them into what used to be their component parts.

@Escade, because it's not just that they were locked, they were also merged together (which means they might as well have been deleted, because they were griefed beyond repair or review). There's nothing that could be unlocked, nothing that could be pointed at as "hey, this could be fun because XYZ" because of that, nothing that other residents could point at and say "hey, why'd you lock that, that was fun", etc.. Now again, I'm not saying that the "unofficial" thread shouldn't have been locked (because prohibiting double posting is perfectly reasonable), but that's not the one that was merged - all the others, the actually potentially valuable ones, were. I found the way this was handled very egregious, and that's why I went with all that "blah blah blah".