It was never disallowed. Flaming people was disallowed. They wanted to stop flame wars from happening so they would close these threads. Recently, the community has matured(????) and somehow we've gone months with a debate thread civil-ly.
http://empireminecraft.com/threads/how-to-use-the-forums-community-discussion.23428/#post-441222 Honestly, logging in and seeing a Trump reference at the top of the Forum header just makes me want to logoff for the day and hope it is just yet again more stupid April 1st stuff. I really hate the Internet on this day..... ...I had hopes for EMC, but I see I was wrong....
I understood it as a joke, just not a welcome one. Especially by the Staff/Mods which to someone who is fairly new to EMC appears to be against their own rules. Anyway, I'm out for the rest of the evening....