Well said.
I'm stuck on the fence on this subject.
I can understand that this is a great place to hang out. One of those reasons is that there’s real people here who you can joke around with and even occasionally post 'stupid' things. And just like in real life, sometimes topics will stray off the point.
Then to have an 'authority' figure basically walk in the room and tell everybody 'HEY... YOU’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT AN AUTHORIZED SUBJECT!’ puts a bit of a damper on things. Especially when one of those authority figures participates in the stupidness occasionally themselves.

On the other hand, we've got people who are new and asking serious questions, who don't quite have a handle on the atmosphere here yet.
Some of the more senior members feel like it's ok to interrupt them, make fun of them etc.. basically having an inside joke at their expense.

Maybe if you relate it to a real life example...

Lets say you have a big office building called "Guitar Tricks"
There's a whole bunch of rooms where you can go and have conversations with people who have similar interests to your own. There are rooms with serious discussion in them called ‘Gear’, ‘Songwriting’, ‘The Listening Room’ etc.. etc...

So let’s walk into the main lobby at the Guitar Tricks building:
The door opens and there’s this big room called "Open Discussion"

New people go in and introduce themselves, getting a feel for the place.
Some of the older members stick around to greet them and make them feel comfortable. There's a few older members off in one corner laughing at some joke they're sharing. In another corner of the room, a new member is asking another member a serious question about the guitar.
Suddenly, one of the guys from the older members groups walks over and throws a picture of a car on the table and says "hey.. check this out it's really funny"... then a bunch of the other older members start butting into this private conversation and making asses of themselves while the new guy stands around stunned, trying to figure out what's going on.

If you did that in real life, it would be considered extremely rude and the owners of the building would start getting complaints that this doesn't seem to be the great place everybody makes it out to be. So the owners start listening in on what's going on and realize... hey... come on, we're pretty relaxed around here and like to have fun, but there's a time and a place for it.
Some of you guys are really taking things too far..walking all over the lobby, interrupting people, making dumb jokes that aren't really funny, posting stupid pictures up on the wall and spraying graffiti...

So what do the owners do?
They take a few of the worst offenders aside and say "I'm sorry but we’re going to have to ask you to leave for awhile and think about the way you've been acting around here. You're welcome back, but if you continue the way you’ve been going, we'll have to ask you to leave permanently. We realize the rules aren't set in stone and sometimes there are going to be people that are allowed to bend the rules. There's even occasions when the owners will hang around the lobby and share a few inside jokes themselves.
But there's got to be some common sense here.
You can't just keep acting like an idiot without any concern for how this might be affecting other people in the building.

So Joe Blow goes away for a week to think about things.
Then h’s welcomed back. But instead of using that week to think about things, he’s been brooding about getting kicked out and immediately starts being sarcastic about the owners. He’s still walking around being a general nuisance of himself and trying to stir up trouble. He’s talking back to the owners behind their backs and saying things under his breath.

Now the owners have gone off to their private offices to talk about this guy and some of the others who’ve been getting out of hand lately. Some of the owners just want to kick the guy out and be done with it. Others enjoy the guys company and think he just needs to get his act in line and are willing to give him a chance.

So... ok, we’ve tried the ‘totally relaxed’ thing and it’s working great. But what the heck do we do about people who don’t seem to have a check on themselves?
Do we write a bunch of strick rules and ruin everybody elses fun? Do we kick them out and throw out somebody who’s made a bunch of friends here and probably contributed quite a bit to tatmosphere around our nice Guitar Tricks offices?
Well.. the owners don’t know. That’s what they’re up their offices talking about right now.