Venom Rants About GameFAQs

Venomscarnage is back again to talk about his experience with the moderators. GUAC was the first to cover this story (see part 1 and part 2), and we'll give it one more mention just to update on what's happened since then, and because it's such an egregious example of mod power on the site. Venom's released a video about it so check it out!

Here's some points if you can't handle the 16 minutes of badassery.

"I'm just gonna be honest: the staff is a joke" Venom replies. While GameFAQs is useful for its FAQs, cheats, and what have you, the message boards are the "bastard stepchild" of the site. The terms of use are pretty straightforward spelled out, but not at the hands of mods who will bend and twist them any way they like. 

Once you're a moderator, all bets are off. You're allowed to break the rules. You're allowed to take the written terms of use...and kind of bend them at your will, basically, and you're allowed to pretty much warn people, ban people, suspend people's accounts at your discretion, and it even says in the gamefaqs terms of use that moderators at any time may moderate you at their will, delete their messages, et cetera. I'm okay with that, but...these moderators, instead of using the written terms of use that gamefaqs has, 9 times out of 10  what happens is you end up getting moderated for things and it's more like an interpreted form of the terms of use.

The problem? This opens you up to a bunch of moderations if you do something a mod thinks is unpopular or offensive to him personally. If you said "I think that the color green SUCKS on money, or I think that's a stupid color - boom, you get moderated for being 'offensive'...Being offended, it's all on what you feel." However, the terms are pretty simple when it comes to this, defining it as what would be considered NSFW, racial slurs, obvious things. But this is stretched and bent to whatever the mod wants it to be. You "should not have to go to any site, where you're supposed to have a fun and enjoyable experience, you shouldn't have to constantly watch your back..."

If you dispute it will nearly always be upheld, because moderators know each other and there's going to be a buddy of the original mod that will side with him. "The moderation staff at gamefaqs? They never do anything wrong. They're always right."

Venom considers Error's twitter linking to be unprofessional and a form of harassment. "instead of holding himself to a higher standard, which this individual fails to do on an everyday basis, he decided to post links to a conversation in a topic which i had posted in. I've confronted him about this...you'd have to be an idiot to not know what his intention was. It was clearly to get other people to come and harass me, and I actually did have people come and harass me." From time to time he even puts people down on his twitter page. Why humiliate other people like that?

As for the resulting back and forth: "Was  I childish? Yeah a little bit. But I needed to vent. I needed to express myself. Because that's another thing about gamefaqs: there is no expression there...you're not really free to express yourself. You really can't be yourself there."

Venom brings up one of Error's defenses, that what he does on his twitter account is just his personal opinion, separate from GameFAQs. For one, if it was a personal account then why put your lead moderator position right on your profile, and why bring up moderations you've made on the boards to belittle the other person? One thing Venom didn't get at was that the whole "personal opinion" thing is undone when you're linking right to your opinion on gamefaqs. If a regular user was insulting someone else and said something obviously offensive, like "you're a f***** n*****" that message isn't less moddable just because you decide to post the message on twitter first and then link the user right to it from the boards. So we can't really buy into the whole "twitter is separate" thing, when Error kept linking to twitter from GameFAQs and mixing the two together.

Venom believes that GameFAQs needs some moderator rotation and a neutral manager who isn't going to be biased. "Once you give one person power and authority for so long, it'll get to their head and that's probably not the best thing for gamefaqs."

Venom closed his account in protest, something which I wouldn't personally recommend (why do the mod's job for them?) But to each his own.

While Error's multi-post, nearly weeklong flame war with Venom was not considered harassment by the wise elders, mentioning someone's account's name on a neutral list of 180 boardgoers apparently is. Error says what he did was all right because it was a public place (at least, a place that can be viewed publicly). So is gamefaqs. But if someone quotes a public statement from another person in their signature without permission, that can get you suspended. If someone does exactly what Error did, but to another gamefaqs board, that can get you suspended for board invasion. When I quoted about a dozen bad public political arguments made by a moderator on GameFAQs, that single post was considered "harassment." So this rule can give you a really bad time, unless you're a mod.