GUAC News 12/24/14: Trigger Alert! - Is Gamefaqs Dying? - Don't Offend Terrorists

Trigger Words Now A Thing

As Gamefaqs is but a part of the broader politically-correct culture, where its increasingly aging userbase must be sheltered like children more and more the older they get, an increasing amount of self-defined mean and offensive and bigoted and insensitive words are not allowed. They could hurt someone's feelings. Sometimes seemingly-harmless words can act as magical enchantments which curse your enemies. These dangerous incantations could trigger a social justice warrior and send them into a diabetic coma of negative vibes and harshed mellows. Speaking of which, Gamefaqs tried to autoflag the term "social justice warrior" itself, so that when anyone referred to an SJW this would be auto-reviewed by mods to protect uptight users from the insult that they are uptight.

The account [name redacted]* brought this new addition to the attention of CE:

The autoflag system itself hasn't changed, but for whatever reason someone decided a few months ago that "trigger words" are a thing now. If you wanna know what admins talk about on their Monday meetings, it's things like this. Something that clearly needs to be shoehorned into the system so that we're all put on notice that this trigger culture needs to stop, and SJWs know someone has their back.

UnbiasedFAQs.

Is Gamefaqs Dying?

This isn't the first time we've heard this narrative but CE recently got to talking about the subject again, and some made their dissatisfaction with the mods known.

"Gamefaqs and CE are dying for 2 reasons. Firstly the mods are terrible and Draconian. Secondly the site has been infested by a large wave of leftist SJW garbage posters"-ColdOne666

" I use to post on CE all the time and shared my conservative opinion on things and would get modded while those with opposing beliefs to mine would blast me and not get modded. I knew there was nothing I could do to change it so I just started posting on the sports boards." -Numba1linesmen

"@Bover_87: It's because terrible moderation policies/new staff is driving away users in droves and also because anyone who has been here for a really long time can notice how unique IP traffic is down significantly in a short amount of time. I personally feel like trolls are tolerated because they are an easy way to generate site traffic/hits instead of actually working hard to cultivate new users to come here. We don't really need numbers to see the ship is starting to sink.

"@Smoliske: Maybe instead of parroting "don't break the rules", you should consider that maybe the rules are broken. If you have a wide variety of the user base saying the same thing (including people who are not trolling or otherwise getting into stuff), then maybe there is actually a real problem. Having insanely liberal slanting for moderation is *not* ok. Having a really strict offensive posting policy enforcement while not having any form of trolling policy *is a problem*. That's really not the moderator's fault either -- that is a systemic failure that needs to be addressed. Trolling honestly wasn't an actual problem of note up until the whole sjw thing this year where you have people actively antagonizing people on a large scale." -CreekCo

"this site is dying because of the terrible mods and getting modded for pretty much nothing. People are leaving to better forums with better interfaces and mods who aren't on a powertrip." -WalkingLobsters 

Krystal, who I feel the need to remind you is a paid admin on the site (lest you couldn't tell from how she acts) responded that the people who complained were "mad"

But eventually Krystal made a substantive argument that the site was not in decline (in general), the numbers in fact showed improvement, but she couldn't legally give specifics. Users continued to suggest possible improvements until Krystal returned to say "still mad I see" and close the topic.

It's probably true that the site in general is doing fine, but the boards have seen a significant decline which many users have pointed out. Look at declining participation in polls, the lower number of active visitors, the fact that 25 of the accounts with the most messages make up 13% of all active messages as of November...and you get the idea that the boards, the domain of the mods, aren't doing as well as the rest of the site. It's likely they know about this - relaxing the terms of use a few years ago, hiring a community manager who said she would be open and look into moderator abuse - but for the above users and others, the site has a way to go.

Don't Offend Terrorists

From Halpert123 comes another one of those "generalizations are bad" moderations. This happened to me a little while ago for generalizing liberal policies as failures...on the politics board, and when I posted a message against pedophiles. Basically, if you say ANYTHING bad about ANY group, it runs the risk of a moderation. Why even call these groups by name and recognize they exist? I mean, if you're already talking about a group you've already lumped a bunch of people under one general label. Awful.

Sarcasm aside, the user got in trouble for being too critical of ISIS. You know those guys who go around beheading people? Yeah, they could get offended by this. The problem was that in the heat of the moment he added that the terrorist group had goats for girlfriends (which he insisted in dispute was a real thing happening among some of the group's members). Apparently this is a thing where members of ISIS have been caught on drone footage with a goat or donkey...anyway, Krystal entered to give her take.

So you guys got that? Just because someone belongs to a "bad group" of "f***ing terrorists" doesn't mean you get to make any generalizations about these bad terrorists...uh, isn't that what you did? Oh and sorry dude, but if we accepted that ISIS was a bad group then it's one slippery slope away from becoming a world where no mod knows who we can and can't generalize as a bad group, therefore we can't let you do it for clearly bad groups. These contradictory statements goat too far imo.

Only 0.3% of Moderations are Overturned

Here's a fun stat: 99.7% of all moderations are either never going to be contested or will be upheld. That's about 90 percent of disputed messages. You could see this two ways: either mods don't like to overturn messages, or they're usually really really accurate at taking down violations and that's a great track record. Yeah, I'm gonna go with the former. As for poor overtaxed mods who can't keep up with all the violations, and all the contest abuse from users, do note that only 2.5% of the messages are in dispute and a whopping 0.7% abuse the form. Hardly the widespread abuse from users we've heard about.

Reason 101 Why wally Shouldn't Be Lead

via the Politics board:

Yeah it was a satire (aka fake) story people fell for, but man wouldn't it be a blast to abuse my powers and put that right up top to help spread my fake social justice message? I'm getting flashbacks to when Krystal said it'd be cool to shut down boards for a day and make everyone a mod for 24 hours to see what craziness would happen. You know, wally, maybe your sights are too low. You can run for admin.

*account involved did not want to be named on the idea that gamefaqs mods could target him based on this blog.