GameFAQs Mods SUCK! (the blog is back, baby!)

Welcome back to Gamefaqs Users Against Censorship! If this is your first time here, you may have come upon this blog because you've had a bad time on the Gamefaqs boards - like many of us - and you're asking, are the mods really that bad? (Yes). If you're a veteran, you know exactly what we're talking about. So let's get down to business!

Why The Return?

As a longtime board member and even longer visitor to the site, this author has seen his fair share of abusive and incompetent behavior from the Gamefaqs moderation "staff" (really, volunteers with nothing better to do...you get what you pay for). Many years ago we began keeping a list of all the so-called violations of the Terms - in our case, moderations on the Politics board since the easily-triggered could not handle the presence of different opinions. The blog itself went up a few years ago and took off in a big way - as big as it can get within the site community, that is. Turns out that whether it was Current Events, Hellhole or anywhere else, the moderators were up to their tricks wherever they could mod. Offsite, there were even more blogs and topics out there complaining about how terrible the mods at Gamefaqs were. All in all, it seems to be a well-known issue.

But something changed after the mostly-disastrous era of one-time, then canned community manager Krystal109: the mods saw a significant amount of turnover. Some notoriously corrupt mods were removed. Complaints from CE began to go down. The Gamefaqs user base overall continued to grow up, and it was assumed that the moderators had grown too. Sadly, this was not the case.

We here at GameFAQs Users Against Censorship saw no reason to continue sinking time on long writeups when there was no reason to complain, no reason to hold grudges or sink into false sensationalism just to keep it going and get views. For their part the moderators FINALLY began to overturn messages, and even APOLOGIZED for the original moderation(s). It seemed like the beginning of a new era of free speech on the site. It didn't last.

A man can only take so much until he stands up for himself. The last straw was over the July 4th weekend, ironically during a time when most people celebrate free expression. Gamefaqs mods decided to spend their Friday and Saturday nights clamping down on accounts - with a rash of suspensions set to last for much of the week, if not longer.

Power will always be abused unless there is pushback, so this blog is here to push back. As always, we welcome contributions and story tips from users and mods alike. Send it to Tails82! We're going to have fun with this thing.

And now for the latest saga!

The Background

Board 261 is generally not a pleasant place (present company excluded). It is the type of board that cheers when a politician gets shot, when somebody dies, riots or commits vandalism. But the problem is not that some accounts have terrible opinions. The problem is when these accounts try to censor others for good ones.

Gamefaqs hosts a Politics board, along with several other non-gaming boards, which at first glance would make you think they were okay with hosting political discussions. Oh, how we admire your naivete. The reality is, the place exists mainly to post one side's view of things. Whether you prefer to call them snowflakes or liberal fascists, these accounts show up each day on the Politics board not to actually hear different opinions or learn something, but to brag about how they ignored up to 200 other users (the site's upper limit), and complain that they're hearing messages that hold different opinions than theirs. Why they continue to show up just to complain about seeing something they showed up to see, we'll never know. In fact this clique even made their own community board where only the preferred opinions are allowed, but apparently this is still not enough for them. Because when you're a true believer of censorship, it's not enough to declare it - you have to live it out and put it into practice.

Rather than debate these different opinions, likely because they will fail, these cowardly users try to get the messages removed and ban the users involved. Yet we would be willing to overlook this foolishness, if the moderators themselves were adults and didn't buy into it as well. In the same terrible form, these moderators take down messages they personally disagree with and they do it in a cowardly way as well - since they are under no requirement to release their usernames when they moderate. Keyboard warriors hide behind the collective to avoid getting called out for bad decisions, so the collective must be blamed. Maybe there are some good mods who do a great job. We will never know.

In our experience, one of the biggest special groups out there is the LGBT movement, aka They Who Must Not Be Criticized. This is rich coming from a site which, at the time of our signup, stated in its rules that there would be zero discussion about homosexuality on the site at all. Today there is no such statement and you can talk about it all you want - unless your message is anything aside from foaming-at-the-mouth praise. But in a truly equal society, these groups would be able to face criticism like anyone else. They would not be held on a pedestal and granted a nobility status so high that even a single critical word of them is not allowed. Any movement given a free ride like this is ripe for abuse.

In practice, this means if you want to criticize a hoax "hate crime," too bad! Modded! If you want to say that liberal policies have failed gay people, MODDED! In one of our personal favorites, if you want to oppose a recent policy change in the Boy Scouts, you aren't allowed to because "the experts have spoken" (and gamefaqs is duty-bound to moderate based off what the BSA thinks - who knew?) If "the experts" decide the other way and you agree with it, too bad! MODDED!

Despite all these pitfalls, if you're still eager to question or criticize the actions of a certain group deemed super-special by the mods (there is nothing explicitly written in the terms of use), get ready to face some sort of "punishment" within half an hour. I use punishment very loosely, since the biggest thing you ever have to worry about is the loss of imaginary site points. The horror! As far as an actual discussion goes, be prepared for disappointment. It's not gonna happen if The Aggrieved don't want those opinions to happen. Who knew that the best way to prove you aren't an easily-offended fascist is to squeal that you're offended at any wrongthink, and then demand that the speech be censored ASAP? You guys sure showed I was wrong!

At this point we would like to add that this is simply one example, not just a personal hangup. Whether you're a Communist or a Nazi, jihadist or Confederate, we may disagree on so many things and the views themselves may be abhorrent - but everyone should have the right to say them. Maybe Gamefaqs disagrees with going that far. Failing that, at least they could respect the opinions of the two major political parties. Failing that, the moderation system just plain sucks.

Last Month!

From the heights of Mount Olympus descends another fabulous moderation from the Gemafaqs Perpetually-Offended Brigade. The troubles began when this user brought up the aforementioned liberal policy failure: after eight years of Barack Obama, the HIV rate among homosexual populations was the highest in the world. The dastardly and heartless guilty party in this whole affair had the nerve to make a topic on the Politics board, link to the news story and add a single sentence saying that this was "Another stunning failure of liberal policies." A conclusion that the article itself also made. The bastard!

Mod wrath was quickly inflamed as the dangerous troublemaker, who had not had a serious moderation in about a year, was set to warned status. Mod wisdom quickly went to use as they explained the situation. In appeal it was learned that the offending message was guilty as charged because it was "antagonistic" to say that a liberal policy had failed.

Silly us. We had assumed that this was an important political topic, since many liberals frequently say that Reagan - and even the CIA conspiracy, why not - personally killed gay people in the 80s, and all of this was posted without incident on a constant basis whenever the subject came up. We also assumed that these same aggrieved, caring liberal accounts would hold Obama to the same standards (never saying "Obama killed gay people" or "Obama never cared about them"...simply saying his policies failed). You would think that the worst decline in national life expectancy since the AIDS crisis itself would be up for criticism, if Reagan was criticized for rates that were far lower. But most importantly, we assumed that you could criticize liberal policies on the Politics message board. Ha!

The answer from Hellhole was about as helpful as the appeal itself, which is to say: not very. Lead moderator Error1355, a well-known reader and fan of this blog, basically revealed that he was harboring a long personal grudge against this account from 2012 because we once sent him a flippant response to his joke "moderation appeal" that he had set up for his poorly-designed website, and he didn't like it. So for all intents and purposes, our message today was going to stay moderated whether it actually broke the rules or not. This takes place after we remained in good account standing for a year, put the blog on hiatus and even praised him in our previous post. Dude must be clingy.

We never received a real answer about why the message was a violation, so we can only conclude that it wasn't one. We also did not receive any guidance on how one would avoid a similar moderation in the future, aside from the logical conclusion of "don't ever criticize or offend a liberal, ever." What were you expecting, from a site that in its mod heyday decided you couldn't make posts generalizing against ISIS?

But wait, there's more! The same night of this moderation there was a SECOND stroke of mod brilliance, an nkl (no karma loss - so as you know, a real threat). The post itself had no commentary by this account at all, and contained a single link to what Franklin Graham had to say about Canada's new law which was set to censor speech. Wouldn't you know that this went too far as well - if you opposed a bill that limited free speech rights, it goes without saying that this makes you a H8er of trans people, because someone might use their words to hate on trans people! (This is extremely unacceptable for a board that once had a 286-post fight over whether the term "trans person," "trans-person," or "transperson" was the right word to use, with each side naturally viewing the other as an abominable transphobe).

In appeal, and in what makes this one of my new favorites, the moderator said that the second message was taken down because the topic title offended him. Not the same moderator who took it down, so we're to assume that two of them got offended here. Quite the feat. For the curious, the topic title gave the bill's name and the user added an extra LOL after it. This is what strikes the moderators at Gamefaqs as "offensive." And no, I had not made the topic itself, and had just posted a link within it. This should give you an idea of how much the mods there actually read and review things. This was a new one for me - a bad moderation because of something I didn't even post! But the s*** cherry on top of it all was that, you guessed it, we were the only one punished while the topic itself remains up for eternity.

Now, you can disagree thoroughly with any of these opinions, as this writer explained to the moderators in appeal. In fact, if moderators disagreed we would like to personally invite them to the topics themselves where they can explain why the opinions and the facts are wrong, which they were very eager to do in the dispute itself. Surely the Politics board itself is a better place for you to get on the soapbox? You can post there like anyone else.

At the end of the day, is non-violent political speech dangerous? Does it demand removal, so as not to offend the eyes of people who are already at least 13 when they can create an account? Is it really killing anyone to have a guy on a message board make one post out of hundreds, in a topic that will quickly be closed on its own and forgotten? Of course not. But dagnabbit, then moderators would have to actually do their jobs and take down real violations! So as you can see, we're at quite the impasse here.

If you thought that this was the end of the absurd road we're on, think again! For the same night that these moderations were handed down, we received a personal message from a long-time admirer - some would call him a stalker, but we're nice. For several years, this account has followed around Yours Truly in every topic and he immediately makes the next post, which he uses to call us mentally unstable, a joke, a terrorist, a pony f***er...the works. Any personal attack under the sun, you name it, he's done it. Yes, this is another one of those accounts who follow around an account and read all their posts just to say they hate them, which is a weird thing to do with one's time. For many years, Yours Truly has also ignored the responses and got on with his life. As for the aggrieved, his stock fell on a big way when he declared right on Hellhole that he was marking EVERY single message of ours, just because he didn't like us personally. That was the end of it, for a while. But a few years have passed and there's apparently a new sucker mod born every minute, so let's spell this out in a way so easy that Gamefaqs mods can understand:

No one is "offended" by our messages. These messages are reported by a single long-time harasser who does it for one reason and one reason alone, to go after this account personally and silence it. After being told that he had been ignored, this account made a second alt so he could make TWO ad hominem attacks after all our posts, and he used this second account to send us a message the night of our moderation, bragging and gloating about what he marked and calling us a joke yet another time. Much like our previous write-ups on Gavirulax, the moderation system is getting abused by established trolls who use it to enforce their personal grudges. Personally we don't care about what they say or do, as long as it doesn't affect anyone else. We blame the moderators themselves for this censorship, when they should know better.

Some will say, as they always do, is our response to all this too tryhard? Not at all. For once, these people should ask why moderators are the ones who spend all their time censoring messages they don't like. They should ask why the moderations on the site are SO terrible that not only do they get the typical board complaints, they also inspire people to create lengthy writeups like this one all across the internet. Yes, they are THAT bad, and there's been even more since this blog started. We'll be doing some research on them and posting the best in the near future. As for us, we're just using the same time that would've gone toward having a great experience on the boards, and using it to give the Gamefaqs moderation system the criticism it deserves. A purist would condemn an anti-free speech issue, no matter how small. We couldn't care less about the loss of karma. It's the principle, man!

And so we wrap up Part 1 of this epic display of mod absurdity. Part 2 will be on its way after the smoke clears from this past weekend.