Let it never be said that TaiIs82 provokes conflict with Gamefaqs or hypes up stories just to get attention. In truth, we would love to walk away from this blog and be left alone. For that to happen, corrupt Gamefaqs mods need to stop their shallow games. But until then, this will remain one of the few places where censored users have the opportunity to defend themselves - and it's always in defense, from absurd moderator attacks. We even held off from some more recent criticism. But with the attacks that have just occurred, we can do so no longer. It is imperative that we defend ourselves from the mods' most recent hate campaign.
Since users are asking for details, the incident seems to be a repeat of last July 4 - when a huge batch of users were suspended by the site and left in limbo for over a week. CE keeps a running list of warned/suspended users, and there's been a similar surge - the main difference this time is that the admin wasn't off for over a week this time, and could respond more quickly.
This list is certainly useful, but at the same time it raises some obvious questions. Who is tracking all these users and watching for them to be warned/suspended? (And there are indeed some people who go beyond just informing, and root for more). We maintain that there is a group of biased individuals who do not come to the board to contribute, but to destroy - to chill discourse and silence others. A few are well-known to longtime readers of this blog, such as the multiple individuals on Hellhole who openly said that they marked EVERY message by yours truly, just because they didn't like the account. In the past, groups like Snack Attack (formed to mass-mark and censor other people) used to be frowned upon - and were even moderated themselves for making false reports - but apparently the idea continues to this day. Despite losing in a big way, these blind squirrels will find a nut sometime. What do we mean by that? Two things.
Either mods are gullible and fall for the complaints of The Aggrieved, or worse - they are actively working with them to silence people they disagree with. From our experience, both of these factors are at play. There can be 1,000 phony complaints to mods, and all it takes to hit the targeted user is to have 1 get through, either because of a mod who can't read or a mod who is in on it too and goes looking for any reason to damage the targeted account.
My personal favorite moderation happened a few months ago, when I had a message taken down because the moderator disagreed with the topic title (the guy who actually made that topic, and therefore the topic itself, remains up for all time in the site archive). First, for anyone to get "offended" at a title because it said the name of a bill in parliament with an "LOL" attached to the end, is one of the stupidest grounds for moderation I've ever seen. No one is getting offended at that in good faith. But second, assume it was something serious. Assume the title was "Hitler was right, kill all the Jews." If I had posted in that topic and said "That's a disgusting and repugnant view," Gamefaqs mods are so incompetent that they would've punished me instead of the guy who made the topic I'm posting under, because some of them are so bad at it to the point where they don't even bother to read what they're censoring.
That's pretty terrible on its own. But, it goes further than that.
It's no secret to any Hellhole follower that the mods there hold personal grudges - in fact, it's no secret to anyone who has an interaction to these bad apples on any board. They have it in for certain users, and if someone doesn't mark a message they will moderate it directly. RaptorLC is a prime example of this (more on him later). Arbitrary topic locks, arbitrary moderations if he decides you're annoying him...or if he's just bored with the topic.
But before I rant on longer, let's get to the moderations. Enter Warning #1 from about a month ago. On the Politics board, someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to make a topic asking if we should quarantine people with HIV. My response was that we shouldn't do that and it was not a realistic policy. Are we good? Of course not. You see, I was still insensitive because I didn't rule out a quarantine waaaay in the past when it WAS realistic and would've meant stopping half a dozen people at the border. In other words, they warned me because I opposed a quarantine, but didn't oppose it enough.
Why it is any of their business to enforce their personal opinions on everyone is beyond me. But it gets more ridiculous: moderator Lord_of_Beefdip, whose opinions are as long as they are wrong, stepped in to quote me and tell me personally that I am a threat to human rights. Clearly someone this biased and out of it should not be moderating their opinions - at the very least, have someone else look at it. But not only did Beefdip fail to contain his temper, by posting he indicated that he had been through that topic and read the other messages within - none of which he had a problem with. Out of over 60 messages, mine and mine alone was singled out and moderated.
Let's look at what some of the other posts said: first, there's the guy who made the topic itself, asking to quarantine thousands of people today. Don't you think that any mod looking at that topic would've started there? But not a peep from Beefdip.
There were some additional people who agreed with the topic title. No moderations there.
There was a guy who said we should go even further and quarantine "all stupid people." That remained up, too.
There was the guy who said we should treat everyone who has an STD as if they were a bioterrorist. Beefdip was nowhere to be found.
No, out of over 60 posts, Beefdip quoted mine personally - again, "quoting a violation" which was a longstanding site rule not to do, but of course is never enforced on mods or their friends (even as they'll mod me because of some other guy's topic title? Riddle me that).
In fact, mine was the only message that was taken down in that entire topic - until Beefdip finally nuked it to cover his tracks, once I pointed out on CE how biased, targeted and inconsistent the moderations were, along with his mistreatment of me. The train wreck that had unfolded - personally singling me out, modding just me, lying about my position while ignoring multiple messages that actually wanted a quarantine, or worse - all this has no other explanation but mod bias.
By the way, since Beefdip said my opinion was a threat to human rights, I tried that line out in part of my dispute and asked mods not to be "human rights violators" for undermining my free speech. You can guess how that turned out. Lead mod stuck with their guy.
And so we make our way to warning #2, which is the title of this blog post, and which almost would've been a blog entry on its own a few weeks ago considering how awful it was. We don't go out of our way to complain here, but since the mods continue to harass and attack on a daily basis, it's only right for us to defend ourselves.
Warning #2 was for saying that I do not respect deserters like Bergdahl - this was in response to someone who (sarcastically) said that everybody should be respected no matter what, as long as they were in the military for at least a day.
Let's not dwell on the politics for too long, but just keep this in mind: as I mentioned in that topic and elsewhere, Bergdahl is someone who admitted his own guilt and, right up to the end of last month, was still saying that the Taliban treated him better than the US.
The official reason for my moderation was that I could offend someone by "disrespecting the troops."
...To anyone who knows even a speck of what goes on at the Politics board, when in the hell has anyone ever been moderated for that? Also, that wasn't what I was doing at all. The guy was a self-admitted deserter who was dishonorably discharged. Why does Gamefaqs feel compelled to tell me that I'd better respect him, or get censored?
So that night, I took a tally of the other opinions that remained up (and apparently don't offend the mods), including:
- Multiple people who also used my exact same terminology and said that they have zero respect for anyone who voted for Trump, including (and especially) Democrats who had voted for Obama 2 times
- Multiple people who praised an attacker who broke Rand Paul's ribs
- Put a quarantine wall around the entire midwest to punish them for having GOP in their states
- Abraham Lincoln was the worst president ever and he oppressed the Confederate south
These are all opinions that would normally fall under the offensive rule - if we were using my moderations as a baseline. The difference between lovers of free speech and The Offended is that the former act like adults and can turn the other cheek, debate and defeat offensive views on their own. The latter can only shriek like a child and claim they're offended.
There is nothing that stops Gamefaqs mods from debating like anyone else - if Beefdip, for example, had just disagreed with me and left it at that, I'd still think he was incorrect but I wouldn't view him as a power-abusing ass. There is absolutely no reason to mod people based off one's personal political opinion and what they personally like or dislike - or rather, WHO they personally dislike (Beefdip no doubt would disagree with those other quarantine remarks, but he decided to target me exclusively). Forget the actual content of the message. The #1 thing that offends them is your username.
We here at GUAC hope that the upcoming, but seemingly stalled proposals to reform the moderation system address this problem. We'd prefer to see more loosening of the rules, but at the very least, be consistent. Right now, "offensive" moderations have no definition and are entirely up to the personal feelings of the mod involved - which, as we saw last July 4, can quickly lead to mass-suspensions if the person involved is abusive or easily triggered.
But let's finally get to today.
This one's another doozy because it popped up on my screen 2-3 minutes after I had posted it, right before I went to sleep last night. I couldn't log out before it showed up, it was that fast. And it wasn't a one-liner; it was towards the upper character limit (basically my final comments that night to 3 people) covering everything from abortion to the Alabama election to Hulk Hogan.
I want you to imagine all those times mods said they were super-busy, MIASU, or needed a lot more time to respond to your disputes, feedback, whatever. Think about all the times they weren't there. Now let's think about what happened here: in the span of 2-3 minutes, this message went from queue to mod review to moderation. There was hardly enough time to read the message, let alone by two or more people, let alone review it properly. That in itself is a big red flag. Look how quickly they're here, and suddenly how fast they act, when it's all to screw you over.
Did they even read the thing? Well, considering how that mod from above, who got offended at "LOL," couldn't tell the difference between my message and the TC's title, I have my doubts. But here's my theory...
After I got that moderation, I acted quickly as well - bringing up the profile pages of our Gamefaqs moderators. Since mods like to hide behind a cloak of anonymity in all their decisions and dispute responses, my approach was one of the few ways to whittle down who was actually responsible. Turns out at that time of night, RaptorLC was the only mod to register recent activity within the past hour. Suddenly things began to make more sense.
I propose that nobody saw that message, nobody got "offended," nobody marked it in that narrow timeframe. Two people weren't involved, just one. And Raptor fits the bill perfectly: any time he gets into one of his moods on Hellhole, he closes the topic or moderates the user directly, sometimes adding some message about how their comment annoyed him. Raptor also has the motive against me, as I've called out these tactics of his before.
Raptor saw my most recent message, got annoyed with my opinion, had a kneejerk response and that was that.
Granted, this is a theory because Gamefaqs intentionally makes it hard to know mod actions (which does wonders for transparency and clamping down on abuse, he said with an eyeroll). But it's backed up with some evidence, as much as account activity would let one deduce, and the following message definitely applies anyway for the stuff that he openly pulls on Hellhole.
RaptorLC: it's time for you to grow up. Stop being such a keyboard warrior coward.
