Community board moderation has typically not been the focus of this blog, but at some point it becomes time to acknowledge when a censorship campaign has been worse than most I've been subjected to, and not just on the community board itself, but on other sites where I have been followed to as well. As someone opposed to unjust censorship in all forms, we would be wise not to ignore someone who has become abusive with what little power he has. Since gwwak has now compared himself to Error, let's take a look at how the Error of the MAGA board operates, starting with the first time I met him.
1. My community board might still exist, if not for gwwak. That's not to say that I blame him personally (I blame the horrid mod staff and their grudgeholding campaign to "Get TaiIs82" at all costs), but keep in mind how much I had to overlook in order to remain on friendly terms with him. gwwak is now claiming that I never moderated anything on my board - this is simply not true. But if he was also going around telling people this story at the time - "TaiIs does nothing on his board, go crazy!" - this intentional misperception contributed to the issues my board had. Of course, quite a few two-bit trolls took credit for closing my board, and gwwak is no exception, but the true blame lies with the mods - who were offered every opportunity to join leadership, but decided to sit back and attack me personally rather than the "violations" they claimed were on my board (funny that they could never actually find any...)
gwwak came to my board looking for 2 things, leadership powers to abuse and sticky topics to spam. I did not know this at the time, but apparently he does this to a lot of community boards and spams their sticky topics closed with a bunch of garbage messages. He wanted leadership on my board and PM'd me about it multiple times, claiming he loved my board and everything that I was doing and so on, but in reality he was just trying to get in so he could no-action his own spam messages once they turned up in the moderation queue. Once I did not give leadership, he turned on me. And at the same time he was praising my board to flatter me, he was telling mods on other boards that he did not really like my place (he did not want to be seen as a "tails supporter" because he wanted to be a mod one day, and any true support of me would cost him social credit points). But just like on the MAGA board, where he pretended to like them even though he was out endorsing Biden elsewhere and telling everyone offsite that he was in favor of closing the board down, gwwak lied to me about his support for my board while talking it down in other company.
Why did he do this? Partly to get mods' favor, and partly because he told me he was "jealous" of my board's success while his board, The Range, was dead. He then saw an opportunity where he could take advantage of my board's closure to redirect the traffic to his board - and likely planned to do the same thing once he got the MAGA board closed down, but that scheme was exposed this time around. The traffic brought to his board the first time around was short-lived, as it quickly became apparent that the board was a trap, rather than anything helpful to my board members.
I defended a lot of things on my board, and by far the stupidest episode involved gwwak. Here's how shitty the Gamefaqs mod staff was: at a time when the site queue was backed up for at least 48 hours - of porn, gore, and whatever else on the site at large - they were focused on me and buttmad at one or two posts they didn't like on my board. Not violations - but things they didn't like. To the point where they stepped in and removed 2 messages about a dead anime waifu, going completely over my head. One of them was gwwak's because he said that a fictional character had been killed in one of his CYOAs on another board. Yes, the actual full death scene was posted on a different board, but because gwwak made reference to it on my board the mods went nuts over what turned out to be an nkl. At the same time full Mortal Kombat fatality videos were all over the site, they said that my board went too far and they targeted me alone. An nkl for "this character got impaled" and a 3kl for "throws grenade at waifu" prompted an admin letter threatening to close my board, because these 2 harmless messages against fictional characters were not taken down by an arbitrary 9pm deadline that night. I defended the hell out of gwwak at the time, which makes his backstabbing later on even worse.
At some point, a few no-name weirdo accounts showed up on my board to cry about it and say things like "this place is a failure of free speech." It turns out that these people were in one of gwwak's groups and he invited them over. gwwak also believes he was the "final straw" to close my board because he claimed that "personal info" about him leaked - even though my archive of the board shows nothing of the sort, gwwak himself had said that something like this did not count as a leak because he had made it publicly available for years, and this alleged incident did not come up at all when I asked mods why the board got closed. However, I WAS soon subjected to an alt account's diatribe against my board, where he claimed he had worked with mods on an offsite discord server for at least 3 months to get my board closed down (without any means for me to defend myself from these attacks). I did some research on the alt and it turned out to be an AssultTank account, a mod who is friends with gwwak and posted on The Range until I came there (he could not handle my existence). The full story about Assult is in a previous blog entry.
Looking back, gwwak was more involved in this activity than I thought, as he was often talking my board down to mods on other boards, and may have actually been involved on that server designed to close my board down. If so, it would've been an early case of brigade activity (we will get more into this group in part 2).
2. I would probably have all my accounts, if not for gwwak. After it became obvious that The Range was more of a trap than a safe haven for my members, activity there died down, but gwwak and others continued to follow me from board to board to either constantly mark things or check my account status. Current Events had a group that became known as The Brigade that functions this way - constantly stalking other accounts to report anything they say and get them "in trouble." Like his lies about my board and the MAGA board, gwwak kept his membership in this group hidden but is now known as one of its biggest members. He runs their warned/suspended topics on one of his alt accounts, usually DragonGirlYuki or CarrieChan, celebrating when other users are moderated. He originally kept this behavior off of his main, in an attempt to not tie his main to their brigade activity - the warned/suspended generals ended up getting closed down by the mod staff for abuse - but now gwwak runs smaller individual warned/suspended topics right on his main, with his other brigade members, no longer pretending to be someone else.
The story of gwwak, then, is one of constant deception. His discord server, which was sold as having more "free speech" than others? It certainly has more than Error's, but that is not saying much. gwwak now keeps the exact same mod on his server as Error's - bover87 the former mod and account hijacker, who stole at least 3 accounts that we know of. gwwak has also acknowledged on that server that bover was his brigade mod. I entered that server expecting something different from what it actually was. When gwwak referred to a greater amount of "freedom" on that server, he meant "freedom" mainly for brigade members to keep doing what they do, target and harass other users on Gamefaqs, but coordinating this offsite on their discord server rather than the warned/suspended generals that were being shut down on Gamefaqs for harassment. When I entered this server, I soon found instances of gwwak bashing me and other users behind their backs, claiming he got my board closed down, and so on.
But before I had joined the server, my Ninetails82 account was banned. This is because gwwak made a "TaiIs82 is SUSPENDED!" topic on one of his alts and then @'d his other brigade members to come in and mark anything I said. He even went so far as to ask me to repost my moderated message on an alt, so he could mark it again. It was clearly bait. And while other brigade members in that topic constantly insulted me and tried to provoke a response, all I said in return was "I am an antiracist." But this alone was still enough to get a 12-year account banned from Gamefaqs for "suspension-dodging," a made-up rule that their mod staff said later that month, does not exist. So when I did not have a single violation on that account, the mod staff actually made up a fake "rule" just to get TaiIs82 for anything. But again, I don't blame gwwak for this part, that is clearly a problem with the demented Gamefaqs mod staff. I was still on friendly terms with gwwak at this time, as he pretended to be friendly with me, which is why I joined his server after getting banned.
3. I was kicked off gwwak's server, and other servers as a result, over total lies. This is where it gets into offsite activity and the brigade server, which is all on gwwak. Consider how whipped you have to be, to demand that users offsite also abide by the dumbest Gamefaqs TOU provisions. You are under absolutely no obligation to do so, but some Gamefaqs users are so obsessed, they take the TOU with them and choose to live like that. Normally you get away from Gamefaqs to AVOID the petty BS, not enhance it. This is why the failed gamefaqs subreddit and the failed CE discord, both run by Error1355, never took off. He kills conversations there as quickly as he does on Gamefaqs, over any minor issue.
It would appear, then, that the supposedly-independent gwwak server was a good idea, but it soon became a brigade-run Mini Me to the Error server. Just as gwwak invited users from my closed board over to his, he also invited more brigade members off of Error's failed server and even made them mods at his place. To make matters even weirder, Error1355 is constantly monitoring the gwwak server, says nothing, and simply looks at what mods like bover do there to seek his approval. It is possible that Error did this in order to have plausible deniability for his bad actions - since the Error server, while it was active, suffered from a series of leaks where the mods were seen as targeting users, insulting them for having autism or another disability (often untrue), and so on. If Error outsourced this shitty behavior to gwwak's server and pretended he had no part in it, he would not be as open to criticism that he was directly involved. Both gwwak and bover (especially bover) would like to become mods on Gamefaqs one day, so the intent to please Error was there. And so they became their own Mini Me brigade.
Eager to satisfy his master, bover began talking about how TaiIs82 (and some other accounts that Error didn't like) should be banned from the gwwak server, and quickly went looking for ways to accomplish this. He started off by flagging all accounts as read-only in the security settings and would only allow them to post if they verified a phone number, or he gave them his approval through a role. I got around this by asking a different mod for a role. But the instant I returned, bover quickly attacked me over an imagined scheme to reveal personal information on darkprince45 - a user I knew literally nothing about, and had no reason to reveal info on, let alone criticize in any way. If anything, I briefly defended him like I defend all warned/suspended users, and supported him coming to the server if he wanted to. But at this point it was clear that bover, at least, wanted me gone by any means necessary - even if it meant total lies. Here's where gwwak went off the rails too.
Even at this point, I was friendly with gwwak and thought he would unban me that same night, because bover was just rabid and way out of line. Instead, gwwak repeated what bover said and then shunned me totally. In hindsight, it was the same play that he had claimed in order to attack my community board - someone's personal information was about to get leaked, ban TaiIs82. And both times, absolutely no evidence and no leaks followed. But that wasn't the point. The point was to smear me - and in this case, bover was so hysterical that he threatened to SWAT me if he knew my address because "darkprince is a cop and you're committing a crime bro!" Nothing that I said was anywhere close to problematic, let alone questionable legally, and in fact nothing was done at all. So to think that bover could make these absolutely insane claims about me as if he were judge, jury, executioner and crackpot lawyer, while gwwak said nothing to defend me, was the ultimate backstab. Especially after I had defended all of gwwak's behavior on my board for months and backed him up whenever there was a mod raid for a frickin' nkl. But he couldn't spend a second on me.
Actually, that's not entirely true. gwwak has read everything I've said about him since then, including this blog post, and then cried about it on practically any message board that he brings his baggage to on Gamefaqs. He could've resolved this in 1 night by talking to me, but instead he decided to engage in an ongoing 3-month forum war that is entirely one-sided (him and his brigade buddies would mark anything I post on sight, so he smears me all day unopposed from his safe space). Anything I say about gwwak on reddit (reposted below) also gets mass-marked by the brigade, and just yesterday I learned that my reddit account had suspicious activity/a hacking attempt placed on it. If gwwak is not responsible, he should say so, but he has remained silent. And when he does talk on Gamefaqs, he goes on Hellhole to say that ONE non-violation post on SPQR that criticizes his abuse of the MAGA board is proof that the whole board has to come down. Even among the mod staff, I am hard-pressed to find one that is this much of a mass-reporting crybaby.
When it comes to a lot of dumb things said about me, I let them slide. It is only when the falsehoods put my accounts in danger (such as "TaiIs82 is suing Gamefaqs"), that's when I step in and shoot them down. But this lie about "TaiIs82's message board posts are a crime" really takes the cake when it comes to abject stupidity and desperation. I have every right to defend myself against these rantings, and I did - by replying to leaked screens already made public by others, or released to me by someone else (since I had been kicked from the server at that point and couldn't possibly have released them myself). I have never released the contents of private, semi-confidential, beta testing, whatever, for all these years. I happened to make 1 exception to shit-talking on a discord server that was already all over reddit, with the people on that server saying themselves that all of it can be considered public, which I simply replied to in my defense because they were freaking out like it was some sort of armchair legal drama. But all this is lost once the false rumor's out and the typical brigade members are smearing me. And yet through all this, ironically, I remained silent about gwwak's abuse for an additional 1-2 months, hoping to work this out with him personally or receive some explanation for his bad behavior which never came.
Now, I'm a patient person and I actually walk the walk when it comes to censorship, unlike gwwak. I still haven't revenge-reported a single message that gwwak has posted, even though he spammed hundreds of messages on the SPQR board that the mods would find disruptive. But as far as patience goes with being friendly, I think that has finally run out after several years when 1) you talk down my board to mods, spam and try to close it down, 2) you try to bait my accounts and get them banned with the brigade's help, 3) you ban me from a discord server and make up some total shit about me like I'm some sort of criminal, scaring other servers from even having me exist there, refusing to work this out with me or explain yourself for months as you smear me everywhere else. What else? Abuse site power to censor the MAGA board, complain that SPQR even exists because of 1 post you don't like, mass-report me with your brigade friends to the extreme lengths of bumping 6-month old topics of mine that you stalked to dead boards just to find something to mark a second time, cry to reddit with the same mass-reporting of anything you don't like, and so on. 2 years of acting like you loved my board, and others, only to backstab them at every turn, running alts on at least 3 browsers to get around the block lists of people you're harassing, using those alts to lie your way into leadership on other boards run by people who don't want your main there. Falsely claiming you are lax on free speech to boards you want to sneak into, while reporting their users and making warned/suspended topics about them everywhere else, melting down over the smallest things you don't like such as the time you decided to spoil a forum game and ruin it with a tantrum longer than this paragraph, just because you didn't have control over it and didn't like who was running it. And probably trying to have this callout taken down as well, like you do on the MAGA board when anyone questions you too much for your liking. You are a total fraud.
Reddit reposts after the break. Note how at least one of gwwak's brigade mods, Conflict, came to attack me on an alt and possibly mass-mark these messages for him. As you can see, it's a lot like Gamefaqs when they want to cry and have content taken down - they loaded the comments section with insults, orientation smears and so on, and then said that their own harassment posts were the reason why reddit should close the whole thing down. The brigade does this a lot on the MAGA board when they attack topics with spam, insults, etc. and gwwak goes along with it to close the topic.
