Who IS TaiIs82? (and is he hot?)
From time to time, many questions about TaiIs82 and his mental state have surfaced on gamefaqs.gamespot.com. TaiIs82 - not to be confused with Tails82 - is known mainly on CE for being one of the contributors to this very blog. Fresh off of an attention-grabbing complaint to the FCC, TaiIs is ready to sit down with us for a spur-of-the-moment AMA (Ask Myself Anything).
Q: Are you hot?
A: Yes. Next question.
Q: Are you crazy?
A: Surprisingly no, even though I am talking to myself right now LOL! But I'm just a regular person who is dedicated. You would not be able to pick me out IRL. In fact, I could be behind you right now...
I think the accusations people throw at me are hilarious, so I don't discourage them. With one exception: I can't stand that white supremacist BS. In fact I had a 12-year account banned a few months ago because I said "I am an anti-racist." This may be the worst decision the site has ever made. Quite frankly, I don't think that any GameFAQs moderator who defends that horrid decision of theirs is in any position to question the mental state of others.
Q: Some people say that the mods target you because you are a gwwak supporter. Care to elaborate?
A: gwwak and I had a symbiotic relationship going on for a while, yeah. I had this community board called Better Than Hellhole! which was basically just a mirror of the mod-enforced Hellhole board on Gamefaqs, with one difference: the topics that mods locked on that board would be reposted there, and left unlocked so the conversations could continue. The board became rather popular and made its way up the community boards list, and it also helped that trolling and mild flaming didn't have to be enforced on the community board if the owner didn't want to. gwwak was really keen on the board and said he was becoming a TaiIs supporter, even requesting a leadership role on the board.
However, things took a turn for the worse when a couple users joked about throwing grenades at anime waifus and this was considered "too offensive" for Gamefaqs (at the same time full Mortal Kombat fatality videos were okay. Go figure). Apparently there was some mod who took his fictional anime waifus seriously, and so does SBAllen, because I quickly received an admin letter warning me that my board would be closed down. This was about the same time that the Sex board was created as a joke by its first owner, was completely unwatched and had some serious issues bordering on pedophilia, but that board is still open while mine is not. A few months later, I logged in one day and my whole board was locked down
I never did find out what message(s) they closed the board down for, and it happened so suddenly that poor gwwak couldn't raid my sticky topics for AMP. Then some mod alt posted on gwwak's board revealing that they had been working outside the system for at least 3 months on some discord server to complain about my board and have it closed down (anime waifus are serious business). gwwak was also under pressure to denounce his TaiIs supporter status in order to save his board, The Range. He invited me there and the instant I posted 1 message, AssultTank threw a hissy fit and said he was never going to visit the board again just because I was there. So unfortunately I have no more AMP to offer gwwak, even though our active topics are still sitting behind a board lock on Better Than Hellhole! We hang out at the Official CE Discord these days and I do things like ask him to create a gwwak82 account in solidarity with me, you know, the usual things that any sane person does.
Q: So you had a board closed down for being free-speech, and an account banned for being anti-racist. Why do you think mods hate you this much?
A: It comes with the fame, yo. I have never done anything malicious on the site, never hacked anything, never stole an account...but I am Enemy Number One when I appear on their radar. This is partly because I have a gift at this, but also because I am the stand-in for annoyed users just as Error1355 is the stand-in for bad mods. Our conflict is the abstract personified. Just as a lot of people blame Error for their moderations since he does it all day, has no life and defends some of the dumbest moderation decisions out there...so too am I attacked as the Chief Troublemaker because I am the most vocal in calling out their BS. When ex-mod bover87 stole an account and this was exposed, I was not the one who did that. I simply blog'd about what happened. Neither did I have anything to do with Error's obesity photos leaking. But because I am in the general vicinity I am the target. Heck, I'm the target even when I'm NOT there. I haven't posted in 2 months going on 3, and people still see imaginary alts of mine wherever they go. It is TaiIs Derangement Syndrome in many ways.
Q: Do you ever get tired of it?
A: Define "it." Sure I've been tired of their mod BS for many years, but I have to have some fun doing this. Surely you know that, me. So I am not tired of having fun.
Q: But don't you just feel like going back to a reformed user sometimes? What do you have to say about people who knew you from board hunting and so on?
A: To those people, I am very, very sorry. But just as my community board no longer exists, some things simply aren't possible anymore. They. Banned. Me. For. Being. Anti. Racist. There is really nothing I could go back to. They couldn't get me on any actual terms of use violations so they invented new ones, until they got to this point. If they banned me for a message like that, they are banning me for ANYTHING. I assume that any future board hunting or harmless posts would be targeted by the mods the same way they've attacked me for nothing in the past. I simply can't take the time to make future contributions if I will just end up getting insulted for them and treated badly.
Q: Alex Benson? Really?
A: I go by many names, some made-up, sometimes real. My real name may be out there somewhere, maybe not. I will neither confirm nor deny, because I like sending stalkers on wild goose chases. Maybe I have used my name before, maybe not, and I use other names to muddy the waters. Maybe I drop my real name from time to time out in the open somewhere and nobody knows the difference.
Q: Sounds complicated. Why all the twists and turns? We're probably wondering how you got here?
A: Oh sure. Quite a simple start, Gamefaqs was (once) popular and there were a ton of blue coins hidden in Super Mario Sunshine. I wanted to find the stragglers in my game. Then it sorta ballooned into looking up any neat cheats for other games I owned. No board account until 2008 though. I was a bit put off by all the personal information you had to put in at the time to create an account, including my real name! At that age it honestly didn't occur to me that you could lie on the form, or if you did you could get in trouble. But I eventually took the dive and here we are. I have another account now and I was surprised at how easy it was compared to the long form back then!
Super Smash Bros. Brawl was the game of the day, a good board all around, although from an early age the mods were already making it clear that there was no fun allowed. My first moderations were for stuff like the Phoenix Wright customized objections, which were labeled "disruptive." *rolls eyes* I guess the Objection noise at the start of your message could scare and deeply, deeply scar someone who clicked on the link...even though clickable links weren't even a thing on Gamefaqs yet. You may notice that when I post, I also keep a lot of the old Gamefaqs conventions, like italicizing instead of the new quotes system, and asterisking any swear words. In fact, I'm probably the biggest adherent to the terms of use on Gamefaqs. Even if they removed a rule, I kept adhering to it, on the (correct) assumption that they will moderate you for practically anything over there. I've seen what former mods say about the system there, and most recently it turns out that bover and I agree on a lot of things. I think he put it simply and accurately: SBAllen thinks that "simplifying" the terms of use means shortening the text on the page, while still keeping the same enforcement and the same legalistic and complex mess that it is. This is what I meant when I said for years that Gamefaqs has a complex labyrinth of secret rules. While the terms today say "users cannot do this and that, which includes x and y" it ends up including a lot more unwritten things until it turns into "users cannot do x, y, z, x-y, (z+x)/g, x2: electric boogaloo..." but most importantly, "anything that might slightly annoy one of our moderators."
And then there was my foray into Politics, which has a lot for mods to dislike. I did get a bit confused when people said I behaved in 2 separate ways on the boards, one as the friendly games and board hunting person, another as "politics troll." But I never trolled, just gave my opinion on things, and I'm still a friendly person. I think I've been amazingly friendly, considering the things that have been sent my way. But there was never a point I "became a troll." I had both the Tails82 and TaiIs82 accounts rolling back in 2009. I think this split personality thing came up because I used a naming trick where Tails82 and TaiIs82 look the same on Gamefaqs due to the font. One account I would use mostly for board hunting, and one I would use for politics. This would divide my activity into logical chunks, while my name across the site would look the same for everything. This is another thing I don't get about the "troll" part. If I was a troll, I would've made a completely different account name for politics and I would've avoided a LOT of grief sent at my main. But RaptorLC took my account split as a sign that I had a secret trolling alt (how is it secret? It's my name!) and at some point made it his life's mission to take my "troll alt" away. Keep in mind that this is the guy who is obsessed with karma and bought a pile of Gamefaqs T-shirts just for the karma points bonus that the site would give him. So it was considered a deep wrong to him when my main would not lose karma for posting things on politics with another account. He was the board police and I was committing an imaginary karma crime in his head, and he just couldn't stand it. So after struggling to punish me in some way for 10 years or so, and with dozens of his trademark childish insults sent my way, when he finally landed a hit this decade that was probably a very pleasing day to his racist ass.
Q: But what about Error?
A: My first big interaction with Error was when he was plugging some joke mod complaint form on his website, and I filled it out in a matching fashion. Something about the most recent moderation I had received, followed by a statement that Gamefaqs had a censorship problem with LGBT and sympathizers. Old rules? Let's remember that back when I signed up, you weren't allowed to talk about gay anything at all. It's a gaming website. If the word "gay" came up, it was likely you were using it as an insult. And there was really no other reason to talk about it on the site, so you almost couldn't bring it up for anything else. This is another reason why I find it funny - when they say "you agreed to the rules when you signed up" - I signed up to something very different. You could even say that the terms were more "anti-gay" than me! But then the Politics board got going and...turned into what it is now. But who can say whether things swing the other way again in the next 10 years?
Like many mods, Error misses context or worse, invents some of his own - aka his rule where anyone who ever complains about a moderation on Hellhole is just there to be a troublemaker. It's a good thing that this board cop only has mod tools and not a gun. But anyway...I was responding to a clear joke form. I ended it on something like "you can be my mole and help me smoke out the renegade mod! Unless YOU are the renegade mod, then I will never stop until you are demodded and Gamefaqs is free again" and then signed at the end with a "cheerfully yours, TaiIs82" for a sudden comedic shift. But Error can't seem to pick up on these things, which is partly why he's a terrible mod. The other part was when he followed me around the boards for 5-6 years with the image of the joke mod dispute form, reposting it after anything I said like he was a total stalkerish weirdo. Which - again - is another thing I find funny, when I later would get modded just for posting in the same topic as him. So THAT was apparently going too far, but not what he did. I guess it isn't harassment if a mod does it.
Speaking of harassment: Error1355 directly caused 2 account closures, when he was also convinced that a 10-year account on the site was far right and got into a twitter war with the dude. Error even linked to it from CE like it was a board invasion and essentially inviting his buddies to go after the guy's personal account offsite. This "far right" user ended up closing his account and today he posts more anti-Trump comments on twitter than Error does. Again...all I can do is find this hilarious. Another person driven off the site by Error's failure to read.
Q: But why did you make the blog, TaiIs? Whyyyyyy?
A: 2 reasons: to inform and entertain. I can say things that they don't allow on the site, repost moderations and so on. There's also a sizable amount of TaiIs supporters out there, such as gwwak who love the popcorn. While I did want to get some attention with this, it was not attention just to get attention. Even though I was getting a number of views, I would not keep up activity just to get clicks. No imaginary filler outrages against the mods, like they do when they go looking to mod someone for imaginary violations.
At the heart of the blog is this: after years of seeing or receiving fairly-dumb to very-dumb moderations on the site, and with mods claiming "you can't prove this and you can't prove that," I set out to show they're full of it. That was 2014 and I went at it with the documentation to the point of overkill. Today, the mods there are totally underwater and we don't have to prove anything anymore, it's assumed. But again, I was not the one to turn opinion against the moderators, the mods did that themselves. I was just vocal about it. And at the end of the day, I consider it an absolute win. I will gladly be known as the guy with the blog, in exchange for what the mods are now known for.
Q: Any final comments?
A: ELIZA!! I WROTE THIS FOR YOUUUUU!! I'M NOT CRAZY!! DUNCAN ONLY NAMED A POKEMON AFTER YOU, BUT I GAVE YOU MY LIFE'S STORY!! AND IF THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH I HEREBY DEDICATE MY FCC COMPLAINT TO YOU!! CHEERFULLY YOURS!! I HOPE YOU LIKE IT!!
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Oh, and 2020 is not over yet, readers. There's more on the way!
