Tanon Demodded - Best of WOT

One thing Gamefaqs has going for it is its assortment of special interest boards, some interesting, some not, some active, others deserted. It's this variety that got me into board hunting years back. Sometimes it's difficult to keep up with what goes on where, however. But fortunately, thanks to a tip to GUAC, we're happy to present the site's latest demodded user.

One of the new batch, Tanon was fairly well-known on the War on Terror (WoT) board and had a dislike for Barenziah Boy Toy, which would be his undoing. BBT has made a reputation for himself posting the same topics on different boards, to the point where some complain it's spammy. Some good old fashioned board drama erupted on board 408 once BBT's topics started to get closed and he complained about it.

On January 5, BBT posted a topic on Hellhole, "Overaggressive mod closing topics in a Social Board without any justifications.." in which he described that a mod was trying to silence him, even though he wasn't breaking the terms.

"Because the mod couldn't actually get it moderated because it doesn't violate the TOS, he/she has decided to make an end-around and close the topics instead, to avoid having any moderations be overturned."

This topic was itself closed. BBT kept up the pressure, however, and started to get attention for it. In what was almost a repeat of the bover demodding, Krystal told the user to stop complaining, nothing to see here...then reversed after talking to Allen and admitted yeah, there was something. At least this time she didn't call anyone a whining baby.

Krystal109 Posted 1/9/2015
"We have already discussed your complaints with the moderation staff and we are in a review period to see if proper action is done in the future. Whining about it more isn't going to change the past and you can only look to the future...The boards are not your complaint zone and it is disruptive to the flow of the board to constantly complain in new topics."

But she did also reinforce that unpopular messages/users aren't just going to be modded:

"You might find a user annoying, but as long as they are not breaking ToU then they are protected by the ToU. Learn to ignore people if you dislike them...we allow crossposting topics between boards. You can easily see this from topics on Poll of the Day to CE with Full-Throttle. The question is are the disruptive on a board and if the answer is no then we should NOT be closing or modding them. Just because a user is annoying is NOT a violation. If that was the case we'd have no users on any of the boards."

...Wait, did Krystal just call us all annoying? Oh well. Now for the switcharound a few days later.

Krystal109 Posted 1/12/2015
"The PM was written by my boss, who I handed over links to, so it make [sic] have some factual mistakes. That being said, Tanon did make multiple posts that were highly inaccurate and only confuse the user base and incite them against the moderation and administrative staff...We purely abide by the ToU and do now [sic] make up moderations to hit you guys. There were also other cases of false information, such as me correcting you about mods being hired by their own merit and not their home board. Overall, the posts and disputes were sent to my boss who had the ultimate call. My personal view, I never saw anything you did as threatening."

Here's an example of how fast Tanon was closing BBT's topics, this one within minutes as other users were used to expecting him, as he posted at the end to let BBT know he was giving him a hard time:

Tanon's defense was that he was just joking about some of his provocative/inaccurate messages, Krystal replied he can't say something offensive and then write it off as a joke, Tanon fired back "You are the one that told me to have a sense of humor!" (and this is technically true, since Krystal told people have a sense of humor when she was saying unprofessional things like the "vag smells" story and how fun it'd be to troll by closing boards/making everyone a mod and then watching the drama).

The reasons for Tanon's demodding, as provided by the guy himself:

"Removing your status as a moderator

Hello Tanon. After reviewing both your recent public posts and your moderation performance, we have decided to remove you from the moderation staff. You are posting things publicly that simply aren't true, and more than one post appears to be disparaging against your fellow moderators. You also appear to have taken it upon yourself to treat a particular board that you frequent in an inappropriate manner, posting messages that sound threatening as well as moderating posts (or not moderating posts) incorrectly."

along with a Krystal message

"I know that in the past that there has been concern of your pocket modding WOT, which means that you actively seek out marks on that board and give them lenient moderations or N/A's. This is why I suggest not modding a board that your [sic] frequent and instead just mark posts to let an objective part [sic] handle them."

In other words, Tanon was showing favoritism to people he knew on the board by getting accounts he liked off the hook, while punishing accounts he didn't like, even if the accounts didn't violate the Terms. To get around this he simply closed their topics because the users can't dispute a locked topic, keeping it out of any review by anyone else. It was only through BBT's complaints that the closings were investigated.

Mith, another newish mod, decided to use the occasion to make threats to other peoples' accounts if they kept up the complaints:

Tanon responded, "Amusingly what Mith posted is essentially what I posted in two threads before I was de-modded." while RavenFola replied "Are the mods attempting to scare us by threatening the ban hammer? That's pathetic."

User reactions to the demodding varied from praise to 'THE TROLLS WON!!1' Here are some of the best comments.

Hi There Hellhole, What's Up - Ohh...Ugh

We've finally found something mods are all right with!

"Have The Hitler Protocols been relaxed? Like... a lot?"

This entry referred to a Politics board topic where someone claimed Hitler would've stopped concentration camp abuses if he knew about them, the board then basically spent the next few pages responding to the troll or telling people not to respond to the troll, then someone from Politics came over from Hellhole after a few days to ask the mods why apparently pro-Hitler messages weren't getting modded despite all that time since they were marked. While we think this is just an unpopular (but who cares) opinion, we bring it up here because 1) it's part of another Politics board rush to get people punished (more on that later) and 2) the mod response was pretty bad.

gmo7897 writes (emphasis added):

While it's a touchy subject, people are allowed to speculate things of this nature. Denying the Holocaust is one thing. We aren't going to allow that unless someone has some really good evidence. However, since evidence is unlikely to exist at this point, and there's way too much evidence saying the Holocaust did happen, we're not likely going to allow people to deny it.

However, people are allowed to speculate on things that are unpopular such as this. For what it's worth, Hitler was a very smart man and a phenomenal leader. That is... until he went all bat crap crazy. He was also a socialist, which is generally all about the government taking care of the people, so there's possible credence into the thought that camps may have been better if he knew anything about them - assuming he didn't.

I'm not saying I agree one way or another, but it's food for thought either way. Hitler is quite possibly one of the most polarizing figureheads in the last 100 years or so - if not further back.

So, in short, saying Hitler was a "good guy" for what happened or outright denying the Holocaust = bad. Saying Hitler may not have been all that bad of a guy but just got a bum rep = tolerable - assuming there's legitimate backing to the claim.

What "legitimate backing" means is anyone's guess, since all the user basically said was Hitler would've made the camps better if he knew they were bad. No sources, not exactly a thesis. gmo wasn't done. Maybe the guy was right! You can't prove Hitler's totalitarian state knew about what was going on in the camps!

I'm not saying that it has to come with a link; it just has to be something that's potentially believable. Just playing Devil's Advocate here, but there's no real evidence to say that he knew what was going on. As the president of a country (or whatever his title was at the time), don't you think there would have been some pictures or something of him at these camps? There are other pictures and videos available from that time period that show what was happening.

Like I said, it's a touchy subject, but we don't really want to stop people from having views that oppose the norm.

Ha. Haha. Hahaha. Okay, mind telling me why pro-Hitler is a touchy but acceptable subject, but I was modded within 15 minutes recently for "misgendering" (using "he" or "his" instead of "she" when talking about a guy who wanted to be a girl - yes this is what they mod). Less than 15 minutes for a joke moderation that was overturned. What the heck. If you want to veer a topic off course, argue the 40s and how maybe Hitler wasn't that bad, derail a topic, go right ahead. You're awful but go on. Yet these are the same mods who go out of their way to take sides and take down unpopular opinions on current debates, arguments that should have a lot more room for open discussion than "Hitler didn't know about his own camps."

Then again we could be reading too much into this. Here's Mith explaining what the board's about.

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.

No, wally Should Not Be A Lead Mod

Recent demoddings must be replaced with new moddings, and Krystal said decisions would be made this week on new mods or promotions. Speaking of which, a couple people said wally should be lead because he's "cool" and "level headed." Certainly not. My experience with him has been shown to be anything but. I have no idea how these decisions are being made or if wally's even being looked at for anything, but if he is let's take a look at some of the stuff he's done over at the Politics board.

Board 261 is hardly known for being level headed, but people who wish their opponents would be arrested for treason, publicly flogged or decapitated by terrorists still stick out like extremist sore thumbs. He has a signature ability of flying off the handle over even minor things. If wally doesn't have the time to vent at others the way he wants to, he'll usually settle for just a "derp" or "XD" sometimes more than once in the same topic, which as you know adds so much to the conversation. Sometimes he'll go off-topic and derail the thing by talking about cheeseburgers and lasagna if it's a topic he dislikes - and of course once the topic's been derailed we need a mod to close it to keep us safe. Note that wally will also tell some users he dislikes to stop making topics, and some (including me) that he would be looking for reasons to suspend, which has more than once been called a chilling effect on the board. He may not in fact moderate the politics board (personally, I'll believe that when he's gone), but it isn't beneath him to tell his least favorite users he might do something to them if they don't stop posting. But let's not spend any more time just talking about it and get to the good stuff:

Mods Removed, Retired from Service...Burgess Unwillingly

Another shakeup at Gamefaqs following bovergate. What's it mean moving forward?

Full list here courtesy of Flintlock_Staff. Keep in mind that not every mod on that list was removed today, but it's been confirmed that over 10 mods were removed mostly for inactivity. The story broke when former mod Burgess called attention to how he has fallen from Mt. Olympus and now walks among us. Krystal confirmed that other mods were kicked for "Activity, behavior, modding habits, etc." while surviving mod Mike1494 said "We can't discuss details of individual mods. But I've seen quite a few mods who are really popular on boards but never actually modded any posts or entered the queue in my time." But many users wanted to know why Burgess was demodded, and when Krystal explained the loss of Math Murderer and others to inactivity but remained silent over Burgess, some assumed that he was one of the mods kicked for bad behavior. Burgess responded that the demodding was not his choice:

Since he didn't go further into details than that, users who asked what specifically got him demodded were met with this answer.

Some asked whether Krystal deserved credit (or blame) for removing users' favorite and/or least favorite mods, but others noted that this was a fairly routine housecleaning and Burgess didn't think it was Krystal's effort to remove him. Users also asked whether mods like Error, Raptor, or The Admiral would be demodded too. However, the demodding is now over and Krystal has said new mods and promotions would be decided over the course of this week. Maybe the new batch will be better.

To those who complained and said the mod they liked was a good poster: that's great. They haven't vanished off the face of the earth and can continue to be a good regular poster that you like. What concerns the staff is whether or not they were good mods.

Impressions: quite a few people were glad to see Burgess demodded and he had few defenders who made comments, although a poll about it was split. Math Murderer was widely seen as a good mod who was demodded for inactivity and will be missed.

User quotes after the jump.

Bover87 Demodded for Account Hijacking

After weeks of pressure and inquiry, SBAllen has weighed in on a recent case of a stolen account. Simplest explanation: bover got his hands on an account that wasn't his, used it as an aid when applying to be a mod, and has now been demodded once these actions came to light.

This issue spilled across multiple boards as longtime users provided evidence, kept up the pressure, and eventually brought about the change. Here at GUAC we decided to take a neutral monitoring of the events, since the charges were pretty serious and...iffy at the start...but after enough effort, bover's misdeeds were established and there is now one less mod at gamefaqs. This was all brought about through the actions of folks like hotdogturtle and Mecha Sonic, who worked to help prove that bover was not the original owner of the account he said was his. Through an uphill battle (as we'll see below), users in action brought about a change in the system. That's something worth noting.

Long explanation after the page break:

Tales from CE: Krystal in Decline

From time to time CE will swell with a sort of anti-mod, or anti-specific-mod, sentiment. The topics will go on and the people who complain will have their topics closed, then people complain about the closed topics until those topics get closed, then that's usually it because people who try to restart closed topic discussions get modded. Fresh off a screenshot competition, I caught up with one of these cycles this past week and it doesn't look good for Krystal109. Some have already argued that there is an abuse of power going on, among other things below.

As for this writer, we were originally optimistic about Krystal but decided to head more toward neutral, since we can see the reason behind some of the complaints, but not for some others. We'll let readers decide. The criticism came in the following forms:

Unprofessionalism: Users pointed out how Krystal's posting style is...how do we say...not always up to a typical adult's level. Spelling and grammar errors? Not so bad when they're rare and mistakes are corrected. But with Krystal it seemed to some users that, while she was being paid for this position, she made multiple mistakes in her messages and even in official site announcements. People are perfectly willing to give out some mulligans, but the grace period has to end at some point. Hopefully Krystal's FAQs are written better than her posts.

Krystal was also criticized for using the official gamefaqs twitter account to give her personal opinon about a game, and it seemed strange that this happened when she could've brought it up the normal way on the site like anyone else.

Some complained when Krystal said she wouldn't date black people due to cultural differences, a point which they argued was racist. Others thought that she was bringing up inappropriate subjects, in a manner not fitting for an admin. In one topic she talked about "vag smells" and when someone said this was unprofessional, she asked why it isn't refreshing to have an admin who doesn't act like a robot. But no one has complained so far that she acts like a robot. If anything, they have complained that she's too far in the other direction. Better to be a robot than a punchline.

Krystal's race comment came up mere months after a moderator was removed after posting a similar message, and this point was not lost at CE.

Krystal herself didn't handle the complaints as well as some would've liked, with critics saying she was dismissive or insulting toward the community that she was supposed to be drawing to the site. In one topic she asked her critics: if they think they can do better, why didn't they apply to the position? The problem with that is that regardless of how they act, the typical user expects a paid administrator to act more professionally. When one of Krystal's selling points was that she knew the community, as a regular user just like us, her new argument - that no one else could hope to perform the job as well as her - was another dismissive claim that downplayed others, even as she was acting more unprofessionally on the boards than quite a few other users and even some of the trolls.

Abuse of power: critics stated that Krystal had revealed someone's usermap over the board's chat, which she denies, but also made clear that she could do it whenever she liked if she wanted. Users also complained that when they brought this up on CE, Krystal would delete their messages and it added to the impression that she was covering something up.

Not only was Krystal closing down topics that complained about her actions, topics that simply asked about what was going on were closed. Even after the swell of complaints, Krystal continues to close down topics that she deems "complaint forums" on the board. We here at GUAC have long suspected that moderators have closed topics simply because they were getting criticized in them. Did Krystal need to lock these topics, when they would've purged on their own in a day or two? Her actions only added to the idea that she was covering up something and was unable to accept criticism.

Finally, Krystal joked about shutting the board down for a little just to see how annoyed people would get.

Taken together, many posters said that Krystal was having a "meltdown."

Quote compilations below...