We Did It

Welchin' wally

It's been a while but dagnabbit, we're going to wrap up a loose end regarding everyone's favorite former mod and put this thing to rest.

Over a year ago, wally said he would close his account and never return to the Politics board if Trump won the election. The bet was previously noted on this blog, and gained more attention after Trump won the primary.

Well, we had an election and Trump won - yet wally remained throughout election night. We personally reminded wally about this bet half a dozen times, which led to a straight-up callout through the new site feature:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/261-politics/74544529

wally's excuse was that some other account didn't shake on the bet, as if he had initiated the offer but had been turned down...but in fact wally's bet was in reply, an agreement to the user's first challenge. There were also two other Trump-skeptic accounts that definitively joined in on the bet within that very topic (but neither one of them have closed their accounts yet, either). There was no indication that the bet wasn't on, and wally jumped into this bet so fast in the first place because he was so confident Trump would never go anywhere. Trump had not won the GOP primary yet, and in fact the primary had yet to begin. From the start, wally and several others were so quick to place their accounts on the line because they thought Trump had no chance, and any of these bets would just be an easy way to get conservatives to close their accounts. As one of the other users believed, the bet was "risk-free" and would be a no-brainer to make.

We also brought up this account bet more than once, during the primary, at the end of the primary, and wally had the chance to say the bet was off at any of these points. He did not.

In the present-day, however, wally continued:

"Either way, this is probably my last post ever on this board, because GOP supporters on this board make me physically sick to my stomach."

So we have a split proposition to rate here: wally said he would close down his account, and he said that he would never return to the board. He has shown no inclination to honor the first part of his bet, so our fact-checkers rate this statement Pants-on-Fire with a deduction of two points. The second part of his bet has turned out to be a shaky half-promise, where he will possibly avoid the board but leaves a foot in the door to return at some later date. We therefore rate this statement half-true, with a deduction of one point out of a possible two. This leaves us with a total of Three Pinocchios.

Here are some user reactions to welchy-er, wally:

You done good, guys. You done good.

There was once a time when this writer would be the only account that would criticize wally, but no longer. wally's stock quickly took a dive after 1) he lost his moderator gig, and a few suckups along with it; and 2) with his position removed, he no longer felt the need to even pay lip service to objectivity or professionalism, and quickly devolved into one-liner personal insults. This quickly cost him further support.

Oh how the mighty...well, the guy who let a little power at a video game website go to his head...has fallen. The mod who could censor everyone but himself. Here's hoping he keeps up the fraction of the promise he didn't welch on, and doesn't just come back in a week once he gets bored and wants to call some more users a bunch of brain-dead monkeys.

Former Mod Burgess Admits: Yes, Demodded for Being Unprofessional

Not one, not two, but three tipoffs lead me to this story. They just keep bringing me back in~

Last week on CE, Burgess responded to some questions and revealed that there are quite a few mods who are pretty bad at what they do.

Since that last part was probably sarcastic (although not untrue), I asked Burgess to weigh in and tell us specifically which mods he had in mind. The reason this piece is a bit late is because there has still not been a response after a week. Same goes for Krystal, the former community manager who had a hand in demodding him. Krystal has often, falsely claimed I don't care enough to get enough sources for my entries, but then typically throws up her hands and says other people care too much about the site (also known as the "lol I was just trollin, you 2 srs" defense after losing an argument). Which raises the question: is this an admission that we care more about the Gamefaqs community than a former community manager?

By the way, in that same topic I had the chance to ask Error about unprofessionalism and whether Joel or Allen had a talk with him yet - as promised here by an employee of CBSi. Of course, nothing's happened on that front. Here's what Allen's been doing instead, and in a surprisingly unexpected fashion. When he said he'd take over Krystal's duties, it looks like it happened in more ways than one...

Here's Mr. Allen's dismissive reaction to when a mod revealed private account information. It's a little hard to follow because - surprise surprise - Allen eventually caved and recognized the mod WAS out of line, so he deleted the mod's post. If he'd left the issue there we'd be fine, but then he decided to systematically go through the topic and punish the user for complaining. Note that Allen considers it trolling when he got called a kid offhand, but only after he suggested himself that the user should grow up and act like a man.

Because Allen is a busy man, yet not busy enough to avoid going on a deletion spree against completely unmarked messages just because he got annoyed by a user on a message board. But at least we know Allen responds to PMs.

Today's A Good Day

http://www.gamefaqs.com/users/wally/boards

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4fwqGHCMXg&t=5m25s

GUAC News 8/6/15: Error Unprofessional / wally Bets His Account / Mods Being Mods

Just a few small updates posted for posterity.

Error's Posts Unprofessional

Yesterday Gamefaqs held an AMA with three of their staff members, which can be found on Team Gamefaqs. During the last session, SomeLikeItHoth managed to bring one of lead mod Error1355's unprofessional posts to the attention of a higher-up on CBSi. 

Here's the post in question, as captured by Hoth:

Of course we don't expect much to change but previous mod removals have surprised us. Who knows? Maybe Error's mouth will get him in trouble one day.

wally Account Bet

Board 261's resident mod wally has placed an account bet, which we can't resist posting here.

...

DONALD TRUMP 2016

Mods Being Mods

Also from 261: typical mod topic closures and general laziness, in a topic asking users what three things they'd want to do if they were in charge (I guess the moderators didn't like the answers).

This usually happens when mods have been called in to a board they don't usually pay attention to, and are just too lazy to mod multiple messages, so they just say the whole topic sucks and punish the TC by closing down all discussion with a button. Of course the creator of the topic has no control over who posts what in his topic, but the mods do. If there are violations of the terms within a topic, the responsible thing to do is to mod them so that users have a reason why their messages were censored and have a chance to dispute. Sometimes mods can't be bothered to do this though, or the argument that the messages are violations is very weak, so instead they just shut down all discussion while calling the TC names and insulting everyone in the topic. Just another day on Gamefaqs.

Community Manager Discussion Kicks Off...With Admin Blocking Discussion

Will there be Gamefaqs community input on Krystal's replacement? Probably not.

Courtesy of "the mod bias monitor" - a user who was warned for making a topic about the next community manager - comes this tip:

Allen later walked back this comment and said he was only talking to Krystal, who's under a non-disclosure agreement. Yet if this silencing was only meant to apply to Krystal, why did he lock all topics on the discussion and why were other users warned for starting new topics? The wording of the message itself is pretty clear it's meant to apply to everyone, since "any discussion" is, well, pretty much anything between two or more people, not just Krystal. For what it's worth, here's Krystal's comment about her termination before Allen told her to zip it:

More of that trademark condemnation of entire boards and some of the most active message board users on the site. Apparently the numbers aren't up to snuff for the higher ups, possibly due to things like staff hostility towards users or the site's trigger-happy moderation system driving people away, and Krystal's defense against this data was that her bosses simply don't understand how much the userbase sucks. With an attitude like that, it's really hard to see why she was let go. Said no one ever.

Anyway, since Allen seemed to distance himself from his early crackdown you can try to start a discussion on this subject and see how it goes. We'll keep monitoring it here. In the meantime, also be aware that posting a picture of Krystal that she herself provided a few months ago is now considered "harassment."

Krystal's Gone, and I'm Actually Sad To See Her Go

In a surprise decision - but not really, when you think about it - Krystal109 is no longer our community manager. Some would say she never really was. Krystal (also known as Stephanie Barnes, for you future employers doing an internet search) has appeared several times in this blog. Sometimes because we had a complaint, other times because the users at Current Events and other boards were upset with her performance. But I have to say, I was always cautiously optimistic or at least neutral about her overall. For her work as a FAQ contributor and behind the scenes I have no reason to criticize her. In fact I think she did an all right job keeping moderators in check, even though that's a little anecdotal. As for actually managing the community...a lot of users simply believed she wasn't cut out for it.

Krystal started off by making quite a few flubs that we've discussed here before, and she wasn't exactly known for professionalism or good grammar. One easy suggestion: please learn how to use the apostrophe correctly. Please. As for her interactions with the message board community, it seemed like a train wreck early on. This experience probably led her to post less because it just didn't seem to go well whenever she became involved in an argument. Krystal started off assuring us that she could deal with the criticism and trolling that came with the position, but those assurances appeared to be directly contradicted whenever she lost her temper and "had a meltdown" as some called it.

A quick summary: telling users it would be fun to troll everyone with her new powers and either close their board, or make everyone a mod for a day and watch the chaos. Telling users she wouldn't date a black person because of "cultural differences," a subject that's questionable for her to raise in the first place, and also a similar view that got a mod dismissed a few months earlier. Constantly closing topics she didn't personally like, even though she was supposed to be discouraging mods from abusing this same function. Misleading and belittling users when they started to complain that a moderator had stolen multiple accounts from other users - an accusation that turned out to be true and something that she knew was true for several days. Yet instead of waiting for the site's main admin to return and deal with the situation, and instead of simply declining to comment until the accusations were sorted out, she went out of her way to imply that long-time users were lying or pushing a "BS" conspiracy theory while calling some of the critics "whining babies." Declining to update the gamefaqs social media accounts on a consistent basis, until users began to call out that she had promised to make this a main part of her job. Possibly a decline in board traffic.

Whatever the reason, Krystal is no longer with us. I'm a little sad because despite her faults she did seem to do some things right, like mod oversight. As for the rest of the nonsense she did, I guess I'm also sad that we won't have this source of entertainment around anymore.

Perhaps the most telling verdict on her performance:

Finally, some additional testimony:

"She rarely updated the GameFAQs OFFICAL Twitter and Facebook except for when Hothlin called her out on it...She was good at bringing the community together at hating her though" -ToPoPO

"I remember when she first got hired she proclaimed to have thick skin and that's one of the reasons she was hired. Over time it was quite evident this wasn't the case." -WaterLink

"i had perhaps five or six interactions with her, and none were positive. the one that sticks out most in my mind is when i took 30 minutes out of my day to submit feedback on the beta for the new site UI, and i got back a reply from her that was nothing short of f***ing bristling. no "thank you for taking your time submitting feedback, we appreciate your interest in helping to make gamefaqs a better place" or anything gracious like that, just a temperamental message that amounted to "you opinion doesn't matter, our metrics show everyone loves the new UI." then the redesign went live and everyone lost their s***." -Mecha Sonic

"Right from the very beginning she spent so much time f***ing feeding the trolls on CE. Many users warned her that any thing she posted would just get trolled to death, since that's the nature of CE but she didn't even take that advice. But the fact that she needed to be told in the first place was already a death knell. What kind of professional needs to be told not to feed trolls, let alone someone who gets the job of COMMUNITY MANAGER, someone who should be intimately familiar with the community. It's clear she wasn't even familiar with interaction on the internet, let alone understanding GameFAQs' community." -4chan

"She did some good things, but she also put her foot in her mouth too many times to count. I feel kinda bad about CE treated her, but she treated a lot of CE with contempt as well, making it easier to dislike her. I didn't dislike her myself, so I'll just say that she was average." -PerseusRad

"'Wait, she bumped the topic to start and talk s*** and then closed it immediately after to get the last word? Wow that's pretty damn low, even for her.' she sounds like a 15 yr old teenage girl based on that topic. It is the equivalent of 'mom I hate u!' and then closing the door" -DomoArigatoMr

"She was absolutely miserable and made wrong steps at almost every turn" -Littlegator

"It's possible to be an authority figure and involve yourself with the community. She was just really s*** at it, was thin skinned as hell, and would troll and make petty spiteful comments when people would post their grievances. She was s*** at her job and it was a mystery how she even got it in the first place." -3rd_Best_Master

"for how much she made a big deal about running the gamefaqs twitter, she really let it go to s***. as a community manager, she was very hostile, offensive and let people get under her skin way too much." -D-Lo_BrownTown

"The problem is that she had no idea what the community was like. If you're going to be a community manager, you should at least have lurked for a month or two before being given the position. It was obvious that she had no clue about the community here, and people spoke up. But instead of listening, she just locked topics and banned people for not liking her. Glad to see her gone." -mfwahwah

I wonder if the higher-ups at Gamefaqs ever think about what inspires people to make site messages, lengthy blog posts and entire videos slamming the way Gamefaqs is run. Maybe in the future it'd be a better idea to have a community manager who listens, instead of calling long-time users a bunch of dumb babies.