ipukespiders
Member
Lime the space time continuum parallel universe multiple time zone traveler?
Gross.
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Lime the space time continuum parallel universe multiple time zone traveler?
Gross.
Boy Wander
Member
He had a cult of personality, it went to his head and he disappeared up his own arse.
FloatingIslands
Member
Hoping for TheBore citizens to come back here. It would be humour heaven
Schattenjäger
Gabriel Knight
werent you the one that was right all along about Trump winning? To this day I still can’t believe he won ... kudos
D
Deleted member 713885
Unconfirmed Member
Same. The quality/hilarious posters went to the Bore (prior and after the mess) and the nutcases went to Reeeee.
Bore posters>>>>>>>>>>>>>> (infinity) Reeee posters returning.
Yeah, those Lime threads were definitely an issue. I think I mentioned that somewhere in my notes on the first page here. Those honeypot threads aren't fair and are more of a way to maintain quasi-order from chaos in a low effort way. It's like when Dragona would throw an ultimatum in page 15 of some thread and say "if you say xyz after this point you're banned for 3 months." No one would even see the post, everyone would get banned. It's not fair to the users in question, though if you have a particular agenda you're trying to steer the discourse toward it's a short-term solution to that end. Those are things I've tried to learn from over the years. In the post-Dragona era I instructed the mod team to put a note in the thread title with a reference to a post number, and edit the OP itself too preferably, if a moderation ultimatum was going to be issued in the middle of a fast-paced thread. etc.
Okay, I guess we might need to break out some story time so that things don't go in unfair directions against Bish here. Buckle up, ladies.
Keep in mind that Bish was the last pre-2004 mod we had. He was a mod from circa 1998 when all the Gaming-Age staffers had admin powers on the forum by default and things were operated that way. When I formally took charge in 2004...well, let's forget about some of the initial mods I picked, hah, but after I got a decent head on my shoulders I had specific standards for moderators, attributes I looked for, and protocols everyone agreed to follow to become a moderator. I didn't ditch the pre-2004 mods who acclimated themselves to the new policies reasonably, but over time issues usually cropped up and they just weren't the right folks for the role and I had to remove them. GAF got a lot bigger and everything got a little more serious and requiring of nuance and sound judgment. Good moderation is hard. You have to constantly evaluate your own behavior. That's why I set things up to be cross-vetted by fellow moderators as a first line of defense, then tried to vet things on a systemic level from there when things got big. Every element of delegation comes with compromise and shortcomings, though.
Everything was a balancing act on my end. I wanted to be fair to the community, but also fair to the volunteers who put time in to help run this place and who helped build it. I was looser with what I allowed out of Bish because of the almost 20 years he had with the community and our own history. Also, there is some semblance of law and order to be had with those kinds of authoritarian figures on a message board. But it's not good for outcomes long-term and big egos abuse power on forums almost without fail. You also end up having a lot of pressure and attention on you in negative ways, too, when you take on that sort of enforcer (or "bad cop") persona, which can tilt you and compromise your judgment further. I've played Bad Cop plenty of times intentionally to trigger people since being thoughtful and patient 24/7 is way harder, and sometimes I've just been a dick, too. I'm not an Iain Banks Culture AI Overlord, haha. By all means make one of those though so I can take a vacation safely. :|
People change, and pressure changes people a lot. Volunteer moderators have a lot of pressure and the only accountability is to me (or on another site, whoever's in charge there; they probably aren't me, but that's for you to decide). Besada for example seemed to want to do the right thing and started out more like Mumei than Bish, well-intentioned softy, but when people started paying a lot of attention to him and talking about him off-site, he tilted and doubled down on viewing everyone as an enemy and felt he needed to take matters into his own hands etc. and ended up banning like >1000 people in 2017. I think his year-on-year ban count was 1300-something by October. Everyone was disingenuous, everyone was bigoted, everyone was evil, etc. It all became a feedback loop where he created his own enemies and then constantly checked off-site message boards to see what people were saying about him and whether he was being "doxxed." He was never really doxxed. People said shitty things about his appearance though. He wanted me to call the FBI. I tried to get everyone to stop obsessing about off-site gossip, but they kept checking and just stopped telling me about it as much, it seemed. It closed down the mod team into an insular thought bubble that was pitted against the community instead of on the same team as you guys. I was tilted by it too since people were obsessing about me and rightfully thinking I was a hypocrite about certain things. I've been way open with my life historically. So to a lot of people I must've seemed like either the world's most incompetent and hypocritical "SJW" or the world's most incompetent and hypocritical dudebro asshole socialite. I can totally see how that ended up happening.
You can't be a good moderator when you're emotionally compromised or arrogant. Good moderators can become bad moderators, and vice versa. Bish and I were pretty similar back in the day. We butted heads one time when I was about 15 years old and I impulse-demodded him for a day or so. I had just created the Off-Topic forum, back circa 2000, mostly to clean up the trashy random threads from Gaming side and keep things running smoothly there as a Gaming aggregate, but since Off-Topic was newly created, GAF was a gaming forum, etc., no one was using Off-Topic mostly and it functioned as a trash bin. I put my own non-gaming-related threads in Gaming after *I* created Off-Topic, haha. I let higher quality threads float in Gaming selectively other than my own, but that's kind of hypocritical, right? I was behaving immaturely and selfishly and gave myself a double standard. I was a kid, though, of course. We didn't have formal communication lines back then, either, and Bish moved one of my, err, off-topic threads to Off-Topic without talking to me about it first, and I got pissed off and bounced him on the spot since I was de facto in charge very soon after being modded. I was in impulsive rage kid mode, but he was an adult and raised the level of discourse between us, he took the high road, we talked it out. I reinstated him, and I recognized my own hypocrisy and started putting a good faith effort into building Off-Topic up as intended sans self-centered bullshit or double standards. Soon after that Off-Topic became legit and just as important as Gaming side to NeoGAF. There's all sorts of history like that and that's one example where Bish put me in my place for the greater good of the forum. Credit where credit is due.
I remember everything and I want to be fair to everyone, ideally, so ditching him for not necessarily fitting the moderator archetype I established later wasn't something I was keen on doing if I could avoid it. Bish always complied with my requests and adjusted himself when I asked it of him. He started coming to the irc/slack channel when I asked him so that cross-vetting and proper communication could happen between him and the rest of the mods. He adjusted to the times and did what I asked him to, so his actions until the stealth ban spree are mostly on me as Dear Leader. Make no mistake about that.
The post-election incident was something I could not just let go, because it was an active ongoing deception that had serious consequences for the boards. I had to go sift through the admin logs and track down the responsible party after mobilizing everyone to figure out what was going on. Bish was right there not saying a peep until I confronted him with evidence in-hand. That nonsense went on for over a month, hundreds of regulars who were a moderate, stabilizing influence on discussion were axed, Off-Topic descended into a yelling fest, etc. It wasn't something I could let go once I found out the full scope of what went down and how he was logging the justified bans and not logging the unjustified ones, not holding himself accountable at all, ignoring my daily expressed concerns about the state of the boards and my confusion about what the hell was prompting all of it without a peep. The only accountability response from me at that point was to permanently remove him, unfortunately, no matter what personal matters had prompted it.
Everyone's fallible. Like I said earlier, Bish had some shit go down in his personal life to my understanding around election time, and that tilted him. Assuming what he said was true, and I have little reason not to think it was true, he had a good excuse to be pissed off, but that didn't absolve him of personal responsibility. Not to say that everything was perfect before then, but it was more in balance at least. I met up with him once a few years back and he was chill. Some of you will remember that silly arm wrestling photo of us that got photoshopped a lot. He's not a bad dude at all, far as I know, and he was proud to be part of NeoGAF and my understanding is that he got those annual NeoGAF shout-outs happening at the E3 Sony Conferences personally. He was on Team NeoGAF...until the moment he wasn't anymore. He probably regrets it, I regret it, and it sucks, but it wasn't cool either and I have to make the hard calls for the greater good or this place doesn't work. Hell, I shut down with anxiety overload for like two days and the whole place imploded. This is the job. I make plenty of mistakes, but I have to correct them as soon as I can, and it's often too damned complicated to have a running dialogue about the whole thing with the public on a day to day. It's often not appropriate, either. I can share things about myself openly to whatever extent I want, but as soon as other people are involved I have to be mindful of the details about them I share with the public. Witch hunts can happen, people can get fucked with, internet can have real life consequences. I'm not going to just run my mouth off and point at people in the heat of the moment to make things easier on myself. That's not the responsible, mature, ethical thing to do. Hence all the #metoo bs being a complex ethical dilemma by its very nature, that I wanted to handle correctly and was not given time to. Hence not naming and shaming bish or throwing him to the angry mob at the time when I found out about what went down.
Most of us had shit happen that tilted us starting around a few years ago. Things fell out of balance and I was not always around since I've been doing this for a really, really, really long time and I need to go live life sometimes to not be drowned by internet crap. Some things got mishandled. For example, I called out GamerGate for being dumb and accidentally got labeled an SJW Figurehead Cuck Whatever. TBH I had never even heard the term "SJW" before GamerGate happened and thought the whole thing was dumb, but I approached it in an arrogant way and mocked a bunch of people and told them to get out of their basements and get laid and stop obsessing over some gamer girl's sex life. Hey, some of them did need to get out of their basements, sheesh, but that goes for folks on every side. That was normally how I *deescalated*, you know, get people to stop taking things overly seriously and reflect on their own behavior, but I handled it immaturely and the situation was volatile, the internet was changing rapidly, etc., and it ended up leading to lines in the sand and an endless ideological battle and a bunch of obsessive people effectively began stalking me. All my personal Facebook statuses would get posted online and gossipped about. People started digging through my entire internet history looking for dirt to "expose" me. I understand why, in retrospect, but it was still not fun at all and closed me off from my normal openness with the internet and gaf that keeps us all on the same page and talking things out instead of shit imploding. There's accountability to spread around everywhere. No hard feelings on my end anymore, though.
I could sit here typing until I die of old age just about all the nuances involved in how everything played out to get us here. But we're better off if I process it and just do the correct thing now and use what I've gleaned from all of it productively as your leader-boy. If I go authoritarian mode on you and tell you to shut up at this point it's not because I'm actually emotional or unable to have a totally open conversation about something, it's just necessary and I'm making a judgment call and asking you to respect that in the moment so we can get where we need to go. See earlier in this thread for example. I am the axis that most NeoGAF stuff rotates around one way or another, I have the most influence and authority and first-hand experience with almost every relevant event of this site's history. No one else comes close. And I'm in this role because I was evidently the natural fit for it, so I have way too much detail and nuance and hindsight to realistically share with y'all. Ultimately that's just my job to pay attention to and figure out and then make the right calls. Sometimes the right call is not explaining something in the heat of the moment and there will need to be mutual trust to get to the other side of it. We had that mutual trust for a really long time, mostly, starting with the community handing me the keys to this place and throwing money at me to run it in 2004. I've never forgotten that and I won't sell out because of that bond I have with the community from that moment. That mutual trust eroded, though, in recent years. It's my fault and your fault and no one's fault. It's water under the bridge. Let's just get it back.
Like I told P pj earlier, once I actually get through this big Ban Review and have all the hard evidence properly evaluated I'll be more comfortable talking about the other bad actors evidently involved last year. A few people did some really fucked up things during the October crisis under pretense of helping the site and myself, and their actions had a major influence on how I approached everything during the crisis, too. It looks way worse than anything Bish did, from what I can tell at the moment. I found out about it around E3 time recently when
Schattenjäger
and a couple other folks inquired about their accounts around the same time, I spotted some really questionable stuff that everyone had missed until now, and it prompted me to commit to this project here. Being here and doing this now is clearly a good thing, though, since we're all getting back on the same page instead of being mutually sour forever over a series of mutual misunderstandings. We're clearly understanding each other a lot better right away with an open dialogue like this. Glad to see things go in that direction and that's the important thing.
I'll keep up the heightened transparency about what happened, per what I've been explaining throughout this thread, but don't break out pitchforks for folks I mention. A bunch of dumb shit happened and we all mostly just want a good, functional NeoGAF back. I've already made the necessary adjustments so that none of this ever happens again. VB3 was an ancient piece of crap so it was a lot harder to spot internal fuckery, too. I've restructured everything and cleaned house and leveraged all my experience and you see the results. I'll put in all the work necessary to repair what's broken, and I have a lot of fun stuff on the way for the community too. We're getting a 2.1 design revision soon. This thread, this project, is just to help us get on the same page in a constructive way while the most important part -- the interpersonal repairs between each of you, me, and NeoGAF -- are completed, not to dwell or assign blame for the sake of it. Thanks much and let's proceed. The PMs and emails I've gotten just in the last day has been a heartwarming tidal wave. I'm confident that NeoGAF will keep getting back on track from here and it's not like I'm giving up regardless. Shout out to
Redneckerz
preemptively for reading this whole thing. ;b
Okay, I guess we might need to break out some story time so that things don't go in unfair directions against Bish here. Buckle up, ladies.
Keep in mind that Bish was the last pre-2004 mod we had. He was a mod from circa 1998 when all the Gaming-Age staffers had admin powers on the forum by default and things were operated that way. When I formally took charge in 2004...well, let's forget about some of the initial mods I picked, hah, but after I got a decent head on my shoulders I had specific standards for moderators, attributes I looked for, and protocols everyone agreed to follow to become a moderator. I didn't ditch the pre-2004 mods who acclimated themselves to the new policies reasonably, but over time issues usually cropped up and they just weren't the right folks for the role and I had to remove them. GAF got a lot bigger and everything got a little more serious and requiring of nuance and sound judgment. Good moderation is hard. You have to constantly evaluate your own behavior. That's why I set things up to be cross-vetted by fellow moderators as a first line of defense, then tried to vet things on a systemic level from there when things got big. Every element of delegation comes with compromise and shortcomings, though.
Everything was a balancing act on my end. I wanted to be fair to the community, but also fair to the volunteers who put time in to help run this place and who helped build it. I was looser with what I allowed out of Bish because of the almost 20 years he had with the community and our own history. Also, there is some semblance of law and order to be had with those kinds of authoritarian figures on a message board. But it's not good for outcomes long-term and big egos abuse power on forums almost without fail. You also end up having a lot of pressure and attention on you in negative ways, too, when you take on that sort of enforcer (or "bad cop") persona, which can tilt you and compromise your judgment further. I've played Bad Cop plenty of times intentionally to trigger people since being thoughtful and patient 24/7 is way harder, and sometimes I've just been a dick, too. I'm not an Iain Banks Culture AI Overlord, haha. By all means make one of those though so I can take a vacation safely. :|
People change, and pressure changes people a lot. Volunteer moderators have a lot of pressure and the only accountability is to me (or on another site, whoever's in charge there; they probably aren't me, but that's for you to decide). Besada for example seemed to want to do the right thing and started out more like Mumei than Bish, well-intentioned softy, but when people started paying a lot of attention to him and talking about him off-site, he tilted and doubled down on viewing everyone as an enemy and felt he needed to take matters into his own hands etc. and ended up banning like >1000 people in 2017. I think his year-on-year ban count was 1300-something by October. Everyone was disingenuous, everyone was bigoted, everyone was evil, etc. It all became a feedback loop where he created his own enemies and then constantly checked off-site message boards to see what people were saying about him and whether he was being "doxxed." He was never really doxxed. People said shitty things about his appearance though. He wanted me to call the FBI. I tried to get everyone to stop obsessing about off-site gossip, but they kept checking and just stopped telling me about it as much, it seemed. It closed down the mod team into an insular thought bubble that was pitted against the community instead of on the same team as you guys. I was tilted by it too since people were obsessing about me and rightfully thinking I was a hypocrite about certain things. I've been way open with my life historically. So to a lot of people I must've seemed like either the world's most incompetent and hypocritical "SJW" or the world's most incompetent and hypocritical dudebro asshole socialite. I can totally see how that ended up happening.
You can't be a good moderator when you're emotionally compromised or arrogant. Good moderators can become bad moderators, and vice versa. Bish and I were pretty similar back in the day. We butted heads one time when I was about 15 years old and I impulse-demodded him for a day or so. I had just created the Off-Topic forum, back circa 2000, mostly to clean up the trashy random threads from Gaming side and keep things running smoothly there as a Gaming aggregate, but since Off-Topic was newly created, GAF was a gaming forum, etc., no one was using Off-Topic mostly and it functioned as a trash bin. I put my own non-gaming-related threads in Gaming after *I* created Off-Topic, haha. I let higher quality threads float in Gaming selectively other than my own, but that's kind of hypocritical, right? I was behaving immaturely and selfishly and gave myself a double standard. I was a kid, though, of course. We didn't have formal communication lines back then, either, and Bish moved one of my, err, off-topic threads to Off-Topic without talking to me about it first, and I got pissed off and bounced him on the spot since I was de facto in charge very soon after being modded. I was in impulsive rage kid mode, but he was an adult and raised the level of discourse between us, he took the high road, we talked it out. I reinstated him, and I recognized my own hypocrisy and started putting a good faith effort into building Off-Topic up as intended sans self-centered bullshit or double standards. Soon after that Off-Topic became legit and just as important as Gaming side to NeoGAF. There's all sorts of history like that and that's one example where Bish put me in my place for the greater good of the forum. Credit where credit is due.
I remember everything and I want to be fair to everyone, ideally, so ditching him for not necessarily fitting the moderator archetype I established later wasn't something I was keen on doing if I could avoid it. Bish always complied with my requests and adjusted himself when I asked it of him. He started coming to the irc/slack channel when I asked him so that cross-vetting and proper communication could happen between him and the rest of the mods. He adjusted to the times and did what I asked him to, so his actions until the stealth ban spree are mostly on me as Dear Leader. Make no mistake about that.
The post-election incident was something I could not just let go, because it was an active ongoing deception that had serious consequences for the boards. I had to go sift through the admin logs and track down the responsible party after mobilizing everyone to figure out what was going on. Bish was right there not saying a peep until I confronted him with evidence in-hand. That nonsense went on for over a month, hundreds of regulars who were a moderate, stabilizing influence on discussion were axed, Off-Topic descended into a yelling fest, etc. It wasn't something I could let go once I found out the full scope of what went down and how he was logging the justified bans and not logging the unjustified ones, not holding himself accountable at all, ignoring my daily expressed concerns about the state of the boards and my confusion about what the hell was prompting all of it without a peep. The only accountability response from me at that point was to permanently remove him, unfortunately, no matter what personal matters had prompted it.
Everyone's fallible. Like I said earlier, Bish had some shit go down in his personal life to my understanding around election time, and that tilted him. Assuming what he said was true, and I have little reason not to think it was true, he had a good excuse to be pissed off, but that didn't absolve him of personal responsibility. Not to say that everything was perfect before then, but it was more in balance at least. I met up with him once a few years back and he was chill. Some of you will remember that silly arm wrestling photo of us that got photoshopped a lot. He's not a bad dude at all, far as I know, and he was proud to be part of NeoGAF and my understanding is that he got those annual NeoGAF shout-outs happening at the E3 Sony Conferences personally. He was on Team NeoGAF...until the moment he wasn't anymore. He probably regrets it, I regret it, and it sucks, but it wasn't cool either and I have to make the hard calls for the greater good or this place doesn't work. Hell, I shut down with anxiety overload for like two days and the whole place imploded. This is the job. I make plenty of mistakes, but I have to correct them as soon as I can, and it's often too damned complicated to have a running dialogue about the whole thing with the public on a day to day. It's often not appropriate, either. I can share things about myself openly to whatever extent I want, but as soon as other people are involved I have to be mindful of the details about them I share with the public. Witch hunts can happen, people can get fucked with, internet can have real life consequences. I'm not going to just run my mouth off and point at people in the heat of the moment to make things easier on myself. That's not the responsible, mature, ethical thing to do. Hence all the #metoo bs being a complex ethical dilemma by its very nature, that I wanted to handle correctly and was not given time to. Hence not naming and shaming bish or throwing him to the angry mob at the time when I found out about what went down.
Most of us had shit happen that tilted us starting around a few years ago. Things fell out of balance and I was not always around since I've been doing this for a really, really, really long time and I need to go live life sometimes to not be drowned by internet crap. Some things got mishandled. For example, I called out GamerGate for being dumb and accidentally got labeled an SJW Figurehead Cuck Whatever. TBH I had never even heard the term "SJW" before GamerGate happened and thought the whole thing was dumb, but I approached it in an arrogant way and mocked a bunch of people and told them to get out of their basements and get laid and stop obsessing over some gamer girl's sex life. Hey, some of them did need to get out of their basements, sheesh, but that goes for folks on every side. That was normally how I *deescalated*, you know, get people to stop taking things overly seriously and reflect on their own behavior, but I handled it immaturely and the situation was volatile, the internet was changing rapidly, etc., and it ended up leading to lines in the sand and an endless ideological battle and a bunch of obsessive people effectively began stalking me. All my personal Facebook statuses would get posted online and gossipped about. People started digging through my entire internet history looking for dirt to "expose" me. I understand why, in retrospect, but it was still not fun at all and closed me off from my normal openness with the internet and gaf that keeps us all on the same page and talking things out instead of shit imploding. There's accountability to spread around everywhere. No hard feelings on my end anymore, though.
I could sit here typing until I die of old age just about all the nuances involved in how everything played out to get us here. But we're better off if I process it and just do the correct thing now and use what I've gleaned from all of it productively as your leader-boy. If I go authoritarian mode on you and tell you to shut up at this point it's not because I'm actually emotional or unable to have a totally open conversation about something, it's just necessary and I'm making a judgment call and asking you to respect that in the moment so we can get where we need to go. See earlier in this thread for example. I am the axis that most NeoGAF stuff rotates around one way or another, I have the most influence and authority and first-hand experience with almost every relevant event of this site's history. No one else comes close. And I'm in this role because I was evidently the natural fit for it, so I have way too much detail and nuance and hindsight to realistically share with y'all. Ultimately that's just my job to pay attention to and figure out and then make the right calls. Sometimes the right call is not explaining something in the heat of the moment and there will need to be mutual trust to get to the other side of it. We had that mutual trust for a really long time, mostly, starting with the community handing me the keys to this place and throwing money at me to run it in 2004. I've never forgotten that and I won't sell out because of that bond I have with the community from that moment. That mutual trust eroded, though, in recent years. It's my fault and your fault and no one's fault. It's water under the bridge. Let's just get it back.
Like I told P pj earlier, once I actually get through this big Ban Review and have all the hard evidence properly evaluated I'll be more comfortable talking about the other bad actors evidently involved last year. A few people did some really fucked up things during the October crisis under pretense of helping the site and myself, and their actions had a major influence on how I approached everything during the crisis, too. It looks way worse than anything Bish did, from what I can tell at the moment. I found out about it around E3 time recently when
Schattenjäger
and a couple other folks inquired about their accounts around the same time, I spotted some really questionable stuff that everyone had missed until now, and it prompted me to commit to this project here. Being here and doing this now is clearly a good thing, though, since we're all getting back on the same page instead of being mutually sour forever over a series of mutual misunderstandings. We're clearly understanding each other a lot better right away with an open dialogue like this. Glad to see things go in that direction and that's the important thing.I'll keep up the heightened transparency about what happened, per what I've been explaining throughout this thread, but don't break out pitchforks for folks I mention. A bunch of dumb shit happened and we all mostly just want a good, functional NeoGAF back. I've already made the necessary adjustments so that none of this ever happens again. VB3 was an ancient piece of crap so it was a lot harder to spot internal fuckery, too. I've restructured everything and cleaned house and leveraged all my experience and you see the results. I'll put in all the work necessary to repair what's broken, and I have a lot of fun stuff on the way for the community too. We're getting a 2.1 design revision soon. This thread, this project, is just to help us get on the same page in a constructive way while the most important part -- the interpersonal repairs between each of you, me, and NeoGAF -- are completed, not to dwell or assign blame for the sake of it. Thanks much and let's proceed. The PMs and emails I've gotten just in the last day has been a heartwarming tidal wave. I'm confident that NeoGAF will keep getting back on track from here and it's not like I'm giving up regardless. Shout out to
Redneckerz
preemptively for reading this whole thing. ;b
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diablos991
Can’t stump the diablos
Stump was soooo aggravated, haha, and a lot of us were annoyed by your personal parade at the time (no hard feelings anymore of course, just being straight with you), but he insisted on being fair to you and took his licks, he gave you that tag, and he protected you from a *lot* of permabans that were inbound on you 24/7 lol. Dozens, probably. He used you as a sort of compass to keep his own bias in check, is how I'd probably describe it. Stump was extremely fair and among the best NeoGAF has had in its moderation history, but you played an important role too on the other side of the fence. You stayed within the rules here but outside of the political bubble of insularity that had rapidly formed around election season, so you were a walking reminder of the existence of that bubble and everyone's bias.
Take this imaginary NeoGAF Medal of Freedom or whatever, but don't get a big head about it. ;b
diablos991
Can’t stump the diablos
Yeah, Stump is a sand up dude. We can disagree on things but the guy but he came through in the end and I respect him for keeping his bet even though it likely pissed some peers off.
888
Member
Definitely seems like things are getting to a new normal. Pretty excited to see a normal community again. It is something that has been MIA in general. Most of the other options around the web are too heavy on one extreme or the other.
A forum where actual civil discussions both in Gaming and OT can happen would be awesome.
I personally enjoy reading about the history of behind the scenes things. It’s always very intriguing to review things in hindsight and see what can be learned from it.
A forum where actual civil discussions both in Gaming and OT can happen would be awesome.
I personally enjoy reading about the history of behind the scenes things. It’s always very intriguing to review things in hindsight and see what can be learned from it.
Rentahamster
Rodent Whores
I did.
Bboy AJ
My dog was murdered by a 3.5mm audio port and I will not rest until the standard is dead
One thing that frustrates me about forums are controversial bans that are then forced to the PMs. It absolutely frustrated me on GAF. Any attempt at discussion or different opinions on bans resulted in a ban for derailing a thread. I get that it's important to not get worked up over every ban. It's untenable for a forum. Every ban or mod action can't and shouldn't be run as a democracy. But there are a lot of things the GAF community was very unhappy about, over and over again, and being forced to never address it pissed people off. Evilore had his post history dug up and people left using that excuse, but it's disingenuous to believe suppression of forum moderation discussion had no effect on the implosion.
Same crap is happening at Reset: https://www.resetera.com/threads/ap...anias-visit-to-a-child-internment-camp.52537/
If this forum again welcomes community discussion and opinions, and Reset is oppression era GAF, I'm moving back here. And thank goodness the forum software is finally updated. It's superb now and not old or amateur hour. I know it cost money but you have to invest in your business.
Finally, can I have my tag back?
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Good grief that thread. Reason has left the building. It reads like satire.
I'm shocked.
Unknown Quantity
Member
Bish and wasabi were decent bf2 players from what I remember when hijacking my baby bros account. Those were simpler times....
They did well on the expansion maps as well, a Mulligan is always a good and kind gesture
They did well on the expansion maps as well, a Mulligan is always a good and kind gesture
Liberty4all
Banned
Rule #3. The Left always eats its own. Hilarious seeing them argue over bimbo rescinding a ban that would for sure stand if it was a left politician being called the same. Afraid of their own community which moderates the moderators a heavily as the moderators moderate the community. What a misersble place to post or moderate. Thank God our home has been cleaned out of that crap.
Liberty4all
Banned
The problem is that it's a double standard. If they had callled any leftist woman politician a bimbo it would probably be a permanent ban no questions asked.
But yeah it's trump's wife so we will reconsider.
Hypocrisy rules for thee but not for me. Standard leftist practice.
Liberty4all
Banned
I should also add that on the right nobody would have to pass such a purity test anyways nobody would give a shit.
dolabla
Member
You might as well get prepared because they're never going to change. It's just who they are. The absolute worst parts of old GAF just copy and pasted themselves over there and they're running the show again. You will never be able to have a real discussion while sharing what you really think. It has and never will be tolerated/allowed.
It's only a matter of time until the site collapses on its on own bullshit.
Liberty4all
Banned
It’s WORSE over there now. At the least mods here were answerable to Evilore here who anyone paying attention knew was not a hardcore SJW. Now they are a purity council lead by hardcore SJW leadership. A forum nightmare.
dolabla
Member
No doubt they're on hardcore SJW steroids now.
nkarafo
Member
Yeah, it was pretty obvious to me how Era was going to end up. Which is why i didn't follow and never made an account over there. I'm not surprised at all that it's now even worse than the worst days of GAF.
Anyway, i stayed here idle waiting to see what happens. Sure, things got slow for a while but now i feel it's getting back on track and all i see is steps to the right direction.
Anyway, i stayed here idle waiting to see what happens. Sure, things got slow for a while but now i feel it's getting back on track and all i see is steps to the right direction.
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It's crazy that using the word "bimbo" can result in a ban. They seem to be just making it up as they go along. It reminds me of the world in the film Demolition Man, where people are fined for using bad words.
Redneckerz
Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
Is it that surprising though? GAF has had mods that actively kept tabs on certain members and just waited till there was something they could ban a user for. If that aint crazeh, then i don't know what is crazeh anymore.
He was popular to those that ran along with the utopian narrative of everyone cheering or loathing the same thing. Suggest otherwise and you made it to Bish's Naughty List for Naughty People.
And that part is what can be observed at ERA aswell. If you don't know to read between the lines, you wont last there. (As if it isnt already really questionable that there is a unwritten secret rulesbook in existence that you only will know of if you pay attention)
Hey AJ! Good to see you here, with all our Discord talks! I know you can make quality posts, so welcome home!
Lime tried similar over at ERA. Although he is now permed i believe. But there are users out there who have more bans under their belt than others, so its good to see the balance is as missing there as it was on OldGAF.
Now that's just a great way of dealing with my prior commentShout out to
Thanks for this Mr Malka. Joke's on you i am a fast reader yolo
You really, really should compile these posts to a book. I am actually serious here. Get some GAF merch going on!
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D
Deleted member 738976
Unconfirmed Member
How sad to work so hard only to be rejected by your own kind. Well it's not like he could have made that place look any worse than it already is.
Azurro
Banned
That was an interesting read, there's a lot of nuance to moderating discussion and allowing differing points of view to converse is not easy.
I was lurking GAF for years and years actually, but towards the time of the election the topics had gotten so crazy and dogmatic that it actually annoyed me to read, so I stopped.
I made an account at resetera after the whole drama, but it feels like walking on eggshells constantly, an endless echo chamber with posters figuring out who agrees more with the group think. I feel way more at ease here, even if I know my comments can be provocative at times, but they are never in bad blood, I'd like to think they are well thought out or at least I try.
It really is great this reboot of gaf.
I was lurking GAF for years and years actually, but towards the time of the election the topics had gotten so crazy and dogmatic that it actually annoyed me to read, so I stopped.
I made an account at resetera after the whole drama, but it feels like walking on eggshells constantly, an endless echo chamber with posters figuring out who agrees more with the group think. I feel way more at ease here, even if I know my comments can be provocative at times, but they are never in bad blood, I'd like to think they are well thought out or at least I try.
It really is great this reboot of gaf.
Phoenix RISING
Banned
Leftist this, leftist that.
I normally don't address posts that use "leftist" as a pejorative as it's own argument, because being "left" is neither an argument or a negative, but is just a dog-whistle for other conservatives to just nod in agreement regardless of any lack of substance in your post.
For example, permanent bans are not instant on Era, even for junior accounts. That's a major change from GAF, where if a junior gets banned for any reason, it's a perm. Also borrowed from Era is that GAF didn't even issue warnings before, but instant bans. Also borrowed, is that people who are banned, you usually get a message on their account explaining why.
As these systems were copied (Evilore would probably argue that an upgrade was always already planned, but the first to market gets the credit, and all others after are facsimiles), GAF isn't even consistent with the latter--some folks have been banned here with no explanation given to the community as to why they were banned.
(One of my favorite things to do is to backtrack in the post history of someone banned until I can find the offending post; that's not always possible here).
Neo-NeoGAF moderation policy now emulates Era's, so while you're throwing them under the bus, you should be thanking them, because now, the only way you get banned around here is by telling a moderator to **** off (Sambien, Naudi) or say you'll shoot your own people at the border (AranS).
(I don't even know what AngularSaxaphone did because they deleted his last three posts).
The fastest way to get banned on ERA is to be critical of sexual orientation. Even then, you'll get three tries:
1. warn
2. week ban
3. extended ban (multiple weeks to a month)
4. perm
Here, as a regular on old-GAF, if you even said "tranny," as I see folks doing casually in OT Community even though Evilore said this place is LGBT+ friendly, and that's a slur like the f-word, you would get basically two chances before a perm, and the first ban would be extended.
This post is a reason why I just ignore people who throw around "leftist" as an argument. This is a classic conservative tactic: say something full of shit, and then it's up to you to take 10+++ minutes out of your day explaining all the reasons why it's full of shit. The payoff isn't worth it in the long run, but I decided to make an exception here to make it known why I might not be replying to shitposts, and when I do, curtly.
Little to nothing in this post wrt NeoGAF is accurate. Not NeoGAF's ban policies formerly or presently, not NeoGAF's rules in general, not NeoGAF's influences. You're making a bunch of authoritative statements about NeoGAF's history and site policies based on single anecdotes as an uninvolved third party observer? Your assertions about what's being "emulated" from Resetera are fantasy. Nothing about the moderation policies here are emulated from their strategies, and nothing they did prompted anything on our part on a technical level, a rules level, or a moderation level.
NeoGAF is NeoGAF. Post here as a NeoGAF member or we're going to part ways here. That'd be a shame. Seriously. Anyone who digs The Wire is cool in my book. But it's getting to be too much and you're interfering in day to day discussions with frequent derails with metacommentary salt posts and the poorly constructed misinformation above now. Your call. Let Reset go when you're on NeoGAF. What you do elsewhere is your business of course.
Non-negotiable ultimatum.
Phoenix RISING
Banned
1. You personally created a thread in OT community and requested that we keep conversations about Era there.
2. Users continue to make passive-aggressive posts about Era in various despite your specific instructions, this thread included.
3. I reply to some of these users, and I'm the one getting singled out, "Don't talk about Era."
Is this a warning to everyone or just me?
Christopher
Member
I wouldn’t take it personally it just seemed like your post was the one to make a general statement on. All love buddy.
LegendOfKage
Member
I normally don't address posts that use "alt-right" as a pejorative as it's own argument, because being "right" is neither an argument or a negative, but is just a dog-whistle for other liberals to just nod in agreement regardless of any lack of substance in your post.
Would you also agree with this statement? I wouldn't agree with either.
And yes, if the entire argument is "they're leftists" then there's no substance in the post to begin with. The post you're addressing is an allegation of hypocrisy and unequal treatment driven by ideology, so why pretend that there's nothing else there? You can make the same argument without even mentioning a specific ideology, much less "leftists" so there's obviously more to that argument than a pejorative.
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davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
I guess what I find humorous about it is that the intent is to insult but you should use an “acceptable” insult to do so. Gendered insults are unacceptable, so make sure to use a non-gendered insult!
dream
Member
Yeah, those Lime threads were definitely an issue. I think I mentioned that somewhere in my notes on the first page here. Those honeypot threads aren't fair and are more of a way to maintain quasi-order from chaos in a low effort way. It's like when Dragona would throw an ultimatum in page 15 of some thread and say "if you say xyz after this point you're banned for 3 months." No one would even see the post, everyone would get banned. It's not fair to the users in question, though if you have a particular agenda you're trying to steer the discourse toward it's a short-term solution to that end. Those are things I've tried to learn from over the years. In the post-Dragona era I instructed the mod team to put a note in the thread title with a reference to a post number, and edit the OP itself too preferably, if a moderation ultimatum was going to be issued in the middle of a fast-paced thread. etc.
Okay, I guess we might need to break out some story time so that things don't go in unfair directions against Bish here. Buckle up, ladies.
Keep in mind that Bish was the last pre-2004 mod we had. He was a mod from circa 1998 when all the Gaming-Age staffers had admin powers on the forum by default and things were operated that way. When I formally took charge in 2004...well, let's forget about some of the initial mods I picked, hah, but after I got a decent head on my shoulders I had specific standards for moderators, attributes I looked for, and protocols everyone agreed to follow to become a moderator. I didn't ditch the pre-2004 mods who acclimated themselves to the new policies reasonably, but over time issues usually cropped up and they just weren't the right folks for the role and I had to remove them. GAF got a lot bigger and everything got a little more serious and requiring of nuance and sound judgment. Good moderation is hard. You have to constantly evaluate your own behavior. That's why I set things up to be cross-vetted by fellow moderators as a first line of defense, then tried to vet things on a systemic level from there when things got big. Every element of delegation comes with compromise and shortcomings, though.
Everything was a balancing act on my end. I wanted to be fair to the community, but also fair to the volunteers who put time in to help run this place and who helped build it. I was looser with what I allowed out of Bish because of the almost 20 years he had with the community and our own history. Also, there is some semblance of law and order to be had with those kinds of authoritarian figures on a message board. But it's not good for outcomes long-term and big egos abuse power on forums almost without fail. You also end up having a lot of pressure and attention on you in negative ways, too, when you take on that sort of enforcer (or "bad cop") persona, which can tilt you and compromise your judgment further. I've played Bad Cop plenty of times intentionally to trigger people since being thoughtful and patient 24/7 is way harder, and sometimes I've just been a dick, too. I'm not an Iain Banks Culture AI Overlord, haha. By all means make one of those though so I can take a vacation safely. :|
People change, and pressure changes people a lot. Volunteer moderators have a lot of pressure and the only accountability is to me (or on another site, whoever's in charge there; they probably aren't me, but that's for you to decide). Besada for example seemed to want to do the right thing and started out more like Mumei than Bish, well-intentioned softy, but when people started paying a lot of attention to him and talking about him off-site, he tilted and doubled down on viewing everyone as an enemy and felt he needed to take matters into his own hands etc. and ended up banning like >1000 people in 2017. I think his year-on-year ban count was 1300-something by October. Everyone was disingenuous, everyone was bigoted, everyone was evil, etc. It all became a feedback loop where he created his own enemies and then constantly checked off-site message boards to see what people were saying about him and whether he was being "doxxed." He was never really doxxed. People said shitty things about his appearance though. He wanted me to call the FBI. I tried to get everyone to stop obsessing about off-site gossip, but they kept checking and just stopped telling me about it as much, it seemed. It closed down the mod team into an insular thought bubble that was pitted against the community instead of on the same team as you guys. I was tilted by it too since people were obsessing about me and rightfully thinking I was a hypocrite about certain things. I've been way open with my life historically. So to a lot of people I must've seemed like either the world's most incompetent and hypocritical "SJW" or the world's most incompetent and hypocritical dudebro asshole socialite. I can totally see how that ended up happening.
You can't be a good moderator when you're emotionally compromised or arrogant. Good moderators can become bad moderators, and vice versa. Bish and I were pretty similar back in the day. We butted heads one time when I was about 15 years old and I impulse-demodded him for a day or so. I had just created the Off-Topic forum, back circa 2000, mostly to clean up the trashy random threads from Gaming side and keep things running smoothly there as a Gaming aggregate, but since Off-Topic was newly created, GAF was a gaming forum, etc., no one was using Off-Topic mostly and it functioned as a trash bin. I put my own non-gaming-related threads in Gaming after *I* created Off-Topic, haha. I let higher quality threads float in Gaming selectively other than my own, but that's kind of hypocritical, right? I was behaving immaturely and selfishly and gave myself a double standard. I was a kid, though, of course. We didn't have formal communication lines back then, either, and Bish moved one of my, err, off-topic threads to Off-Topic without talking to me about it first, and I got pissed off and bounced him on the spot since I was de facto in charge very soon after being modded. I was in impulsive rage kid mode, but he was an adult and raised the level of discourse between us, he took the high road, we talked it out. I reinstated him, and I recognized my own hypocrisy and started putting a good faith effort into building Off-Topic up as intended sans self-centered bullshit or double standards. Soon after that Off-Topic became legit and just as important as Gaming side to NeoGAF. There's all sorts of history like that and that's one example where Bish put me in my place for the greater good of the forum. Credit where credit is due.
I remember everything and I want to be fair to everyone, ideally, so ditching him for not necessarily fitting the moderator archetype I established later wasn't something I was keen on doing if I could avoid it. Bish always complied with my requests and adjusted himself when I asked it of him. He started coming to the irc/slack channel when I asked him so that cross-vetting and proper communication could happen between him and the rest of the mods. He adjusted to the times and did what I asked him to, so his actions until the stealth ban spree are mostly on me as Dear Leader. Make no mistake about that.
The post-election incident was something I could not just let go, because it was an active ongoing deception that had serious consequences for the boards. I had to go sift through the admin logs and track down the responsible party after mobilizing everyone to figure out what was going on. Bish was right there not saying a peep until I confronted him with evidence in-hand. That nonsense went on for over a month, hundreds of regulars who were a moderate, stabilizing influence on discussion were axed, Off-Topic descended into a yelling fest, etc. It wasn't something I could let go once I found out the full scope of what went down and how he was logging the justified bans and not logging the unjustified ones, not holding himself accountable at all, ignoring my daily expressed concerns about the state of the boards and my confusion about what the hell was prompting all of it without a peep. The only accountability response from me at that point was to permanently remove him, unfortunately, no matter what personal matters had prompted it.
Everyone's fallible. Like I said earlier, Bish had some shit go down in his personal life to my understanding around election time, and that tilted him. Assuming what he said was true, and I have little reason not to think it was true, he had a good excuse to be pissed off, but that didn't absolve him of personal responsibility. Not to say that everything was perfect before then, but it was more in balance at least. I met up with him once a few years back and he was chill. Some of you will remember that silly arm wrestling photo of us that got photoshopped a lot. He's not a bad dude at all, far as I know, and he was proud to be part of NeoGAF and my understanding is that he got those annual NeoGAF shout-outs happening at the E3 Sony Conferences personally. He was on Team NeoGAF...until the moment he wasn't anymore. He probably regrets it, I regret it, and it sucks, but it wasn't cool either and I have to make the hard calls for the greater good or this place doesn't work. Hell, I shut down with anxiety overload for like two days and the whole place imploded. This is the job. I make plenty of mistakes, but I have to correct them as soon as I can, and it's often too damned complicated to have a running dialogue about the whole thing with the public on a day to day. It's often not appropriate, either. I can share things about myself openly to whatever extent I want, but as soon as other people are involved I have to be mindful of the details about them I share with the public. Witch hunts can happen, people can get fucked with, internet can have real life consequences. I'm not going to just run my mouth off and point at people in the heat of the moment to make things easier on myself. That's not the responsible, mature, ethical thing to do. Hence all the #metoo bs being a complex ethical dilemma by its very nature, that I wanted to handle correctly and was not given time to. Hence not naming and shaming bish or throwing him to the angry mob at the time when I found out about what went down.
Most of us had shit happen that tilted us starting around a few years ago. Things fell out of balance and I was not always around since I've been doing this for a really, really, really long time and I need to go live life sometimes to not be drowned by internet crap. Some things got mishandled. For example, I called out GamerGate for being dumb and accidentally got labeled an SJW Figurehead Cuck Whatever. TBH I had never even heard the term "SJW" before GamerGate happened and thought the whole thing was dumb, but I approached it in an arrogant way and mocked a bunch of people and told them to get out of their basements and get laid and stop obsessing over some gamer girl's sex life. Hey, some of them did need to get out of their basements, sheesh, but that goes for folks on every side. That was normally how I *deescalated*, you know, get people to stop taking things overly seriously and reflect on their own behavior, but I handled it immaturely and the situation was volatile, the internet was changing rapidly, etc., and it ended up leading to lines in the sand and an endless ideological battle and a bunch of obsessive people effectively began stalking me. All my personal Facebook statuses would get posted online and gossipped about. People started digging through my entire internet history looking for dirt to "expose" me. I understand why, in retrospect, but it was still not fun at all and closed me off from my normal openness with the internet and gaf that keeps us all on the same page and talking things out instead of shit imploding. There's accountability to spread around everywhere. No hard feelings on my end anymore, though.
I could sit here typing until I die of old age just about all the nuances involved in how everything played out to get us here. But we're better off if I process it and just do the correct thing now and use what I've gleaned from all of it productively as your leader-boy. If I go authoritarian mode on you and tell you to shut up at this point it's not because I'm actually emotional or unable to have a totally open conversation about something, it's just necessary and I'm making a judgment call and asking you to respect that in the moment so we can get where we need to go. See earlier in this thread for example. I am the axis that most NeoGAF stuff rotates around one way or another, I have the most influence and authority and first-hand experience with almost every relevant event of this site's history. No one else comes close. And I'm in this role because I was evidently the natural fit for it, so I have way too much detail and nuance and hindsight to realistically share with y'all. Ultimately that's just my job to pay attention to and figure out and then make the right calls. Sometimes the right call is not explaining something in the heat of the moment and there will need to be mutual trust to get to the other side of it. We had that mutual trust for a really long time, mostly, starting with the community handing me the keys to this place and throwing money at me to run it in 2004. I've never forgotten that and I won't sell out because of that bond I have with the community from that moment. That mutual trust eroded, though, in recent years. It's my fault and your fault and no one's fault. It's water under the bridge. Let's just get it back.
Like I told P pj earlier, once I actually get through this big Ban Review and have all the hard evidence properly evaluated I'll be more comfortable talking about the other bad actors evidently involved last year. A few people did some really fucked up things during the October crisis under pretense of helping the site and myself, and their actions had a major influence on how I approached everything during the crisis, too. It looks way worse than anything Bish did, from what I can tell at the moment. I found out about it around E3 time recently when
I'll keep up the heightened transparency about what happened, per what I've been explaining throughout this thread, but don't break out pitchforks for folks I mention. A bunch of dumb shit happened and we all mostly just want a good, functional NeoGAF back. I've already made the necessary adjustments so that none of this ever happens again. VB3 was an ancient piece of crap so it was a lot harder to spot internal fuckery, too. I've restructured everything and cleaned house and leveraged all my experience and you see the results. I'll put in all the work necessary to repair what's broken, and I have a lot of fun stuff on the way for the community too. We're getting a 2.1 design revision soon. This thread, this project, is just to help us get on the same page in a constructive way while the most important part -- the interpersonal repairs between each of you, me, and NeoGAF -- are completed, not to dwell or assign blame for the sake of it. Thanks much and let's proceed. The PMs and emails I've gotten just in the last day has been a heartwarming tidal wave. I'm confident that NeoGAF will keep getting back on track from here and it's not like I'm giving up regardless. Shout out to
While you're telling stories, I've always wondered how bish was able to overrule your decision to lock the BCT thread. What happened there?
Redneckerz
Those long posts don't cover that red neck boy
It goes further, but thats a post for the specific thread on ERA.
Its for everyone. Yours just gets picked out of it because prior to that post you told me to keep it in the ERA thread, so it then looks odd that you yourself forfeit your own suggestion with a general rant on ERA.
That does not mean your post is bad perse, but it does mean it should have been made elsewhere - Hence Evil's post. Just post that kind of thing there and let this be a thread to welcome all the Bish's shadowbanned users back and what not.
And read my PM dig dang it!
We talked about it. He was quite protective of the BCT thread and the people there, and asked that he be able to handle things personally in there to smooth things over rather than the route I took. Since he felt so strongly about it I left it in his hands and that was that. In retrospect I don't know if it was really the right call. A lot of the BCT guys acted like they were deputized by Bish personally, and got real negative after Bish got booted. They'd coordinate in there or their discord and would all hit an off-topic thread at the same time to control the narrative and dogpile people. I didn't want to axe the entire subcommunity, but they were seriously harming discourse here on a daily basis and were not responsive to requests to ease off on the coordinated bombing. MHWilliams urged me to stick with softball on it because of the Importance of having an intact Black Culture group in the vein of BLM on the site.
Several of the BCT guys treated me like their enemy for being a moderate voice who was trying to calm down the boards after Bish's stealth ban nuked off-topic. I didn't say anything out of line whatsoever that I recall; very carefully worded posts that were trying to mend the anger and hostility that started to permeate everything. But especially with BCT guys, there were lots of thinly veiled comments about me being disingenuous and being their Enemy and empowering racists by encouraging civil discourse and moderation when I would post to try to course correct, and lots of cries about the forum being doomed without Bish around to righteously banhammer everything into its proper place, according to them. Was frustrating considering what went down with Bish -- sabotaging the forum, single-handedly keeping it afloat, same diff? -- and also I didn't appreciate being treated like some White Male Oppressor all of a sudden out of nowhere, but that was the identity politics horseshit in full swing post-election.
All the Hillary kids embraced identity politics hardcore, "moderate" became a dirty word to them, and I was subject to a lot of bigotry for uhhh having a white guy avatar, mostly. In full Ziggy Stardust getup, mind you, hah. They'd simultaneously make thinly veiled comments about how I was the Enemy for being a white dude, but then I'd see them go straight into some thread about Steve Bannon or whatever and talk about how they were natural allies with Jewish people and on similar tiers in the Oppression Olympics. Meanwhile I'm uhhh Jewish but I refused to take part in the Identity Politics garbage and didn't mention it. That's not how things are supposed to work here and I'm not going to play Oppression Olympics or Virtue Signalling games. You're supposed to be judged on the substance of your words and ability to support your statements with sources and evidence as necessary here. No one's supposed to be scoring points based on their genitals, their melanin, or whatever else. I contested all this where I could to get things back to sanity and the intended framework of discussion on NeoGAF, but, yeah, mass account suicides any time I posted anything to that effect by the time 2017 rolled around.
There was a Tupac thread around spring/summer last year I recall, and I went in there and entered the discussion casually. The people in the thread all turned on me instantly, told me I Just Couldn't Understand anything about Tupac or hip-hop culture, and would never be able to. I supported my statements with credible sources and got confrontational with some of them since uhhh it sure seemed like they were suggesting that I couldn't participate in a general discussion thread on my own forum because of my skin color, and yes, that was exactly what they were getting at. Not enough melanin for EviLore to have a conversation about Tupac or hip-hop on NeoGAF. Meanwhile they were not even trying to support their own statements with any sources or evidence; they refused to source or elaborate on anything they were claiming had invalidated my posts, dismissed my hard sources, and mostly just tried to get me to leave. I blew most of them up. All seemed to be recent additions to the forum, I guess, and at least one or two of them didn't know who I was or what my role here even was. That was seriously one of the most bizarre experiences I've had in 19 years on the boards here.
2017 was the absolute worst. I tried to mend the damage and get people talking again, but no matter how thoughtful and sincere I expressed it in a post people just told me I was a disingenuous racism apologist for advocating humanist principles and calm, civil discussion and uhh moderating. "Moderate" was code language for "disingenuous racist apologist enemy" though all of a sudden. Yeah, forum moderation is disingenuous, makes sense. Screaming and forming angry mobs to drive people out for not being as angry as Required or stating the Correct opinion--that's the path of virtue and enlightenment and the way discussion forums should operate, clearly.
That's just how things work though when you're emotionally compromised to the degree these iGen kids or some of the other bubble people who've been constantly melted by the authoritarian misery over time. You become that blinded by anger, resentment, fear and demand everyone else in the social bubble stays angry 24/7 too or they're the Enemy. Staying in a constant state of distress and anxiety intentionally is IRRATIONAL and UNHEALTHY, and demanding it of others is abhorrent, produces unnecessary suffering, and is flat-out fucking insane. We had a lot of depressed people on the boards here and I've had to intervene to save a bunch of gaffers from suicide attempts over the years, so this sort of stuff is serious business to me. I had never seen such a hostile, terrified, miserable atmosphere on my forum as I did on off-topic post-election. I was concerned about how many people might be driven toward self-harm by this crazy freak-out anger bubble that would not let up. In that kind of state you become unable to see your own hypocrisy, victimize yourself absolving personal accountability and never look inward critically since you're in dysfunction and in pain and frightened, and you dehumanize everyone else and project villainous attributes onto them to an unlimited degree, especially over the internet. There's no way to have a reasonable discussion with someone in that state.
Try to calm people down? "STOP NORMALIZING!!!" "THEY WIN IF WE STOP BEING ANGRY AND UPSET!!! DON'T NORMALIZE!!!" TBH, Jon Oliver's partly responsible for pushing that "don't let them normalize it!!" narrative, since his word was gospel on here around that time, but lots of other progressive voices in media share the blame for reinforcing that notion too of course. Ended up being a really harmful talking point.
Anyhow, you're all individual sentient amorphous blobs to me. Tons of people misrepresent themselves on the internet, and it's ridiculous to give people bonus points based on what they claim about their own identity and attributes on an anonymous message board. Everyone's always welcome to disclose what they wish to disclose about their ethnicity, sex, heritage, religion, orientation, whatever, and we all have our own insights based that stuff, but the only thing that matters to me here is the substance of your posts, your disposition in accordance with the rules, and your sources and citations as appropriate. I'm glad we have a lot of gender ambiguity in avatars right now to the point where people don't seem to care one way or another about whether the user they're talking to might be male or female, cis or trans, etc. No one needs to hide anything and it's up to your discretion, but it's way better if you just ignore that stuff and focus on what people have to say, not the sex/race/orientation/etc. you believe to be associated with the person saying it.
We're all one big group, as far as I'm concerned. The subcommunities built a lot of friendships and so forth over the years, but they also formed their own insular bubbles and that bred tribalism and disconnected those groups from the community as a whole over time. I sometimes made hard calls about closing down certain subcommunities when they were no longer willing to abide by the rules here and identified more as their own group than as a part of NeoGAF. I know that has caused some of its own drama over the years, but over time we tried to be less confrontational and aggro about those situations and more just encouraged folks to link up on discord or w/e and do their own thing, or create their own forum in some cases. Sometimes that's for the best, and it's not proposed in a spiteful way.
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Tornado Condor
Member
Hi everyone. Nice to be back to a GAF that isn't full of lunatics.
Evilore, i certainly hope you have changed the way you used to run things. There are sites such as voat, thebore, and KiA that love to criticize gaf but a good portion of the things they mention are justifiable. In fact, these communities are a byproduct of the unchecked behavior that was going on here and other sites. They predicted what happened years before but everyone here turned a blind eye to them. Now that all the lunatics are off to ResetERA, there isn't much criticism about gaf. I hope things stay this way.
Evilore, i certainly hope you have changed the way you used to run things. There are sites such as voat, thebore, and KiA that love to criticize gaf but a good portion of the things they mention are justifiable. In fact, these communities are a byproduct of the unchecked behavior that was going on here and other sites. They predicted what happened years before but everyone here turned a blind eye to them. Now that all the lunatics are off to ResetERA, there isn't much criticism about gaf. I hope things stay this way.
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This place is like old GAF. I was banned years ago(I was a member WAY back) by amri0x for arguing with him, and I browsed GAF forever as the ban was never lifted. I watched this place devolve into absolute madness and it was something else.
It reminds me of old GAF. I hope some old timers start coming back, as different opinions are always fun to discuss and read.
Tornado Condor
Member
It'll be like old gaf once the hot girl threads are allowed ;b
Note that I have not even started on my enormous list of accounts to review yet, since I've been storytelling above and handling individual PMs and email requests (by all means continue with the PMs and support@ emails as per the OP though, happy to help sort you out). Before the main review process even starts up, here's what we're looking at:
-Two ex-mods were working together to actively sabotage the site during the October drama by banning what appears to be hundreds of NeoGAF loyalists and reasonable people simply for not participating in the angry mob / witch hunt. I have both sets of logs in-hand and those will be the top priority to evaluate.
-Three other ex-mods so far have been identified with multiple totally senseless permabans each in the same time frame back around the first week of the drama, that don't appear actively malicious, but are all unjustified and shouldn't have prompted any moderation action at all, never mind perms, so all of their bans are being pulled from the logs as well and will be reviewed.
-All the temp bans that were in effect when we performed the vb --> XF migration look like they may have glitched and turned into permanent bans by mistake. We're pulling those logs now to confirm; if so, all will be reversed
-The rest of the several hundred post-election stealth bish bans are on my list and will be fully reviewed, as noted
-Seems I may need to reverse the majority of those...couple thousand....2016-2017 besada bans I mentioned earlier......
-This is more of a gaming side matter and looking into it properly was on the agenda already to handle separately since the timeline stretches back quite a ways, but It appears another one of our ex-mods had a bit of a silent personal crusade going on, and based on four or five incidents I've come across so far, they were permanently banning anyone who so much as typed "gamergate" or hinted at all that they were not necessarily 100% pro-Anita or pro-Zoe in those stupid SJW vs GG battleground threads on gaming side, regardless of what was actually materially stated in the posts. Scope of damage TBD, but wouldn't surprise me if that turns out to be in the hundreds of users unjustly banned. Of the aforementioned handful of these I've been asked to review in the last couple days, no one was even saying anything negative, inflammatory, sexist, or hateful. Straight to perm, all extensively recorded in the proper channels with thorough user-facing explanations, just all of it's horseshit.
I'll make it right.
-Two ex-mods were working together to actively sabotage the site during the October drama by banning what appears to be hundreds of NeoGAF loyalists and reasonable people simply for not participating in the angry mob / witch hunt. I have both sets of logs in-hand and those will be the top priority to evaluate.
-Three other ex-mods so far have been identified with multiple totally senseless permabans each in the same time frame back around the first week of the drama, that don't appear actively malicious, but are all unjustified and shouldn't have prompted any moderation action at all, never mind perms, so all of their bans are being pulled from the logs as well and will be reviewed.
-All the temp bans that were in effect when we performed the vb --> XF migration look like they may have glitched and turned into permanent bans by mistake. We're pulling those logs now to confirm; if so, all will be reversed
-The rest of the several hundred post-election stealth bish bans are on my list and will be fully reviewed, as noted
-Seems I may need to reverse the majority of those...couple thousand....2016-2017 besada bans I mentioned earlier......
-This is more of a gaming side matter and looking into it properly was on the agenda already to handle separately since the timeline stretches back quite a ways, but It appears another one of our ex-mods had a bit of a silent personal crusade going on, and based on four or five incidents I've come across so far, they were permanently banning anyone who so much as typed "gamergate" or hinted at all that they were not necessarily 100% pro-Anita or pro-Zoe in those stupid SJW vs GG battleground threads on gaming side, regardless of what was actually materially stated in the posts. Scope of damage TBD, but wouldn't surprise me if that turns out to be in the hundreds of users unjustly banned. Of the aforementioned handful of these I've been asked to review in the last couple days, no one was even saying anything negative, inflammatory, sexist, or hateful. Straight to perm, all extensively recorded in the proper channels with thorough user-facing explanations, just all of it's horseshit.
I'll make it right.
Bboy AJ
My dog was murdered by a 3.5mm audio port and I will not rest until the standard is dead
Love it.Note that I have not even started on my enormous list of accounts to review yet, since I've been storytelling above and handling individual PMs and email requests (by all means continue with the PMs and support@ emails as per the OP though, happy to help sort you out). Before the main review process even starts up, here's what we're looking at:
-Two ex-mods were working together to actively sabotage the site during the October drama by banning what appears to be hundreds of NeoGAF loyalists and reasonable people simply for not participating in the angry mob / witch hunt. I have both sets of logs in-hand and those will be the top priority to evaluate.
-Three other ex-mods so far have been identified with multiple totally senseless permabans each in the same time frame back around the first week of the drama, that don't appear actively malicious, but are all unjustified and shouldn't have prompted any moderation action at all, never mind perms, so all of their bans are being pulled from the logs as well and will be reviewed.
-All the temp bans that were in effect when we performed the vb --> XF migration look like they may have glitched and turned into permanent bans by mistake. We're pulling those logs now to confirm; if so, all will be reversed
-The rest of the several hundred post-election stealth bish bans are on my list and will be fully reviewed, as noted
-Seems I may need to reverse the majority of those...couple thousand....2016-2017 besada bans I mentioned earlier......
-This is more of a gaming side matter and looking into it properly was on the agenda already to handle separately since the timeline stretches back quite a ways, but It appears another one of our ex-mods had a bit of a silent personal crusade going on, and based on four or five incidents I've come across so far, they were permanently banning anyone who so much as typed "gamergate" or hinted at all that they were not necessarily 100% pro-Anita or pro-Zoe in those stupid SJW vs GG battleground threads on gaming side, regardless of what was actually materially stated in the posts. Scope of damage TBD, but wouldn't surprise me if that turns out to be in the hundreds of users unjustly banned. Of the aforementioned handful of these I've been asked to review in the last couple days, no one was even saying anything negative, inflammatory, sexist, or hateful. Straight to perm, all extensively recorded in the proper channels with thorough user-facing explanations, just all of it's horseshit.
I'll make it right.
I knew something was up when I got a ban for something weak with a warning my next one would be a perm. I've been banned a bunch but I've also been here since the beginning. Surely less than a ban a year--very reasonable. Then the final ban came and it was a perm. Absolutely ridiculous.
Let's get GAF back to the fun days. With constant reinvestment into forum stuff, too. This site looks great.
davepoobond
you can't put a price on sparks
Yeah people I recognized were dropping like flies the past couple years. At some point I wasn’t even reading any names I was familiar with, so it wasn’t as fun anymore.
Tornado Condor
Member
Not only that but most of the content of the new posters were "fuck X," X being anything they disagreed with.
The Faceless Master
Member
after reading all this info about all the behind the back shenanigans and shadow bans etc, it made me realize that the time when all that was going on was the most browsable GAF had been for me in maybe a decade.
is that what an echo chamber feels like? i legit kinda enjoyed that time period.
is that what an echo chamber feels like? i legit kinda enjoyed that time period.
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diablos991
Can’t stump the diablos
So your enjoyment correlates with the amount of times you can read about Trump in a day?
Off topic was unreadable and Gaming side was only OK if you filtered out all the political noise.
Bboy AJ
For sure. And yeah, that wasn't handled fairly at all and I should've kept better tabs on everything, my bad. The ancient vb3 platform and its godawful logging really didn't help matters though. It was difficult to identify foul play on that piece of junk and I mostly had to rely on trust and protocol being followed, and you see how that played out. We were getting upwards of like 75,000 posts per day, I had over 50 moderators, etc., too, so I was delegating more, I was more distant (various reasons as mentioned earlier), etc. Made it harder to spot the shift from all the familiar faces -- who were apparently getting torpedoed out of the picture in many cases :| -- over to the bunch of temper tantrum toddlers we ended up flooded with. Yuck. Gettin' the band back together now though! And that sort of fuckery won't happen again.
Plenty more improvements on the way, too. I have a design team working on a major polish and usability update that should hit around the end of the month. Ground-up overhaul to level things up some more. We'll see how many thousands of these bans I can adjudicate between now and then haha. Oh, what was your old tag again btw? I'll hook you up.
Tornado Condor
Member
Gettin' the band back together now though! And that sort of fuckery won't happen again.
Plenty more improvements on the way, too. I have a design team working on a major polish and usability update that should hit around the end of the month. Ground-up overhaul to level things up some more. We'll see how many thousands of these bans I can adjudicate between now and then haha. Oh, what was your old tag again btw? I'll hook you up.
I'll take a tag. Surprise me
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