Board 8 > Fandom bans politics on GameFAQs (outside of Current Events)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Isquen posted...

This is Isquen erasure :(

I have not done this because of any particular individual at all, I have no way of knowing who even makes the topics!

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

Wang this idea makes you objectively smarter than the entirety of Fandom.

Nope. You guys don't realize that the goal of this policy is to reduce overall site activity and moderation labor required for gfaqs. Any solution you propose must help Fandom in that sense.

I think a great option would be to trust the volunteer moderators to handle this stuff for their own community (and if places like CE can't, then sure ban them). Then no labor is required. But clearly Fandom doesn't trust the community mods.

I miss the relatively civil politics topic on board 8 and wish it wasn't closed. Even if I basically never posted there; it was a place I liked to read. And not just because of the great wordplay in the titles but that definitely helped.

I cant believe that was the last word play politics topic.

Guess PotD was too political

first they came for the contests, then they came for the POTDs

nothing is more political than voting

Wanglicious posted...

making the tag auto-blocked by default so you have to opt into that tag, also easy. if you want to limit political talk on a subject, you can also just make the rule of political talk should have the tag, otherwise moderate it. essentially the same rule as this only instead of "ban outright" it's "in a topic with the tag." more complicated and annoying sure but far less egregious than an outright ban.

This option was discussed and rejected apparently

doesn't surprise me at all. i'd expect both of those to have come up first before going 'nope, just ban it all, no halfway measures, fuck 'em.'

which is to say yeah, the policy is to run people off the site. there isn't any other actual answer. the theory would go "heavily political people are toxic, we don't want them, it'll be a less toxic community without them so we'll just ban all politics and kick them all out."

now this ends up grabbing way more people in the crossfire but the ends justify the means. until those ends result in losing so many people that even with desperate attempts like, say, another contest, you don't get remotely close to the traffic you once had because you ran people off and they don't care.

I don't think they care if they run people off or not.

What they care about is that they needed to employ someone to run this site and fandom works off doing as little work as possible. Because an issue came up they felt they needed to deal with, rather than deal with it they took the path that leads them to need to have less community involvement now and in the future.

Rip POTD 1998?-2024

A real one.

1999

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1-what-do-you-think-about-polls-on-web-sites

Dang.

I want a potd where we can call the "admin" stupid.

did they get mad about how many poll of the days talk about politics?
was the poll in fact a political one and therefore got suspended?

like take this one, almost a year ago to the date:

04/22/2023 How concerned are you about environmental issues like climate change, pollution, and sustainability?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/9165-how-concerned-are-you-about-environmental-issues-like

decided to check through polls and this one stood out the most for the year so far as a very political subject:

01/28/2024 Are you concerned about your privacy on the Internet?
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/9446-are-you-concerned-about-your-privacy-on-the-internet

internet privacy is highly political with lawsuits in the billions, in fact this poll was likely inspired from Google's 5 billion dollar settlement the month prior to it.

how dare the poll of the day talk about such subjects!

red13n posted...

I don't think they care if they run people off or not.

What they care about is that they needed to employ someone to run this site and fandom works off doing as little work as possible. Because an issue came up they felt they needed to deal with, rather than deal with it they took the path that leads them to need to have less community involvement now and in the future.

I think this is really the underlying driver to all of this. Fandom gets by from monetizing off of the free labor of nerds to appear in search results, and message boards don't align to that model.

Poll of the day is still there, there just is none, so not sure it's removed per say. Didn't this also happen recently?

ctesjbuvf posted...

Poll of the day is still there, there just is none, so not sure it's removed per say. Didn't this also happen recently?

We have had times when the POTD started blank, but it was usually fixed by now.

Yeah but it is still there

Is it possible that there was a poll queued up but then got taken down ahead of time because it was seen as "too politcal" and they never replaced it?

Or done as a protest maybe.

Whatever the case, weird week at GameFAQs.

ctesjbuvf posted...

Yeah but it is still there

I imagine it's just automatically there regardless of whether there's content programmed for it

Leonhart4 posted...

I imagine it's just automatically there regardless of whether there's content programmed for it

Sure, but it not being removed makes it seem like not an active decision unless the just removed a political poll.

They probably forgot to schedule a poll for today, which is why there's no poll on the homepage. When DToast gets online, he'll probably get a new poll up and running.

They schedule polls very far in advance. If it's blank now, I wonder when Toast actually stopped maintaining it.

If the last poll ever was about Discord then that's hilarious.

Something similar happened pretty recently although it was fixed by now.

Well polls are political, can't have polls on gamefaqs! It's all supposed to be about video games. So we can't be asking users questions. It might make new users uncomfortable and they decide to leave when they see a poll. They'll be removing the polling option from topics soon.

Oh hey it came back at some point.

Pretty sure one of the admins was bragging about how much time he has to spend on the site but the poll was missing for like 12 hours.

Also fuck fandom.

(From Disneyland no work today)

dang i caught my first moderation in around 20 years (last one was 2004 i think maybe even 2003) for not talking about minecraft in the minecraft topic

stay safe everyone

Minecraft is serious business.

Minecraft featuring Jack Black as Steve

Thorn posted...

dang i caught my first moderation in around 20 years (last one was 2004 i think maybe even 2003) for not talking about minecraft in the minecraft topic

stay safe everyone

What did they even put down as the reason?

Thorn posted...

dang i caught my first moderation in around 20 years (last one was 2004 i think maybe even 2003) for not talking about minecraft in the minecraft topic

stay safe everyone

ok but this kind of proves that as long as its on Minecraft were good

ChaosTonyV4 posted...

ok but this kind of proves that as long as its on Minecraft were good

but do we need a Minecraft tag now so I can ignore the topics

Kenri posted...

What did they even put down as the reason?

"Other Issues - Criminal activity, drug use, cheating in online games, personally identifiable information, etc Interfere with others using the site or otherwise disrupt the site"

^ seriously?

I'm looking at the post on the log site ("gonna drop kayfabe for a second here" probably didn't help, lol) and there's no PII in there. Even the linked tweets didn't have PII. It's like, since they haven't gotten around to updating the user content rules they're just clutching for whatever could fit. Interesting.

Would have more respect if they actually did mod the post for "Off Topic", lol.

Oh, the bold there is mine - NFUN took that from my laughing about it on Discord. I bolded it because I found the irony (the post was about other people doxxing) funny.

The mod also noted that it crossed into politics and directed me to CE if I wanted to talk about it. I'm not contesting or anything even though I think I have a technical argument that relaying news reports about a court case is more news than politics... (of course the judicial system is inherently political but then so is damn near everything) but I feel like such a dispute would just be re-litigating the arguments in the feedback topic and the higher-ups clearly want to close the book on that so it's not like I blame the mod for that.

Blame the mod. They always have the choice to ignore a report, but they didn't.

Historically (all 3 days of it), political topics outside of CE are deleted for off topic. Political posts inside topics are deleted for Disruptive or Other with an explanation of the new rule about politics. As the rule is new, there's isn't really a dedicated category for it at this time.

i mean it still runs the issue that the news is politics, politics is banned, news isn't, so ???.

like this isn't even a hypothetical with something as basic as poll of the day - internet privacy is highly political, we had a poll on it in January earlier this year, and it's blatantly because of the Google court case with a 5 billion dollar settlement.

it took the news then asked a political question - internet privacy - with multiple different answers.

there's no guideline or explanation whatsoever on how news can be covered really. intentionally broad sure but still really dumb at best, an asshole move at worst.

foolm0r0n posted...

Blame the mod. They always have the choice to ignore a report, but they didn't.

Yeah this. The fact that anyone is actually enforcing this is pretty disappointing.

My next stage of copium is that mods will delete posts sometimes just so they can say they're making a token effort, but leave as many untouched as they can

Like my posts in the Minecraft topic were left alone and I didn't adhere to the parody, so here's hoping

If like 100 people from this board all went to CE at once to discuss politics I wonder if that would be allowed or if it would constitute board invasion.

Do we have 100 people here who even play minecraft on a regular basis?

Probably not, I'm just thinking about the logistics of being "invited to CE" on a website that has consistently banned people for trying to go to other boards in any sort of group.

PeaceFrog posted...

Do we have 100 people here who even play minecraft on a regular basis?

https://imgur.com/a/75pvcUZ