Poll of the Day > Blocking off CE seems like an extra cruel move

(+) Yeah! (+)

There are plenty of things they could have done to regulate political discussion without locking access to the most popular board on the site by far.

There are probably people on CE that Ill never interact with again, its kinda sad when you think about it.

Very questionable move

Well if it makes you feel any better, they'll all probably come here eventually.

Mostly, I'm guessing they're just looking at CE, recognizing that it's the one that's taking the most mod resources to manage, and trying to solve that problem in a manner that doesn't immediately destroy the site's user count (instead, slowly bleeding users while they try to promote other parts of the site to keep the total user base roughly the same).

In practice, there's a good chance the problem users from CE will just keep bothering other boards and require mods to pay attention to more places, so it's not necessarily the best plan.

Yellow posted...

Well if it makes you feel any better, they'll all probably come here eventually.

they mostly come at night mostly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrVZHxH2O1I

whatever man, this shits boring. who cares

Another place is perfect for them. No one is there and it's literally another place.

Yellow posted...

Well if it makes you feel any better, they'll all probably come here eventually.

That doesn't make me feel better.

Damn_Underscore posted...

There are plenty of things they could have done to regulate political discussion without locking access to the most popular board on the site by far.

There are probably people on CE that Ill never interact with again, its kinda sad when you think about it.

No it wasn't it was the right thing to do.

I do not like DToast and Fandom they are the worst thing to happen to GFAQS but that is one decision I do wholeheartedly agree with. Something had to be done about the trolling going on in CE and it was clear raising the Karma level to 50 to entre wasn't working so they did the next logical step they could in closing it off.

Sorry but you have only got yourself to blame because you couldn't abide by the rules and it cost you access to C.E.

CassandraCroft posted...

it was clear raising the Karma level to 50 to entre wasn't working so they did the next logical step they could in closing it off.

The actual next logical step would be to raise the karma limit to 300-500 or so and make more liberal use of usermap axes for repeat offenders (possibly modifying the penalties to include a 300 karma penalty for any suspension and applying that to all accounts on a given usermap). 50 karma's nothing, so it's trivial for trolls to just make a bunch of extra accounts and put a modicum of effort into getting their karma up so they have a backup. Maintaining multiple accounts like that for over a year while being careful never to use any of them on the same IP address, though? That's a level of dedication very few trolls are willing to put in, such that stamping them out on the rare occasions they crop up isn't hard.

But no, they just want to LUE the board.

adjl posted...

The actual next logical step would be to raise the karma limit to 300-500 or so and make more liberal use of usermap axes for repeat offenders (possibly modifying the penalties to include a 300 karma penalty for any suspension and applying that to all accounts on a given usermap). 50 karma's nothing, so it's trivial for trolls to just make a bunch of extra accounts and put a modicum of effort into getting their karma up so they have a backup. Maintaining multiple accounts like that for over a year while being careful never to use any of them on the same IP address, though? That's a level of dedication very few trolls are willing to put in, such that stamping them out on the rare occasions they crop up isn't hard.

But no, they just want to LUE the board.

There is a thread over on CE using the term LUE can you someone please tell me what is/was this LUE and why did they get rid of it/close off access?

Sorry for the ignorance but my account is only a couple of years old.

CassandraCroft posted...

There is a thread over on CE using the term LUE can you someone please tell me what is/was this LUE and why did they get rid of it/close off access?

Life, the Universe, and Everything was a social board in GameFAQs' early days that was particularly rampant with trolling and other shenanigans. To solve this, the board was made private, making it so no new users could join and anyone who was banned would lose access permanently. As expected, this caused the board to die a slow death, instead of just removing the misbehaviour problems and allowing a healthy social community to remain.

Basically, it was exactly what's happened to CE. Somehow, Dtoast insists that he's both aware of LUE and yet also doesn't expect this to have the same effect, which is some pretty questionable logic.

adjl posted...

Life, the Universe, and Everything was a social board in GameFAQs' early days that was particularly rampant with trolling and other shenanigans. To solve this, the board was made private, making it so no new users could join and anyone who was banned would lose access permanently. As expected, this caused the board to die a slow death, instead of just removing the misbehaviour problems and allowing a healthy social community to remain.

Basically, it was exactly what's happened to CE. Somehow, Dtoast insists that he's both aware of LUE and yet also doesn't expect this to have the same effect, which is some pretty questionable logic.

Thank you for the resonse.

Is it still around anywhere? Or is it completely deleted? What happened in there to make the admins to close it off? It sounded like an interesting board.

I do not think CE will die. I post/lurk in there every day and I am always seeing new names I haven't seen before.

Why didn't they just keep the politics board and say you could only post about politics there? Why make it a random social board?

CassandraCroft posted...

Is it still around anywhere?

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/402-Life-the-universe-and-everything

Only mods and admins can even access it now. It's not technically deleted, but it might as well be.

CassandraCroft posted...

What happened in there to make the admins to close it off?

I can't speak to it personally because it was before my time (this was late 90's/early 00's, and while I was around in that I was using GameFAQs for game FAQs and occasionally posting on boards once I turned 13 in 2002, I wasn't exactly up to date on deeper community drama), but as I understand it was much of the same stuff that prompted them to kill Politics and CE: people trolling and being offensive on a scale that demanded more of the mods' time than they were willing to keep spending.

CassandraCroft posted...

I do not think CE will die. I post/lurk in there every day and I am always seeing new names I haven't seen before.

It won't die any time soon, but it will eventually. The site as a whole is already dwindling because more people are drifting away than are being replaced by new users, and now for CE in particular no new users will ever be joining the community. With CE no longer readily accessible through the board list, existing users stumbling across it is now less likely (they either have to really go looking for it or be linked to it), and anyone that's spent any time in Purg since the beginning of May will be locked out, all of which adds up to a significantly reduced chance that any departing users are replaced. That, in turn, fuels a death spiral: As the community shrinks, it becomes less active, which causes more people to drift away because it's not active enough to be interesting anymore, which shrinks it further. Fandom's already used "hardly anyone posted there anyway" to justify closing the Religion board altogether, so I expect there'll be some activity threshold below which they'll just close CE themselves.

Ultimately, though, I think that's kind of what Fandom is going for. Veteran users that mostly just hang out in the same community boards all day don't generate as much ad revenue as users that bounce between multiple game boards and info pages for those games (and while I have no actual stats to support this, I'd expect that long-time users are more likely to block ads than new ones because they experienced the site before the ads got so bad). Devoting bandwidth and mod resources to maintain those community boards isn't going to be as profitable as shifting the focus to attracting more users that just want to talk about games. Toss in that Fandom's executives seem to believe that new users are going to be turned away by controversial or offensive content on social boards (never mind how vanishingly rare it is for anyone that isn't already established as a GameFAQs user to accidentally stumble across any of the social boards), and you've got a move to push out social boards altogether.

Interesting, the messages for LUE and CE are different. Apparently the mods could invite you into CE if they wanted to.

@adjl

Thank you for everything you have been brilliant.

Also I totally agree with what you have said.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


I'm mostly speaking in general, like I wouldn't know who I haven't seen unless they posted here or something

Damn_Underscore posted...

There are probably people on CE that Ill never interact with again, its kinda sad when you think about it.

Thankfully the sex and sexuality board has a Discord server for this reason. That board sadly went on the chopping block and I would have missed some folk. With that said some have got lost in the shuffle but it's better than all of them going. Maybe do something like that yourself?

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


Yeah, I thought it was something on that level. LUE was basically GameFAQs 4chan, in a lot of ways, and that definitely got taken too far on a few occasions.

I wonder how many people had this reaction to the whole thing
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/12b69b09.jpg

Locking the most popular board on the site away feels like a deliberate effort to kill the site.

It would be like if your Xbox locked you from playing Halo until you played Gears of War first.

didnt a kid from LUE burn down a church back in the day?

the best was shutting down the politics board, foricing all those users to go to CE, then restricting politics talk to only CE, then purging all their members because the politics became too much. I'll stick around because while my days of dialogue and discussion are gone i do enjoy lurking and doing drive by posts but these forums are going the way of LUE and those marking posts to purge people out think theyre cleaning up the site but theyre really killing it in the end.

They think the decent thing to do is slowly kill the boards rather than just showing mercy and putting us out of our misery.

We all know they want to shut down the boards. They didn't go out and buy gamefaqs directly, it was just part of a bundle of websites they bought. They are harvesting all the good content and guides and whatnot from here before they kill the boards and then say "oh well nobody is coming here anymore let's shutter down"

This is wild.

Haven't been on GameFAQs in years and they seriously LUE'd Current Events.

That place was a quarantine.