Telika: For the background. With Elcook, it was about a forumer with a very long history of violent racist diatribes and neonazi group support, who started using a well known white nationalist symbol as an avatar. The answer was "playing dumb" denial (it's probably meaning something else entirely). With Ashlee, much later, just to check out of exasperation, I was myself pretending to be a nazi oppressed by political correctness and asking if I could use a swastika as an avatar. Apparently that would have been no problem (again, maybe she assumed I was a hindouist nazi so it'd be ok). People seem a bit surprised by my contempt for gog...
fronzelneekburm: Yeah, I'm afraid you're going to have to post some proof to support those wild allegations.
Also, Ashlee is Chinese, so she's probably not even aware of the unfortunate connotations swastikas have in Europe.
You may be correct. I'm now trying to reconstruct the puzzle of escalating forum/chat/mail interactions (with some missing pieces) and some contradictions could be explained by cultural ignorance just as well as (or at some points better than) by the assumed PR flip-flopping. My yearslong growing disgust with gog's handling of its "community" has tainted these disputes with the staff, and rendered them antagonistic to the point of dismissing unlikely honesty from both sides.
There is an ideological bias in how one implements a "code of conduct" and delineates "hate speech" or "political comment" (is it "political" to treat global warming as a fact or evoke it at all ?), and there's a cultural aspect to the codes and references used to propagate and consolidate ideologies (a website tolerating or filled with segregationist symbolism, for instance, defines itself as such a territory to those, excluded or included, who recognize them, be the mods willing or blind to it). Due to the forum's history, I tend to distrust GOG's ideological bias more than its savviness (especially as some of the latter should be expected from CMs), but both factors can lead to similar results. And also interact (if, say, racism is no big deal to you then of course you won't be aware of its symbols, but then maybe don't pretend to uphold "hate speech rules" on your forum).
So, mix of both. I've sought, two or three years ago, to get a better feel of which it was, and the result gave me a disgusting impression of "deliberately playing dumb" about an imagery that was obvious to me. But maybe this mix is not homogeneous throughout GOG. Maybe I've been unduly shocked by ignorance, maybe rightfully shocked by indifference. What I didn't want is to be played by deliberate creeps acting innocent. But if Ashlee's cultural background is that different from Europe's, then it indeed reopens interpretations.
The incriminated imagery has left GOG since then (as far as I know, i'm not foruming much anymore), so it's not a current matter. But maybe also an element for more indulgent interpretations.
