Bye. I support a person's right to choose what they permit in the forum they control. I hope you find a forum that has rules that you like better.

Yes, its known that capitalism and free speech are opposites of each other because the core values of control and chaos differ. Obviously, in a company hosted forum, its company that sets the rules up and customers can easily create own related projects, alternative forums, IRC channels, unrestricted discussion clubs if desired.

However the core issue is that this project run without steering of any kind, and while members such as Emob78 have used it as customers do to express own educated opinion, some other groups used it to slip in own agendas, some of which was hate spread, drama spread and "bs" spread, i.e."international free discussion forum" which realistically can only be hosted by a government or community structure, but not a commercial entity.

All the qualifiers in the world can't wash away the fact that this is a sappy goodbye thread in disguise. Goodbye, Emob78! You shall be missed. At least, until we eventually get bored and replace you.

(Weirdly appropriate-feeling flippancy aside, it's been fun for real.)

Maybe not around the time it was locked, but there were a lot of really good conversations that happened in there over the years. We didn't all agree (obviously) and things could get tense and hair-pullingly frustrating, but the way it kept pulling back into actual constructive conversation was kind of admirable. Not that I'd expect most people to know that. The thing was almost unreadably huge, so it's obviously easier to take someone else's word for it or judge the whole thing based on its less than wonderful end.

That... would be awesome. Guerrilla grocery store saloons could totally become an internet trend.

Just a heads up: the content it previously failed to, er, contain moved here.

Is the thread title a slam at me?

I'm serious! :P
Are there other people in here with just one testicle?

If there are maybe we could form a support group or something.

/\ what he said

What people should realize is one thing though: moderating will almost never coincide exactly with what you think should be moderated. I never felt strongly one way or the other about whether the forums should be moderated or not, but I'm willing to take the good with the bad. If we have no moderation, I can post whatever I want, but we will end up having the kind of flame wars we have now. If we do have moderations, these kind of threads will get locked, but so will some threads that according to me are "harmless non-insulting to anyone" and should remain open.

2 years ago any mention of moderation was almost universally rejected.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/please_modirate_the_fourms

It wasn't that people were "better" two years ago. The mess we see now is an inevitable consequence of the no-moderation we wanted back then. To paraphrase one particular post: "My problem isn't the idea of self-moderation. it's the a-typical result. Everyone is supposed to be civil and rational, but inevitably a few turds will show up who will turn any even slightly political or controversial discussion into a cesspit."
I wondered how long it will take for this to happen. Well, I got my answer. Less than 2 years.

Well, if moderation continues, then it's just as inevitable that most of us are going to see at least one thread locked/deleted despite believing that it shouldn't be, before 2 years are up. I only hope that when that day comes you remember the alternative of non-moderation before throwing a tantrum and declaring that you're leaving because the mods are "abusing their banning power".

      

Although I'm largely only present in the Discord chat room nowadays (thanks to tinyE, who persuaded me not to leave the GOG community entirely), I thought I should probably throw in my $0.02 on this regard, as I genuinely hope that Fables is going to make a sincere effort to get this problem sorted. I'd really like to come back to a forum that is like the community as it was two years ago. That community still exists in spirit - the cheeky, chirpy nature of the Discord chat room proves it.

I'm largely on the same page as adaliabooks and ZFR, although I would mention that the internet on the whole is a VERY different place to what it was two years ago. Back then, the overwhelming majority of commenters on forums were rational, reasonable, decent people who held moderate views. Now they're full of people who have either come out of the woodwork to spread their extremist views, people who are PAID to spread such extremist views, people who get a rise out of spread extremist views although they don't actually believe in them, and people who have been radicalised by the above.

The world has become a very toxic place. I never realised how toxic until a few months ago when I was called by a old friend's wife to ask me if I'd get in touch with him and talk some sense into him - he'd been arrested for stabbing a guy in the street. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't spoken to him in about a year, but this was a man who, in the space of that year, had been transformed from a largely apolitical, gentle kind of guy into a short-tempered, one-track-minded bigot. Turns out he'd become involved with the "wrong crowd" (I won't say which crowd in the interest of peace here). And no, I couldn't get through to him. I haven't spoken to him since. I also had to stop doing charity work (food bank) because I was being threatened, including with my own obituary being pushed through my door and posted on lampposts in my street. That's the kind of world we live in.

Point is, the toxic, conspiracy-theorist mentality that's been spreading through Europe and America these past two years has spread to near ubiquity in every corner of the internet: Facebook, Twitter, news sites, gaming sites. You can't have a public debate anywhere about politics or everyday life without various individuals hijacking the conversation with conspiracy theorism and hatred. Regardless of your political views, certain things have long been held as being incompatible with common decency: racism, sexism, death threats, acts of vengeance. We have a sizable minority who are hacking away at the pillars of civilised society out of some nihilistic desire to bring the whole house down just because they can.

Two years ago this forum didn't NEED moderation because people like Bradley and Infinite were a minority who didn't last five minutes here. The level of political toxícity wasn't there at the time. GOG was also a much smaller, less known site with a much more tight-knit community.

And I must confess that my memory of this forum over the past couple of years has become so poisoned that I could have sworn that Emob78 was one of those who tended towards spreading the aforementioned hate and bile. Looking back, I've noticed that I was very wrong in that perception - he's proven to be a quite rational, quite reasonable debater, from what I can see in the right-wing libertarian corner of politics. I respect that. Doesn't mean I have to agree with him, but I respect him and I respect his views in Post #1.

Bringing up the topic of Donald Trump for a moment (or any analogue political decision of late: be it Brexit, Front National, AfD, PiS, Russia...) - I don't think that anyone should be attacked for the mere act of voting for something. You may have voted for Trump solely on the basis of his anarchocapitalist views. Your vote for Brexit may be out of a genuine concern for "controlled immigration", and you may genuinely not be a racist. That's fine. Elections, after all, are an anonymous thing. However, I do believe that if you choose to express your preference for and if you openly campaign for a given candidate or option, you assume the full package deal of that conviction and are expected to answer for the consequences of it, especially when the policies or views of that candidate, option or movement are openly known and highly representative of it.

I do think that there are many important issues that are in need of discussion: immigration, the future of the EU, the role of Islam in the world, free trade, journalism standards. But to be honest, many people aren't interested in civil debate. Dare I say it, many people simply are not informed, educated or qualified enough to debate these topics in a qualified manner. So they come to the table with half-cocked political views and mould the facts to meet these, with supposedly ironclad sources whose URLs contain "wordpress.com" or pretend to be serious newspapers that don't actually exist. We have a wonderful and quite untranslatable word for these in German: "Stammtischparolen". Loosely translated, it refers to the uneducated circlejerk banter within pub or restaurant gatherings of like-minded people, which serve basically to confirm each other's prejudices. And I have zero tolerance for such attitudes and ignorance, which is why I tend to fly off the handle about it.

And if the idiots among you are going to take my list above as an incentive to raise more political hell, then go fuck yourselves.

At the end of the day, liberal society is based on the assumption that human beings are capable of independently conducting themselves with common decency. This can no longer be assumed, and so rules and laws become necessary. GOG is a microcosm of that societal failure. Fables has recognised the need to react to this failure, but GOG as a whole has reacted much too late, so the process of change, however necessary, is going to be that much more painful.

And if you don't like having to conduct yourselves like human beings, there's always 4chan, Indymedia, Breitbart, Infowars, Vice and various sub-Reddits for your "political persuasion".

On a more light-hearted note, shouldn't the heading for this thread be "My last willy and testicle"?

I sincerely disagree with this assessment.

Here's the thing: it shouldn't be hard to voice your opinions, whatever they are, without being an asshole. If someone absolutely needs the option to insult and demean others in the process of making an argument then they are exactly that: an asshole. Freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom of consequence, and in that case it's the forum telling you "Goodbye and good riddance".

Oh, come on. One thread that gets trolled to Hell and back locks down and it's suddenly reason to leave because there was some semblance of discussion on occasion between the flamebaiting and mudslinging?
Your right to agree or disagree hasn't been removed. You're still free to hold whatever opinion you so desire. The difference is that you can no longer be abrasive with it. Sure, we've always had people who got overly-offended about things, this is true. But we also had the exact opposite where people would throw around rape threats, death threats, and all sorts of other insane insults and would run to "lol u special snowflake" when people got upset over it. And you know what? I get it. I understand that there are communities where this sort of thing is fine. I've been to those places and seen it for myself, where "nigger" and "faggot" are just common greetings. Thing is, that's not how you function in society, or most societies. If you want that, you go to one of those places for it. Just not here. Every community has rules, whether written or unwritten.
Feel free to leave in paranoia if you want, and perhaps your prophecy may come true, but honestly? I doubt it. Even if it does, this is a tiny corner of a big internet and, as I said before, there are plenty of other places to go to. I hope that neither you nor anybody else takes this as an insult, but I feel that if you're so concerned about either there being too many of X political opinion to make things comfortable for you or there not being enough free room for you to speak however harshly you like that you have to leave over it, then quite frankly, it's no great loss to anyone here. In fact, both parties are probably better off in the end like that.

Fables has my full support.