LOL, well spoken.

Just one comment: There is a difference to a RL store or restaurant. You can't shut out rowdies in RL place. But here we can in theory choose to ignore the people who misbehave. It's our choice to click on a thread and read the responses. I guess a lot of GOG customer don't even know about the forums and only run into them when they encounter problems with their games.
I say "in theory" because... you know...

Please, stop waving a two year old thread around as if it held any relevance today. The only thing it proves is how badly the forum deteriorated.

I don't. Not with all the truly despicable shit that happened here. If someone really can look at people posting blatantly racist rants and supporting violence and murder and say that it's ok and nothing needs to be done about it that person deserves no respect. There would be room to argue about it if this was just about some trolling, or someone calling other users "assholes" etc. If that was the worst of it we could argue merits of maintaining total freedom. But when we've reached a "Breivik was right", "subhuman animals" etc. level there is no way left a decent, sane person can maintain that introducing moderation is wrong.

Honestly it would have been better and more effective to ban the actual trolls rather than close threads but maybe that's just me.

Good idea, but who are the "actual trolls"? Anyone you name is going to get a shit load of "yes they are" and "no they're aren't" and whoever disagrees is going to leave the forum and we'll have another dozen threads just like this one.

As an aside...

You bought a house in late 2008. Once settled in you had friends over and everyone had a good time. Made some house rules because it IS your place after all, and sometimes the family would come over to visit and it needs to be at least somewhat presentable on those occasions. Over time it morphed into the place where all your buddies would hang, sometimes bring a friend or two of their own. Everyone had a good time.

One day, call it 8 years later, you notice that people are putting their feet on the furniture, it smells a bit of ashes, and there are water rings on the end tables from beer bottles. And dammit, you told them 8 years ago what the rules are. Well, today you're finally going to enforce some of them. Finally. And some of the friends are now a bit ticked that your house isn't the fun place it used to be.

That reaction makes perfect sense to me. 8 years of essentially tacit approval of nearly any behavior through near non-existent enforcement. Doesn't excuse the rule-breakers, yet it's completely understandable the reactions of some folks to news of doing something about a problem that wouldn't exist to this extent had the rules meant anything but fluff for the last 8 years. And eventually it has grown into what we see now.

Want to fix it? Install a flux capacitor into a DeLorean and take care of it from the get-go.

Take care, emob

Yeah.....no.

DeLoreans had less than spectacular engines and were covered in stainless steel. They are beautiful cars but there is NO WAY you are getting one up to 80MPH unless you are driving it down a fucking runway. :P

You'd be better off putting the Flux Capacitor in a Dodge Dart. :P

It's relevant because as I said with the anti-moderation attitude back then it was inevitable that we'll arrive at the situation we're in now.
Actions have consequences. Some take years to appear. Saying that it "holds no relevance" is like saying that smoking 10 years ago has no relevance to the lung cancer one's having today.

Just like (assuming continued moderation), the inevitable consequence of it is that people will start complaining "why was thread x locked, there was nothing wrong with it!!!" or "why was x locked when y is allowed!!!". I just hope people who ask for moderation today will remember this. And won't 2 years from now call this thread irrelevant.

Moderation will never be on the thin line exactly where you want it. It's always going to be too much or too little. I'm just pointing out that not everyone who wants less (or not at all) moderation than you is a troll.

Either way, I think I'm done with this thread. Good bye and good luck to you, Emob and hope you find other forums that are more to your liking. And good luck, Fables on moderating these forums.
Ninja'ed but ^this is a good example of what I meant.

Well, sorry you feel that way. The GOG forum isn't my hill to die on. I do understand the historical significance of the GG thread because it was one of the few of its kind that was permitted to continue on the forum of a major company, but still, at the end of the day we're talking about a community built around a shop/service rather than a specalized fan site. I go to other places like RPG Codex for my freedom fix.

I do agree with many here, and disagree with even a larger amount of people. But if you ask me I will stay calm and wait for the next controversial topic to show up. I really want to see what will happen then. Will it be locked due to controversy even though no rule was broken? Will certain parts be misconstrued or manipulated to declare rules were broken? Will someone actually break the rules even though they are basically a large neon sign at the entrance now? Will it go on for months as a civil discussion until everyone there moves to something else?

I sincerely don't know and that worries me. While I understand an anything goes place is impossible for a company, especially a family friendly one, it worries me that this place could become another NeoGAF. A place where no discussion is allowed and a handful of people decide what is right and what is wrong to say and think.

And regarding hate speech. I consider the whole concept a cowardly absurd thing made by people who can't defend themselves through reason. Why? Because anything could become hate speech if you twist things enough. Take for example my case. I am Mexican, but I am white, and also of mixed racial origins. As such I was often discriminated in my own birth country for not being the right shade of brown. Yes, my sister and I were discriminated for being too pale. And nowadays I am constantly being called an oppressor and told I "don't know what discrimination is like" for being white, by college classmates who know white people are a minority in Mexico.

You can't choose to punish one form of discrimination without punishing the other. You can't choose to punish discrimination against one racial group, or one gender, or one nationality, or one whatever, without punishing the same discrimination against all other categories. And many of us are worried rules will be abused or not enforced properly. I hope that is not the case.

A silver lining is that we don't know yet how things will go and how the rules will be enforced, but that doesn't mean some of us will be less worried.

What I know is that back in 2008 this forum was a place I liked to visit and post in. It was a time when the community was small and rather united in its dislike of DRMs and most importantly its appreciation for games in general. When political discussion happened to be civil because most people had points to argue about instead of showing "truth" at each other vainly hoping to be acknowledged and people on both sides of the spectrum had a thicker skin, they weren't easily offended by disagreements.

I guess that it is quite naive to wish to see things return to that "golden era" ten years later, especially after 2014, but I'm still hoping.

I wasn't here myself to see it so I can't accurately say, but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that's because there were no disagreements. As you just said yourself, it was a bunch of people with the exact same mindset. This tight-knit community inevitably gets rocky when people who disagree show up. I'm curious how a defense of Steam would go back then vs. nowadays.

I mean't no relevace in context of your post, where you tried to equate people opposing moderation two years ago with people opposing it today. Yes, perhaps we are all to blame for the forum became, but not having forseen the hateful things that eventually took place when opposing moderation then can not be equated with opposing it now after we have seen here the things I described.

I do feel the need to point out a rather simple truth and I'm sorry if this is rather condescending from its rather obvious nature, but it seems to have been neglected in all of this:

Such efforts to moderate the forum are likely to be opposed by "anti-political correctness" campaigners under the guise of "political correctness gone mad". Fine, whatever.

However, this argument seems to forget that there is always some kind of "political correctness" regime, regardless of how liberal or authoritarian the society. They're called social norms. In authoritarian regimes, this kind of "political correctness" frowns upon any criticism of the national course as "unpatriotic". Just look at what happened to people in America who criticised the Vietnam War or the Second Iraq War, or who suggested some degree of empathy with the Soviet Union. Look at how people who criticise Brexit in the UK are treated. The problem is, authoritarian social norms tend to conflict with those of other nations, even those of other authoritarian nations.

Now, it's all well and good arguing that hostile nationalist rhetoric should be allowed here under the auspices of "freedom of speech", but we are not all one nation. We are a community of multiple races, religions, nationalities and genders. I'm going to hazard a guess that at least a few of the American users here are African-American, that some of the South African users are possibly black, and we know for sure that we at least have two Muslims and probably plenty of Jews, Christians and Atheists. Probably a few Sikhs or Hindus among the Indians as well. I'm not even 100% sure in most cases who's male and who's female. Who gives a fuck?

When you strip away all of the nationalist sentiment of Europe and the US, the theocratic sentiment of the US and parts of the Middle East, the anti-capitalist sentiment of places like Venezuela and much of Europe right now, when you bring together the majority of educated, civil people from any nation, any religion, any gender (orientation), you find a common denominator in common values about common decency. I have friends including an American Jew (who happens to be lesbian), a Jordanian Muslim, an Indian Hindu and a Japanese Buddhist. We all share a common outlook on the concept of right and wrong - we also all studied at university together.

There is a reason it's said that you shouldn't discriminate by religion, gender, sexual orientation, nationality or race - because no matter how dominant conservatism may be in a given country (from the extreme conservatism of countries like Saudi Arabia and Japan to the extreme progressivism of countries like Canada and Scotland), there are always people who share these common progressive values, whose lives are not dictated by nationalist, religious or ideological sentiment.

I'm sorry to my more conservatively-minded friends out there who think that their country, their race or their (ir)religion is the centre of the universe, but maybe it's worth considering that ultra-conservative values are fundamentally not compatible with such a globally-oriented community, because each nation's conservative values by their very nature bring them into conflict with another's.

And maybe, just maybe, the rules that underlie how people should conduct themselves on such an international forum should be based on those common values. This is, after all, supposed to be a forum for all, not just white males of Judeo-Christian heritage.

:oP

I thought I should end off on a humourous note to set the mood right. :)