I never really felt any of it was honest, really. Gamergate went so fast that i didn't even know it was going down until it was already over. However, the battle scars on the market are still very, very apparent. The worst part about the issue is that simply ignoring wouldn't've improved things either: politics likes to seep into your life, whether you are interested or not. It's always sneaking into everything, then dragging you out of the area in which you hide from it. Don't want to talk about taxes? Too bad, your taxes just went up. Just want to have a gaming channel, well too bad, you didn't pay that extra copyright tax to show that little bit of gameplay. Want to talk about something major that just happened in your area, and how scared you were that your school was being shot up? Too bad, you simply plagiarized a news story. Like your games with bouncy titties and sexy babes? Too bad, that's objectifying women, and needs to be stopped. Always sticking their noses into everything. And imagine being unlucky enough that you become a victim of a politically motivated attack for being jewish, christian, white, black, hispanic, asian, male, female, straight, gay, whatever, or for just wearing a red hat that you had no idea stood for a political campaign, or maybe it was just a plain red hat and someone was out "polar bear hunting." Yet people can't help but run to government and media over their personal issues that can be sensationalized for money and power. In america, for every republican accused of rape or sexual assault, there's probably 2 or more democrats (since the narrative is that democrats care more about women's rights, it's safer for a woman abuser to hide where they're assumed not to exist). Which do you hear more about? These people will meet congressmen in an elevator to harass them into making decisions in favor of a woman they don't know, whose accusations have not been verified, yet you won't see these people going after weinstein, anthony weiner, etc. I remember a woman telling me that I was a misogynist for supporting Trump, 'cause he was tied to Epstein and there was a case against Trump for sexual assault allegations, yet "i don't want to talk about it," when bringing up that Epstein and the Clintons were much, much closer. When everyone was going after Moore, what was said about Barney Frank, Ted Kennedy, and more? A quick google search on democrats and sexual assault yields some interesting results. Seems more to me like a weapon, 'cause they know the right cares, even if the left (seemingly) doesn't, so it makes an opportune weapon for the left against the right.

This isn't to say that the left doesn't care about sexual assault allegations, but to point out that those who control the narratives are more interested in controlling the narratives than being principled. You can force equality, but it's a question of whether it's equality of opportunity or equality of outcome. Outcomes do not necessarily correlate with opportunity, in fact they necessarily do not correlate if you accept that individuals are different and have free will.
I don't know about polish law, but in the US it would actually be illegal to make a statement. I imagine most countries have similar laws regarding commenting on employment status.

I have heard of other people get fired over saying stuff on social media like Facebook and Twitter. a few firings were justified because this one girl posted a picture of her working at her Subway and the others said some racial stuff. The others no so much and the thing the thing that happened with Linko90 was another example of an unjustifiable firing if he was indeed fired. I guess companies can be overly sensitive but we don't know what was going through the top dogs at GOG when this happened.

Seems I'm late to the party.

Linko seemed like he did his job pretty well. At the very least, his posts were the main blue posts I saw on any thread, during my time here.

How do you get that it would be illegal? Many companies release information like this all the time. I can understand why they wouldn't make a statement, but US law would hardly be the reason anyway I can see.

... so, instead of doing that you could, for example, clear up what actually happened. As others have pointed out, that would help. I don't know if you are legally bound to silence. If you are, a clear statement about that would show some communication as well. Something like "I would like to tell you more, but we're legally not allowed to comment."

If there is no legal reason to withhold information, however, it would be nice towards your customer community to reduce the need for speculation by just communicating with us. So, without further speculation, what exactly happened?

<3

I ran into it at the onset, and a lot of people involved then were simply angry about non-disclosure of personal relationship between somebody endorsing a game and the game's developer. The lack of journalistic integrity, basically. Nothing more, nothing less.

Ironically, the immediate hijack attempts of the conversation that I did see were from the usual sites catering to crowd loving their manufactured controversies to justify how much the whole world is against them or something.

Let me put it this way - the available statistics say otherwise. Behavior of each party members definitely says otherwise. When Franken's dumb "titty grabbing" photo came out, he resigned. When several Republicans got caught on worse things, they were fully supported by their party and nominated to key positions.

Please at least have the decency to acknowledge that part, rather than spreading the usual "both sides are the same (except Democrats are worse)" that has no basis in reality.

It certainly does not help when GOP refuses to allow things like an official investigation into rape accusations by our esteemed Supreme Court judge, though, does it? Funny how the "eevul" Democrats are more likely to politically kill their own party member (and a very effective one) for silly things, yet potential rapists get the "party stronk!" treatment by GOP.

To be honest, I can't take seriously any claims coming from Trump supporters anymore.

The guy was a known fraud and conman before the election. After all the things he's done since, it takes a serious self-delusion to continue supporting one of the worst examples of humanity in general, much less somebody being a president of the goddamn United States of America.

For me, "equality" means acceptance of the various quirks and oddities that are keys to human nature. As long as it's not something harming others, equality is the tolerance of it.

You cannot force this kind of mind frame. Unless through generations-long systemic brainwashing, I guess, but I don't see that as a valid (or desirable) solution, either, regardless of the attempts of our educational system.

As others mentioned, the lack of official statement from GOG does not help matters, either.

If there's one thing I've learned by now, is that GOG really needs to work on communication with its core customer base. I think these are the people you should be worrying about offending the most, not some well-meaning idiots on a sites profiting from the controversies they bombard their "users" with.

And lack of communication with your users, especially when there seems to be a rather clear need for at least some kind of explanation, might end up more offensive and damaging to your business than some random hashtag SNAFU.

Please before locking this thread (if it should be necessary at all which I do hope won't be the case) keep in mind that this thread was NOT meant to be just another thread to discuss previous events. This was meant to be purely a support thread to show GOG that most here would love to have Linko back a a forum admininstrator. I explicitely stated in the OP that this here was never meant to be yet abother thread to discuss what the recents events were about at all - unfortunately some users don't have any problems though to hijack even such well meant threads for their own purpose. So since this is all about discussing if Linko did good work regarding the forum and how important he is I dont see any reason to discuss anything controversial here at all.

it's not nice to see gog employees let go. that said, none of them have tried to change the community aspect which (i atleast) was led to believe would happen since the previous community person. still, shouldn't be fired.

I'd argue that you cannot discuss "whether Linko did good work regarding the forum" without meandering off into general discussion of related topics.

With that out of the way, I pretty much said all I wanted to, so I'll leave you to enjoy your comfortably "non-controversial" thread.

Apologies for taking a thread on a public forum for a free-form discussion venue.

Yeah. That baffled me too, and for quite some time I simply didn't want to believe it was the same guy. I had some good exchanges with him, and he had a pretty good instinct as to guiding the community. He was good at deescalating topics. He let the community rage on for a few pages, but knew exactly at what point he could just close the thread down and lock down the topic entirely without incurring the community's wrath, but still he did it, and I respect that chuzpa.

He saw the ******* controversy coming, he saw how people kicked and spat on someone with peculiar spelling instead of people that incited hatred, so he took her side, the side of the unjustly ostracized, and that too I respect.

Yet apparently he couldn't keep his political leanings in his pants in Discord and on twitter, and that did disqualify him from those platforms, even though GOG suits may have hired him exactly for those political leanings, but have now reconsidered.

If GOG hired a forum community manager for that job and that job only, hell, I'd say hire him back, he did a good job. But GOG will keep putting their entire social media stuff in the hands of a single person, and that single person can not be one with two (possibly three) utter PR disasters in three months. I'm still seeing a lot of attempts to reinterpret what he did as unintended, and by those who clearly understand the intent, as acceptable. This won't help him. At all. The last thing he needs now is for someone to tell him: "You were right. Carry on". He needs to come to terms with these fuckups so he won't wallow in self-pity and paranoia. Nobody 'had it in for him', not even after his first fuckup. He brought it on himself.

The situation he is in right now is quite horrible, I must say. If I'm not mistaken, he moved to a foreign country with a foreign language for this job (i.e. social media manager, not "forum babysitter"). That kind of implies he hasn't got wife/husband and kids, because they would have had to move as well. But that's the situation now as far as we know: Foreign country, no job, and, hey, if GOG suits are vengeful, there might be a lawsuit coming for knowingly sabotaging their reputation.

All the best to him and may he find a new job soon. As sad as that is: He blew this one big time & several times. I want him to get back on his feet, but you can't do that if the blow doesn't first take you down.

It is true that he was doxed – and "doxed" here means what the word actually means: His full name was of course readily available to those who searched for it last week, but the context matters, and here it was definitely posted to intimidate and fuel outrage against him, and in turn to get him fired. That constituted the dox. So, yes, completely and utterly unacceptable. The forum in which it happened took draconic measures against the doxxing members; there was never any address data posted to my knowledge; there were no threats of physical harm and violence; and he had completely withdrawn from posting before that, however. But that's literally all that can be said to alleviate that this shit happened. The theory that the dox made him leave however is unsubstantiated.

GOG: Hire back the Enigmatic T, whatever the cost.

I don't know the official reason, but it could harm your ability to work 2 part time jobs at the same time, as well as could provide blackmail potential.

That seems to be the point. Voices like Sargon of Akkad put the blame on the manufactured controversies. Most people don't take games journalism seriously (outside of stock holders and game making companies), but it definitely seems that the big picture at the end of the day was that people who would not have been involved at all got involved when it came to the manufactured controversies, 'cause that is how politics invades an area that it's not welcomed. Did republicans have titty grabbing, or just unfounded accusations? That's funny, he was investigated 6 times prior, which is why the FBI took almost no time in finishing: they already looked into it before. The whole reason to keep doing investigations was to push the nomination past the mid-term elections, to wait for this "blue wave." This wasn't about Kavavnaugh, but about a power grab. I would try to defend trump, here, but why bother when the criticism is now levied at trump and trump supporters, while ignoring clinton? Thank you for proving my point. That's fair to say, but there are different definitions of what harms others. This controversy about trans-rights? No one's being harmed: we're talking about having sex listed on IDs based on genetics. How does that harm the trans community? In none of the topics has this ever been enumerated. Meanwhile, every time someone abuses the issue we've ignored for a long time (bathroom policies), it's a "one off thing." Maybe it is, but we see more harm being done there than we conceivable have on government documentation.

True equality is of opportunity: everyone's going to have their quirks, so to let those quirks flourish, we shouldn't do anything that affects the outcomes of those quirks. When given equal opportunity, the quirks will cause different outcomes. Right now, we see disparity of outcomes as a justification for removing the equality of opportunity, which, by your own definition, promotes inequality. say what? GOG does need to work on communication, but this is one of those issues we need to rspect.
Even releasing a name with a major controversy like that can ruin employment opportunities. If GOG didn't go after him, i imagine he fled out of fear. It's one thing to deal with keyboard warriors, but once they start digging up your personal information, even just a name (which can be used to derive other info), is a whole other story. They now have information on you, stuff that could ultimately be used against you and levied against you for power, but you have nothing on them.

I support Linko. He has always been decent, judging from what I can see and a few interactions over at the discord. He also seemed to do his job well as a moderator. It's awful that something like this has happened to him. You can't claim victim status, when you do the same thing you claim your oppressors are doing. But the mob's intent is just to poop on people, and they don't care about anyone else but themselves.

I hope the reason GOG is giving him a break is to protect him from more harassment. But to add on, GOG should also ponder a bit about how they do future PR and marketing. Come up with new strategies on this.

This was an oversight on his part and really should never have been the case. There are rules about non-English being used in this forum. The poster in question used to post in actual English and generally has been posting tons of topics and making many posts with purposefully bad spelling and grammar.

While this is the English forum, it's not used exclusively by people who are native speakers. The purposefully terrible spellings result in a forum experience that's harder for everybody else to use.

Personally, I skip over those posts, but it seems unreasonable to tolerate that when the much easier to handle posts in other languages do get actively modded. I'd rather have non-English that's a foreign language in here as I can at least get a translation with minimal effort, whereas the purposefully bad spelling is really hard for those with learning disorders to deal with. It's not like it's just the occasional spelling or grammar error, it results in a very real load on other people in the forum.
It's not illegal in the US to comment on employment status. There may be some sort of law in CA or other state, but employers generally avoid discussing employment status on the off chance that the comments result in a defamation or other law suit being filed.

Even when they do comment, for example as a reference, they tend to keep to the least amount of information practical so as to avoid lawsuits from either the new employer or the former employee.

Does that mean we can call him a nationalist then? Or a englishist?

Either way, that's not GOG's problem. It's not inflamitory, and having bad writing is akin to bad excuses for liking a terrible game: you aren't doing anything wrong, but you sure aren't winning anyone over. Now that i do more research, i think you may be right. I could've sworn i was reading differently before, but swearing i've read something isn't proof or evidence. That said, your explanation is still justification for gog keeping their mouths shut: CDP has enough lawsuits already; it doesn't need any help keeping their lawyers busy. I respect that GOG would keep cool on this issue. Opening up even to say "he's not with us anymore," would be an invitation to demand yet more information. The line has to be drawn somewhere.