Suspended for Otter Nonsense

[Joven]

In a perfect world, giving a manual reason for a post's deletion would be a great thing. I do not disagree with that, but considering the carpet-bombings that happen, I just do not think it is feasible. In a perfect world, I would like to see deletions lessened, and edits happen instead. Using a swear word as an example means an automatic deletion, even if you included 6 paragraphs of a quality post.

Keep this in mind:
Posting content with the intention of criticizing either Square Enix staff or specific individuals.

Sorry, I haven't had much sleep today and I tend to get a little too serious about things when I'm tired. Thanks for keeping me in check .

[SaberMaxwell]

Keep this in mind:
Posting content with the intention of criticizing either Square Enix staff or specific individuals.

Note: I'm not arguing whether that's in the ToS or not or anything, just sort of venting incredulity with the fact it is in the ToS.

I personally think that's the biggest joke on the ToS. Why have official forums if critique is bannable?

Sure, "critique the game not the individual" and I can see why they'd have a notion like that.

I should be able to defend myself by saying "I'm not criticizing the moderating team or anyone on it, just the policies that the moderation team follows." but there is no real appeal process (they tell you there's one, but more often than not your appeal is directed to the person who banned you, and ofc they're gonna say the punishment is correct. That's if they don't just hit you with a boilerplate response, which of the people I mentioned above, I've seen three of them get boilerplates) so I know that defending myself like that would fall on deaf ears.

[Shinklet]

Professional internet janitors have killed any form of message board or forum.

[Kallistra]

If enough people report your post, the forum moderators will look at it (they also seem to look at posts in threads that blow up). All you need to do is be come off too firmly and/or include swearing and/or seem like your antagonizing someone and you will probably get slapped with "being a negative effect on the community".

The biggest flaw with the forum moderation is that it's not very consistent--which isn't surprising considering how many posts are published daily...but there are a lot of incredibly minor things that have gotten some people suspensions/bans while others haven't gotten any punishment at all. This makes it really difficult to gauge how you can interact with other uses and what you can say, especially in a confrontational manor (such as a debate or disagreement).

I'm going to use swearing as an example because it would be the easiest thing to fix and it's something that is incredibly hit or miss in terms of punishment.

Say you're in the massive Duty Finder thread and you see someone post about how an anonymous player in their party was being a 'female dog'. It's there, the whole word. This person's post gets 10 Likes and people agree that their situation was awful and that anonymous player was indeed a 'female dog'. A few months later you see a thread praising a villain in the MSQ for being a complex and interesting character. You write a long and civil reply respectfully disagreeing with the OP. However you got carried away and the post is long so you decide to leave a TL;DR at the bottom. And so you say, "TL;DR: I think he/she has potential, however right now we don't know enough about them and they just come off as a 'female dog' for the sake of being a 'female dog'." Some people agree with your post and some people disagree with it. Some people don't even read your post and just see the TL;DR. People from all sides decide to report you. After a couple days you are met with a notice of a 10-day suspension and the reason being for strong, vulgar language that is creating a negative effect on the community. Why did you get in trouble for using a word when talking about a fictional character, but someone else used it when describing another person and received no punishment? Is it because you said it more than once? Is it because you used it in a TL;DR section, so that made people more drawn to it? Was it the context? Is swearing allowed or is it not allowed? There's just no way to tell because the rule isn't followed consistently.

This is something that could be easily fixed with a few filters/catches. For example, the swears prevent your post from being published (similar to how going over the character limit works) and you are met with a warning like, "Vulgar language is against our ToS. Please remove/replace any swears contained within your post. Trying to bypass the filter and keep these words will result in a strike on your forum account." This stops the problem before it happens and makes it clear what their tolerance is. Or there could be a system in place that blocks the word(s) after the post is made. This would leave the site cleaner and leave it up to the poster to decide how/if they want to change what they said after the post is published. If they're reported, the emphasis should be more-so on how they used the censored words rather than the actual words themselves.

The way swearing is viewed on the forums versus how it's viewed in-game seems to differ quite a lot. In both cases, if you swear directly at someone for the purpose of attacking them, you're in trouble. In-game, context matters and if you say "That was [censored] crazy!" you're probably fine on that part even if you get reported for something else. On the forums, I think you're not supposed to swear at all and saying "That was [censored] crazy!" will get you in trouble (if you're reported/a GM sees your post). Again, this is followed inconsistently that it's hard to tell, but I'm inclined to believe the forums wants to have a zero tolerance for swearing because your post is searchable (both on the site and via Google) and is a lot more permanent than saying something in-game.

There is honestly so much more I could get into about this...there are a lot of things that puzzle me and aren't very clear. But I have gone on long enough and I'd like to hope this critique won't result in myself getting suspended if I leave it where it is now.

[SerLuke]

I've been banned twice, trust me I know what you mean. I have studied the ToS several times, and have come to the conclusion that anything not positive is literally bannable, at the sole discretion of the mod, in my opinion. At the very end the ToS includes:

Oh don’t worry they ban positive comments too while leaving up threads that call people morons #ottergate

[SerLuke]

I also got temporary banned for posting the otter pictures.

They stated it was off-topic.

Which baffles me that they would ban so many people over that, instead of the OP who was trash talking his FC in not one but two threads and used the whole cancer/autism thing as a cover up.

The mods on this forum are a complete joke.

He apparently got (temp?)banned for derailing my otter suggestion thread apparently but his post stealth baiting his old FC and calling them morons is still up

[Gula]

During the live letter, Yoshi, and do an extent Ms. Translator said "Pain in the [OMG CENSORED]" on stream. Had this been the forums, oops guess that's an offense.

[Joven]

So I've been doing a lot of thinking on the drive home from work and I've decided that I've had enough of tip-toeing around this issue. I've already stated in a previous post that I'm willing to take a perma-ban for this so I need to back that up. I lit this fuse when I started this thread and now it's time to watch it burn. I'm done being polite.

I'm just gonna come out and call this for what it is: pathetic. When people are too afraid to say what they think due phantom moderators and an ephemeral Terms of Service then you know something isn't right. We shouldn't have to worry about having our posts sniped or being shadow banned due to a broken system where anyone can simply point a finger and make someone disappear. Where people can get banned for a simple slip-up while others blatantly disregard everything and face no punishment. To top it all off we only get silence and even silenced when asking for clarification or for even questioning the motives of the moderators.

That's all we really wanted: clarification.Transparency. A chance to correct our mistakes before any serious penalties can be incurred and we lose our ability to post on here, but I guess swinging the Banhammer is easier than actually moderating. We can't even get a canned response on here because I guess we aren't even important enough for that despite the fact that we're essentially paying to use this service...

I get that there are a lot of threads on here and keeping them up can be a nightmare, but at the same time we need some way to know that someone out there is actually listening to us. Instead it feels like we're just screaming into the void.

If anyone is interested, before I get the Orbital Banhammer, my Discord is Joven#3737. I'm terrible at starting conversations, but may chime in every so often in others.

Also, I apologize if anyone gets caught in the blowback of this.


Edit: Always remember #Ottergate

[Zeonx]

I'd be careful.

I am at my cousins house, he tried to get a second appeal and wanted transcripts of why he was banned the exact reasons in detail to point out why he was perma banned from forums because he is dyslexic and has a hard time understanding some things.

they basically told him no second reviews and they aren't going to give him transcripts of his bans or even explain.

I kinda remember some of his post and that's why he wanted to see some transcripts because he feels they were bias versus him, since recently he's been noticing poster's saying some of the stuff he was banned for and no action was put against them.

Now he really think's that the reason was he put a SNK signature when SE and SNK were having a lawsuit over comics he believe that his ban was over that due to that his signature was being removed everytime a temp ban happened then they had to give a excuse why he was banned which were small things everyone post every day like the word LAZY <--- cmon that is jacked up he see's people directing it at others and posting pictures also same as he did no action done.

nothing wrong with snk vs capcom signature either not much he can do now he got final answer but watch out to others.

just be careful all cause I remember what he was banned for it was very tiny things even asking for skull armor and banned the person below for asking for macho gear trust me it happened.

[Ursa_Vonfiebryd]

Dualgunner.
Cassandra_Solidor.
VanillexFang.
Sir_Rawrz.
Lorgana.
Selli.
Dervy.

These are all names I can think of off of the top of my head of people who've been permabanned; of them I know five, and talk to them frequently on Discord. Dualgunner was banned for a meme, Sir_Rawrz was banned for light profanity, Dervy was banned for numbercrunching on the forums (he said the "P" word), Vanille made the mistake of posting a screencap of FFLogs on the OF, Selli was banned for a ridiculously silly reason.

Someone said it's a three-strike system. For some it is, for most of the people I know it's two-strike, and it's a permanent record. Dualgunner's bans were two years apart from one another, and Cassandra's bans were four years apart from one another.

The otter everyone got tempbanned for? That's gonna be there forever. If most of these people ever see another ban, that otter will add to their likelihood to make it permaban.

Hmmm. Did these users get an in-game ban or just a forum ban? I'm used to the old school days where the forums were a separate beast (with a separate login even). But these seem to be tied to accounts, which I suppose makes them exclusive (you can make a Square Enix account that is separate from the game on the SE site--or you used to be able to) but also a pain if you get banned. I stand corrected, but I still wouldn't be afraid to speak my mind because I'd rather be struck mute than to be too afraid to speak at all. Would I ask for an appeal? Certainly. After some time had passed. But in the end, so long as my game doesn't suffer I that's the most important part imo. But yeah. Still a bit on the messed up side. :\