Way back on July 4th, 2005, I launched the Alexandrian with the cleverly titled post “Welcome to the Alexandrian“. In that post, I talked about how I had become a freelance writer. The 100+ reviews I wrote for RPGNet played a major role in that story, but I wrapped up my post by saying: “But if you go to RPGNet today, you won’t find any of my reviews there. What happened? Well, that’s another story for another day.”
Then I didn’t really follow-up on that, largely because there were more interesting things to talk about.
But I’ve had people pinging me for awhile now wanting access to some of the content from my older reviews. And the original (and continuing) purpose of the Alexandrian is to archive my creative work. To that end, I’m going to start posting those old reviews in order to properly archive them away. Which means that “another day” has finally arrived.
THE 
REVIEWS
I posted my first review to RPGNet in the spring of 1998.
It was a review of The Paxton Gambit, a campaign supplement for the Heavy Gear roleplaying game, and it had originally been written for and posted to the Heavy Gear Mailing List. RPGNet had been around for a couple of years at that point, but the site was just beginning to get noticed by the larger RPG community. One of the people who noticed was Phillippe Boulle, who — at the time — was an editor at Dream Pod 9. He, in turn, posted a message to the Heavy Gear Mailing List asking that fans of the game go to RPGNet and post reviews of their favorite Dream Pod 9 products. When I saw Phillippe’s message, I took the review I had already written, popped over to RPGNet, and posted it.
That was a lot of fun and, to make a long story short, I kept doing it. In fact, over the next four years I would do it 165 times.
In those early days, the RPGNet community was heavily focused on the reviews: There was no general forum, but there was a discussion thread associated with each review. That meant that all of the discussion on the site was focused through whatever reviews had been posted in the last couple of weeks. It meant that the community was radically neophilic and intensely focused on RPGs.
It also meant that, if you were a successful reviewer, you were the genesis point for sprawling discussions that could go on for dozens or even hundreds of posts.
In retrospect, it’s pretty easy to recognize that RPGNet was actually serving as one of the pioneers in the newly-emerging blogosphere: Each review was effectively a blog post and the emergent community was blog-focused. At the time, it was just exciting. I’d been participating in online discussion groups since 1988 or ’89; but here I was actually finding an audience.
From ’98 through ’02, I was one of the top three or four reviewers on RPGNet. During this time period, the site went through several changes of ownership, one of which nearly destroyed the site before it was returned to Sandy Antunes (the founder). In 2001, it was then sold to Skotos Tech.
Throughout this time period I continued writing reviews. In May 2001, in fact, the site ran a “Justin Bacon Review Week” in which all of the reviews posted that week (20+ total) were written by me. That was pretty awesome and I felt very honored. Around this same time, I was asked by Sandy Antunes to help develop content for a D20 Nation website that he wanted to launch as a partner-site with RPGNet. (Unfortunately, those plans never came to fruition.)
The site was also changing, however.
Forum software had been installed at some point. This was almost certainly a good thing (the site would have probably died completely during the period when its owners weren’t updating the content if it hadn’t been for the forum), but it also meant that the character of the site was changing: The community was becoming forum-oriented instead of review-oriented.
(One memory from this time period in particular: The early forum software didn’t have any accounts. You just typed in your name and left your message. There was a period of a couple weeks where somebody was deliberately trolling the forums by posting incendiary posts under my name. It took me awhile to figure out what the heck was going on, and eventually the guy responsible confessed. I suspect this incident contributed significantly to the site updating to new forum software with registered accounts shortly thereafter.)
In mid-2002, I posted what was essentially my last review at RPGNet. (In mid-2004, I posted a review of A Game of Thrones. But it was a fluke.) Partly this was because professional work was chewing up more and more of my time. Partly it was because the RPG review community had completely fetishized the reviewing of typography and binding quality instead of actual content and gameplay. But largely it was because the audience for reviews at RPGNet had severely atrophied.
PARTING OF THE WAYS
I remained an active member of the RPGNet community, however, until 2004.
In October 2003, I was participating in a thread where somebody was voicing incredulity at the idea of someone owning more than a hundred RPGs, claiming that a hundred RPGs didn’t even exist. I pointed out that hundreds of free RPGs were available on the web; so you could own hundreds of RPGs without even spending a dollar. After a couple rounds of this, I compiled and typed up a very lengthy list of the free RPGs I owned and posted it. This took about 2-3 hours worth of effort.
This list prompted several pages worth of interesting discussion. Several days later, however, one of the forum moderators did a drive-by on the thread and deleted the entire post as “threadcrapping”. I was irate at having 2-3 hours of work eradicated and responded with, “Fuck You.”
In retrospect, I probably should have saved a local copy of the post. And I probably could have been more politic in my response to the atrociously poor moderation. But I wasn’t and I got hit with a 90-day ban for mouthing off to the incompetent moderator.
Several months later, after the ban had expired, I came back and found that I couldn’t log into my account. Reconstructing events after the fact, it appears that one of the moderators (probably a fellow operating under the name “Kuma”) had decided to change the password and e-mail address on my account in an effort to secretly turn a temporary ban into a permanent one. E-mails to RPGNet went unanswered, so I created a new account under the name “Justin A. Bacon” and continued posting.
In August or September of 2004, Kuma started trying to IP ban me from the forum. Since I was posting from a dynamic IP, this completely failed. (I wasn’t even aware he was doing it, since he’d posted his intentions in a thread I was no longer reading.) After several weeks of this, another moderator apparently got around to banning the “Justin A. Bacon” account for “avoiding a ban”. (This was, of course, completely untrue. For several years after this it was quite hilarious because the “Justin Bacon” account had still never been banned, although it looks like they finally got around to “fixing” that recently.)
I sent an e-mail to the site and was told to wait a couple of days for the issue to be resolved. After a week or so, it hadn’t been.
At this point I posted to Trouble Tickets asking for an explanation. None was forthcoming. It took several days and many other people posting to both the forum thread and e-mailing RPGNet before they finally got around to posting their explanation: They believed that I had posted at some point during my 90-day ban and were, therefore, permabanning me.
Did they have a link to that post? No.
Could they find a link to that post? No.
Was there any way to fix this issue? Yes. Within 1-2 days, they would confirm the existence or nonexistence of the post Kuma claimed it existed.
… only they didn’t do that. Instead they closed the thread so that no one could post to it.
A month and a half later, somebody else posted a thread asking: “Hey. What’s going on here?” The moderators still had no explanation.
During this time period, I was being contacted by others. Something was deeply, deeply rotten in the moderation team at RPGNet and I wasn’t the only one having problems.
I decided to raise the stakes: I publicly announced that if RPGNet didn’t want me as a member of the community, then I would pull my reviews.
The point was to raise the profile not only of my issues with the moderation team, but the general issues the community was having with the moderation team. I was hoping that it would force the new owners of the site to put their cards of the table and make it clear what sort of site RPGNet was going to be. In this I was successful, although not in the way that I had hoped: Still unable to produce the posts demonstrating that there was any justification whatsoever for my permabanning, the owners of the site instead permabanned me for daring to exercise my IP rights.
I shrugged and walked away. The RPGNet I had once fervently supported was obviously dead and gone.
POSTSCRIPT
I do remember quite vividly, though, my final e-mail exchange with the ownership. They wanted to give me “one last chance” to let them keep my reviews on the site. They wrote: “By removing them from RPGNet, you’re destroying the value of your reviews.”
This taught me an important lesson: When an organization believes that your work has value because they allow it to appear in their venue (rather than the reality, which is that the content is what gives a venue value) then you’re probably better off getting away from that organization as quickly as possible.
In the years since then, the situation at RPGNet has only worsened. The Tangency forums have become the tail wagging the dog. There are members of the moderation team who take great pride in the fact that they’ve never played an RPG. (This fact boggles my mind every time somebody mentions it.)
The site, which once made its name on the participation of major RPG professionals (priding itself as the “Inside Scoop on Gaming”), has become increasingly hostile to them. It’s becomes a popular past time for posters to bait professionals posting to the boards so that the professionals will get banned. At one point, this was coupled with a ludicrous policy of banning discussions of games written by people who had been banned.
A couple years ago a friend of mine told me he was being accused by RPGNet’s mods of being my sock-puppet because he included links to products I had written (and he had helped edit) in his .sig. Last year I had a complete stranger send me an e-mail saying that RPGNet’s mods were making the same accusations towards him.
I’m not sure what to tell either of them. I enjoy discussing and debating RPGs. It improves my games. It improves my writing.
But RPGNet? It’s a cesspool. And, sadly, it’s a cesspool that’s been created by the very mechanism which is supposed to be keeping the water clean.
In any case, that’s the nutshell version of my rollercoaster ride with RPGNet. Hopefully you found it at least mildly entertaining. But mostly it’s my way of introducing the reposting and archiving of the reviews I wrote for RPGNet “back in the day”. I’ll be starting later today and posting them semi-regularly until I’m done.
Only thing you could have done under the circumstances, I think.
Wanted to thank you for your service and the reviews your had written for RPG.net. I was also on RPG.net back in the day and probably left around the same time you did. “Left” is too strong of word…faded away is more like it…With increased activity in tangency and ban-happy moderators(I prefer a more laidback approach to moderation), it just wasn’t my bag any more.
I was never a member (or even a regular visitor) of RPG.net but it sounds like a mess.
I’ve always viewed certain forums as like regular places you can hang out, not unlike meeting a group of friends and strangers at a barnes and nobles (or library, school cafeteria, restraunt, or somesuch). Stories like this really make you appreciate the establishments that are run well and professionally.
This is especially true when the forum moderators and owner(s) care about their customers and are passionate or at least interested in the topics at hand.
During 3e’s heyday, I was a regular member of the Wizards of the Coast forums and moderators would occasionally take a part of the discussion – they became a part of the community and interacted with the people there. I also thoroughly enjoy posting at a forum for atheists and the “Giant in the Playground” forums for this very reason.
It makes me wonder what goes on behind the scenes with moderators who seem to go out of their way to skirt the rules and assert their dominance like that. Oh well, it’s their loss, I suppose.
Are you perchance familiar with the site rpggeek.com ? It’s a (fairly) new site from the creators of boardgamegeek.com, which itself is a wonderful community that I’ve been a part of for many years. If you’re looking for a non-cesspool RPG-centric resource and community site, it is well worth checking out.
Well the thing about rpg.net is that all forums have a ratio of signal to noise. Usually the noise comes in the form of insane silly shit (see youtube). In rpg.net it comes in the form of barking insanity. But if you can ignore the barking insanity (with a big side order of self-important preening) as much as you can ignore the inane silly shit that gets posted on most forums (the standards for spelling and grammar are pretty good) then you can focus on the signal, which is a lot of really nifty creative ideas. I’d be very saddened if I never got to read stuff like the Long Stairs.
(Googles “long stair rpgnet”.)
(Reads.)
(Bookmarks.)
Same as Daztur above. I have found loads of creativity, interesting discussions and simply fun in RGPnet forum.
As happens with any forum with a lot of traffic, the majority of threads aren’t interesting for any one person. I successfully focus in the ones that are of my interest.
That said, when the owner of a site or the mods of the forum doesn’t care about the community it simply dies. I’ve already seen it, but I don’t think RPGnet is in that rut just now. Hopefully.
Who’s not been banned from Rpg Net…
the last good thread was in 2009
Justin.. I think RPGnet in banning you then that they made the right call. For many years I recall you being argumentative, verbally abusive and cursing out people who disagreed with you in the slightest calling them idiots and treating those that did not share your views with derision or condescension. And similarly others who did the same or engaged in similar behavior were banned as well regardless of their stature. I recall another noteworthy game designer having been banned for a long time there as well for similar reasons and then in the recent years he was invited back in good stead with open arms. At the point and time of your banning RPGnet was actively incorporating vigorous moderation to point of reporting threads and investigation and making their rulings as a standard of enforcement as in the years preceding the moderation was almost zero and it was a virtual wild west of trolls and personal attacks that pushed people away from wanting to be there. Its not a perfect system.. it still isn’t.. far from it.. even I have my complaints from time to time but it works. Even now you have come here to cry sour grapes when the fine print went into great detail about your reviews and your retaining copyright of them. However under the EULA contractual agreement you acknowledged they( RPGnet) still retains the rights to still distribute or store in perpetuity what you have written on their behalf as a long time reviewer. You could have chosen to take the higher road to have walked away without having raised a fuss about trying to rip the reviews from their site in an attempt to gut them and discredit them. And no one would have thought the lesser of you for it. On the contrary it would have made people question RPGnet’s motives and operations had you went away quietly. But by attempting such a boldfaced reprisal in the community perhaps hoping it would generate buzz that you had done so successfully that failed in that instance it just comes off as pretty lame and thuggish . And now you have burned a bridge with gasoline. Because instead of looking like the victim you were looking to disguise yourself as you seem a smaller person and immature for trying to attempt to hurt a site that for the most part was source of enjoyment for the geek community and place that was at least in some way partially responsible for your gaining the reputation as a reviewer that you had in the beginning. And now you are trying some time later to get your digs and barbs in as you are on the outside looking in. So you can accuse RPGnet of having no integrity such is your right but it is my right to also point out that you are and have been editing and distorting the facts so as to reduce the accountability of your actions to nil.
Quick fact-check, Chris:
(1) You can claim that RPGnet “really” banned me for reasons other than what they claimed they were banning me for. That makes either you or them a liar. Take your pick.
(2) Much like RPGNet, you attempt to claim that they could retroactively force me to give up the copyright on reviews that were written before their current “EULA” (sic) went into effect. This is legally false and obviously absurd.
(3) You further imply that I “failed” to get my reviews removed from RPGnet. This is simply not true. RPGNet has no right to any of my reviews except, arguably, my review of A Game of Thrones and none of my reviews currently appear on their site.
(4) You claim that I have been “editing and distorting the facts”, but fail to cite a single example of that. Throwing around baseless aspersions like that doesn’t impress me.
(5) You claim that I would have called more attention to the situation if I hadn’t called attention to the situation. That’s certainly an interesting opinion, but it’s unclear what your factual basis for that claim would be.
(6) You apparently have no idea what paragraphs are.
I encourage you to get your facts in order before attempting to comment on things in the future.
I would like to point out to Chris M. that if it’s RPGnet’s right to ban Justin for being argumentative, then it is clearly Justin’s right to ban you for being argumentative. I.e., he’s perfectly free to delete your post and ban you from posting on his blog. And to do so without even telling you that he has, let alone why.
Do you ever wonder why he didn’t do that?
I was banned when a moderator claimed I was a sockpuppet of a banned poster, possibly (I’m only speculating) because the moderator decided that a post I made was somehow alluding to him.
After several emails went without response, I used the guest functions to complain in Trouble Tickets – which eventually lead to the site taking notice and, despite acknowledging that I had nothing to do with the previously mentioned banned individual, upheld the ban because I had posted while being banned.
‘Cesspool’ doesn’t begin to describe the place. There are many great posters there, but the moderation and site ownership is awful. And heaven help you if your positions contradict those the mods favor!
I received a 3-day ban for daring to quote the dictionary to show that someone who posted an insult as a response to me was misusing a word. Then a week later I went on and discovered the ban was permanent, with no explanation.
So apparently using the dictionary can get you permanently banned. I can only assume the person who insulted me has some sort of “in” with the moderator(s); otherwise no idea why that would be worthy of a 3-day ban much less a lifetime ban!
Very strange.
I am permanently banned from RPG net, and I have never even been there. I was unable to. Apparently, I have been banned for malicious attacks. This is a pity. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, so I did a google search for Rpg.net, and tried to visit. Perhaps they know something I don’t, and I visited the site while sleeping. Unfortunately, I cannot enter to find out, and will never know. Rather kafkaesque.
Same here as the above poster, my first time on the site I am already banned for spamming. I must be the most silent spammer ever LOL. I also love the welcoming tone:
“Please either 1. Stop the bad behavior, or 2. Cease accessing this system.”
No “if you were banned by mistake, please contact (here)”, just by that message you can tell the hubris syndrome sometimes seen in Admins and Mods. “I am perfect and immune to criticism or error”. Little people who cling on to the little power they have. It’s pathetic.
The whole Chris M. answer is downright laughable: I’ve been an Admin for a big rpg site in spanish for almost 2 years, so I know the job. If you ban someone you at least owe it to the user to know exactly why he has been banned and for how long. A “Fuck you” response is a well deserved 90-days ban, but after “paying his due” then the record is clean again, then if the user explain why he answered like he had, a revision by the admins take place, and if the user is right, the Mod also gets either a warning or the axe, depending on the mistake(honest or not, basically), and at the very least they had to apologise to the user. And if I ever found out that someone on the mod team has altered the password of someone, then the one who would get the permaban would be the mod.
But banning someone for 90 days and then extending the ban for no apparent reason is just crap. As an admin I had to put up with people I hated, who I thought contributed nothing to the forum, but as long as they didn’t violate the rules then all I could do was frown when I read them. If someone is any of those things Chris mentions, a Mod or Admin has to warn them, you can’t ban someone retroactively, it’s ridiculous in any serious legal system. At the former site I ran, you could only be banned for bad behaviour if you were warned beforehand, not immediately, unless you were a spammer, a nazi or someone along those lines. Otherwise it’s just plain censorship.
Interestingly, I think I was banned there a few years ago. At the time I was attempting to offer some advise after having read an entire (multi-page) thread.
Entertainingly, I was attacked for my offer of advice because I posted largely in blocks of text. I took exception to this attack and my response was, shall we say, less than obsequiously polite. Hence the ban.
I felt the fact that I could read whole threads, seeing the same inane questions posed over and over, somewhat mitigated a block of text.
Now if I want to get a general sense of opinion on an rpg (or anything really) I just google the topic I’m interested in and follow the flow. That way I don’t have to interact with individuals who seem innately incapable of rational, civil discourse even though they gather in fora ostensibly for that purpose.
I call it the “Speaker’s Corner” phenomena.
Just wanted to say my experience of rpg.net was similar. I got perma-banned for saying that moderators were perma-banning people too freely which was kind of hilarious. I got told that I could contest the ban in 6 months time and I said I wouldn’t want the site to get my hits for its advertising. A terrible place with power happy moderators, I wouldn’t go back if they paid me. The thing that makes me sad is that despite this horrible culture the place is still probably the central place for discussing rpgs.
I stopped going to rpg.net when it became clear to me that the vocal majority of the membership (including Mods) appears to be of a certain political/philosophical/sexual mindset, and that anyone who expresses opinions contradicting said mindset tends to be targeted with attacks that are blatantly against the site’s own written rules. Of course, those attacks are not called out by moderators. Now that I am aware of the fact that the ownership is based in or around the SF Bay Area of California, it makes more sense…
There is no difference in what I’m reading about rpg.net and OBS (DriveThruRPG).
I still use RPG.net to read reviews before I buy but I don’t take part in their forums much as the bigger egos there turn me off.
OBS has ridiculous people working there and ban people all the time but because they’re a bit of a monopoly, they get away with it and control the flow of RPGs.
Lulu is an unusual but solid safe haven from DTRPG.
Wish I would have seen this a year ago or so when I got involved there as an effort to find something other than ENWorld.
Moderation there is still crap and biased and unjustified. I got a thread ban for not agreeing with the majority and then the next day a 24 hour ban because on another thread I wrote something like “I acknowledge your views” in response to one post I was discussing. I even PMd the person I was discussing with and he was sorry I got banned because he wasn’t offended. And of course the mods deleted my offending posts, so there could be no proof of what I actually did.
i decided not to go back. For me, I lost nothing but a little bit of time and emerging relationships. Lesson learned, though I’m still looking for a place for thoughtful and healthy RPG discussions.
Anyway, love your blogs, you do great work, thanks for sharing.
I came across this tale of woe by pure chance (I was looking for information about Heavy Gear books as it happens), and you have my utmost sympathy.
Sadly there are people in this world who think that their opinions are the only possible ones and that anyone who has the temerity to disagree is worthy only of harassment and abuse. You find a lot of them on Twitter. Their usual complaint is that something you quite unwittingly said abused THEM, and then feel justified in swearing at you, making outlandish claims about terrible things they imagined you said, and basicically being outright nasty, abusive and doing their best to hurt… all while claiming that YOU hurt THEM and this is why they’ve turned on you!
As you might guess, I’ve been abused in this manner. There is one individual in particular who loves to mount damaging personal attacks. Like you I write a lot of reviews, primarily on my own site but cross-posted elsewhere… and in one torrent of abuse last summer this individual asked DriveThruRPG if they wanted such an awful person as they claimed I was as a featured reviewer. Without even considering the evidence, they removed my privileges on the sport and refuse point blank to reinstate them. (To my amusement, said individual promptly attracted a Twitter ban for one of the unpleasant attitudes they claimed I displayed!)
A couple of months ago they tried the same thing, only pulling my employer (a university) into his abuse. The university’s response was to ask me if this individual was a student and if so they’d institute disciplinary proceedings against them!
I now post links to reviews on my own website in the ‘comments’ page of the relevant product on DriveThruRPG, rather than use the reviews system (which I still have access to seeing as I have purchased a lot of stuff there!). I’m still annoyed by their behaviour. You’d think that 11 years of virtually daily reviews – I write thim in my lunchbreak) – would count for more than some abusive loudmouth. (not to metion that at the time I was invited to become a featured reviewer I had contributed roughly one-sixth of ALL the reviews on the entire site!
Guess I’m old-fashioned, thinking that a sense of honour or loyalty… or even taking time to review the evidence… might be displayed by a ‘major player’ in the industry.
So what? I just carry on writing reviews on my site, and finding stuff to read in all manner of places. Including here.
Rpgnet is notorious for its abysmal moderation. I left the site almost a decade ago when I noticed how the moderation did not live up to their own proclaimed standards and how they moderated not based on people doing something bad but on people disagreeing with what the moderators thought was the correct opinion. Also they talk big about not allowing abusive behaviour, but all that amounts to is shutting down insignificant insults or even bog standard reasonable critique from some people, in favour of a board culture that is extremely passive aggressive, shockfull of petty powerplays, backhanded compliments and cheap manipulation.
While they claim they cut down on abuse, they are actually just cutting down on disagreement, frank discussion, and the occasional abrasive comment in favour of enacting real abuse.
I saw a reddit thread some time ago with people discussing their experiences with that place, very little of it good. About the only people who have anything good to say about that place are the ones in the middle of it. I can only encourage those people to find other communities. They would be shocked how much more laid back places can be where people can just communicate with eachother, even with occasional insults, critique, and decent moderation.
I was a heavy user of rpg.net for many years but then sorta drifted away because my real-life RPG activity had stagnated. I came back maybe around 2018 (a rough guess) to find that it was a very different place. Three things I noticed:
1) Activity in the forum had slowed to a relative crawl. Instead of having pages and pages of posts with new responses every day, there was maybe one and a half pages of new stuff in a day.
2) When reading an old thread, it seemed like a good third of the responders had the word BANNED under their name. I don’t know what happened but I got the clear impression that the moderation had basically gone apeshit in the years I was away. The only thing I could figure is that maybe a lot of people had started getting too much into politics during the Trump era, which ignited passions both for and against, but now I think there was much more going on with that.
3) User-submitted reviews had slowed to a crawl. Actually I think this started many years ago but seems to have just gotten worse. This may be related to the fact that there seem to be less users of rpg.net these days, but I think it might also be due to some readers being fairly hostile to the reviewers themselves so some people just gave up on trying to contribute.
For a while I wondered if maybe the RPG hobby had just diminished overall and the lower activity level on rpg.net just reflected that. But now I’m more convinced that rpg.net has somewhat ruined itself. I still check in occasionally and sometimes contribute to the forums, but it definitely feels like a shadow of its former self.
Ugh, wish I’d read this 10 years ago.
Did RPG.net ever fix this? Is it still that bad?
Darjr;
I believe it’s worse.
I joined in ’16 and had – generally speaking – avoided the Mods hammers until ’19, in which I picked up four bans in a year and a couple more warnings. I’d not really changed my habits/views in those years, which suggests that the political ‘Overton Window’ had been shifting since then.
One was – in hindsight, justified but an overreaction. Would have been better to have merely done an ‘oi, no!’ post and explained why in public – which would have helped me because I didn’t know what the sin was. A ‘learning experience’ could have been done, for the good of all but was not.
The other five was not. Two of them were literally going against statistics ‘They’ didn’t like [reliable, impartial and not even that contriversial] merely because… I’m not sure. It made them sad or something?
I tried ‘lab methods’. I followed the proceedure as laid out in Da Rules. Never got email replies. When I finally came off yet another ban I made a public appeal [https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/bans-appeals-etc.858152/] and promptly got a combination of being told it’s all too much / there’s nothing wrong / that doesn’t happen / well, that’s your own damn fault.
That’s the point I realised they were right [sorta]. It was my own fault, for remaining in such a toxic location. Didn’t rage-quit or anything, merely gave up. I add to Slaphammer’s comment; I bet reading an old thread will feature 1/3 banees then another 1/3 folks who have quit but accounts are still technically alive.
Went back at the start of the pandemic, wanting to basically spam-link for a govt petition for folks to get finance assist during it. Me bad, got sucked in to general conversation. When I picked up another soft ban over nothing in particular, I remembred what a drek-pit it had become and walked again.
This might sound like ‘same old’ to most readers, but the fact that I’m a Marxist Socialist needs to be noted. It’s not simply ‘the right’ they don’t like, but just *anyone* who doesn’t toe the party line completely. The fact that I’m a Brit didn’t help things, as they are generally very American-centric…
AFAICT, the “appeal” system at RPGNet is deliberately Kafka-esque. The rules say you can appeal via e-mail:
– If you send an e-mail to the listed address, I’m pretty sure it’s automatically deleted and no one ever reads it. (I’ve never heard of anyone who has ever received a reply.)
– If you post an appeal to the board, you’re told to do it via e-mail. If you say you did that but never received a reply, they gaslight you and say that everyone receives a reply or that you should just wait until you get a reply (which you never will).
– They then got so tired of people pointing this out, that they banned public discussion of it.
When I joined Infinity, Modiphius reached out to RPGNet to see if my ban could be reversed so that I could do promotion activities. Here’s how that worked:
– No response from admin e-mail.
– Do a run-around by contacting the site owner directly. The site owner says, “Only the moderators can make that decision.”
– Forward the site owner’s e-mail to the moderator directly. They say, “Only the site owner can make that decision.”
– Forward the e-mail from the moderators to the site owner asking for his decision. Get no reply.
Justin;
I’m inclined to grant a touch of Hanlon to the appeals system, as I did in fact get a couple of replies for my very first ‘crime’. However, what became clear was that the ‘appeals’ are only regarded as valid if you’re merely protesting a technical error, not questioning a mod’s actual call. Which may be the true Zeroth Rule of RPG.net; that the Mods were not like us mere mortals, capable of fault or bias.
All the other appeals ended up with the standard non-reply, though.
I think the real ‘Kafkaesque’ element is the fact most of the ‘crimes’ are alerted via the reporting system [I think]. That normally, an invisible person will grass you up, and if it suits the ruling group’s ‘mission and values’ you will then get the hammer. You never actually get to find out who you annoyed, [though it’s obvious sometimes], get to defend your position [through this is irrelevent as ‘it’s true’ is not a defence] or at times even find out what your ‘crime’ was.
RPG.net is a good example of what happens with an organisation which has a secretive co-option system for picking leaders, without any oversight [from either the membership and/or a ‘Benevolent Dictator for Life’]. A small group has managed to capture power, and now uses said power to replicate/preserve itself and to press it’s factional goals on everyone else.
Even if I simply ‘stuck with the elfgames’ [as the mod suggested to me] I still wouldn’t return. I generally like games like World of Darkness, and the forum’s ideological bell-jar and toxic culture makes discussion about game setting etc difficult at best and I’d not have faith putting so much time/effort into a place which I and/or my fellow players/ST could get kicked out on a whim. And sure as hell I’d never run a game in such a place. The risks of loss would be too great.
[…] fact, that’s what the ‘The Alexandrian’ and I have in common; we both are exiles from forum-land, finding in blogging a publishing medium […]
I too used to frequent rpg.net back in the day. Then I stopped visiting for merry a long time. Then recently went back and all I can say is ‘yipes’. Cess pool of rotten moderators doesn’t do it justice. The third Reich was more laid back than those cretins.
As near as I can tell — though I haven’t personally run afoul of it — it has become an unwritten rule of RPGnet that all members are supposed to be familiar with all atrocities ever committed throughout history and never present them in a neutral light. There is no such thing as accidentally saying something offensive out of ignorance. You are “obviously” trying to commit a hate crime, not too sheltered by privilege to understand what you said wrong.
Really, these days RPGnet strikes me as a far-left forum first and a tabletop RPG forum second. I half expect them to abruptly ban all discussion of D&D one day due to its legacy of racism.