Gamefaqs - An old gaming website that still exists somehow

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This is what happens when you search for poop on the Anime: Other Titles board:

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How hard up do you have to be for male poop scenes that you are scouring a PG-13 SFW website for links?:briefs:
 
TaiIs82 here with a modern look at the boards. Yes, TaiIs82 the alleged scourge of modern Gamefaqs himself, who uh...lol...got banned for saying "I am an anti-racist."

The message

A previous similar message

At first I thought that older one was modded because of the Trump support, but then they just straight-up banned me for opposing racism. Some of the mods there have gone so far off the deep end that when they're mad at you and can't find a violation, they just delete whatever's at the top of your message history, leading to situations like this. There is allegedly admin oversight to what they're doing, but Allen phoned it in years ago.

My ongoing feud with Error1355 - the worst mod on Gamefaqs - is the stuff of autistic legend and could fill a whole blog's worth of your time. So I will just bring up some of the pettiest things they did - and keep in mind that these are people well into their 30s and 40s who thought these moves were going to seriously wound me in some way and "teach me a lesson."

- Error expelled me from the barely-active board "That's What She Said" even though I hadn't posted a single thing there to rile him, or anything period for that matter. But he got offended at something I sent to him in a joke mod form something like 8 years ago, so he followed me around reposting that same image for several years, convinced that he was "fighting the homophobes" with this display.

-Error was also convinced at this time that he had to harass another 10-year user off the site for not being pro-gay enough, even taking the war to twitter because he thought the account was far right and dangerous to the boards (ironically, that guy is now posting more anti-Trump things on twitter than Error does)

- AssultTank is another crappy mod who spent at least 3 months on an offsite discord plotting to close my community board down by any means necessary. Eventually he begged SBAllen enough that he did it. I asked what the problem was with the board and they couldn't give me a reason or specific message showing why it had shut down, other than they were just generally offended. When AssultTank had first complained to Allen, he sent me a PM saying it was problematic that someone had posted an nkl (the lowest possible violation on the site) about wanting to blow up an imaginary anime character. So my board was threatened with closure, and eventually got locked because someone had fictionally insulted, and wanted to blow up a mod's anime waifu.

- AssultTank also thought he would "teach me a lesson" by intentionally misspelling my account name so that something like 5 or 10 karma (meaningless site points) would not go to my account after I won a trivia contest. Yes, the points you automatically get by logging in each day. I am embarrassed for him that I'm even bringing this up, because it was one of the saddest, pettiest moves I've ever seen, and he was proud of it like withholding the points would teach me something. The cringe was real.

And now, a ban for "I am an anti-racist." Even for Gamefaqs, I'm surprised by this one. That was somebody's hill to die on when it came time to argue for a ban. I'd love to know what the mod board looked like that day.


And going into the 2nd month where I haven't posted there at all, people are still accusing other accounts of being my alts and threatening to send them to the moderators for a ban. There is a particularly sad chunk of the userbase that gets obsessed with banning accounts, to the point of keeping spreadsheets on them and refreshing at all times, to see if any of the accounts on their list that they reported today were banned. Then they rush to announce it on Current Events and other boards, like they had just won the lottery when they get someone warned or suspended on Gamefaqs for a few days. 9 times out of 10 if you scratch the surface of these users' delusions, they're LGBT or allies convinced that they are waging war against anti-gays and saving Gamefaqs from the alt right. In reality they are driving what's left of the userbase off the site.

People have referred to me as a career troll but I don't even plan the vast majority of the things that they lose their minds over. Banned for opposing racism? Who could've seen that coming? I have even been blocked by users from other boards, who don't know me and have never interacted with me, because someone didn't like me years ago and I got put on a blocklist that the easily-offended accounts circulate amongst themselves. It was just weird, and then I end up making board-friends with one of the people and the next day everyone in the group has unblocked me. The cliques there are so bizarre. This post has gone on long enough but it could probably go on an autistic stream way longer if we drilled down to just 1 user and their decades-long trail of drama, why they hate this account and that account, and the things that were allegedly said in warned/suspended topics #21, #85 and #107 that led to grudges that have gone on for years. Nobody new is coming in so it's the same old users who hate each other.

I haven't posted there in a month and I could step away for 10-20 years, if the site is still around by then I could come back and nothing would change, it'd be like I had stepped out yesterday. There are some heavy OCD behaviors going on there. A few people will still be around, accusing other users of being a TaiIs alt 10 years later. I will live on in the minds of these screwed-up individuals for quite some time.
 
The constant accusations of being so and sos alt and the over abundance of "*so and so user is banned/warned/suspended" topics was super annoying on CE and is what actively pushed me to just troll and stir the pot.

It's weird how all the 40 somethings on that websight dont realize how fucking boring they made it by ONLY talking about SJW Politics and board drama. If you try to post anything else its ignored, so of course those of us that used CE as a time waster instead of a social life simulator would stir the pot. Even better when you actually like Trump and they lose their collective minds over it.

I'm also in month 2 of being gone and god damn i dont know why i didnt leave sooner. Even just trolling those losers hadn't been fun for 3 years.
 
You can stir the pot on them just as much offsite, because of course some of them follow you around looking for new reasons to feel outraged. These ones sometimes even ask mods to do something about the offsite content, and are disappointed when they find out their heroes can't actually moderate everything on the internet and are just unpaid Paul Blart types who have no real power or influence outside of Gamefaqs.


This is the Error1355 New Years meltdown where he reclaimed his body image after someone leaked his photo on reddit....yeah he's, quite the beautiful one. He rode that to 500 demanding that other accounts put their personal photos up to prove they were as "brave" as he was. Basically whining and begging the guy who leaked the Error photo to release his photo too, to make it seem fair in his mind.


And Error has been glitching out in recent years. Here he is repeating the word "patriotism" and a string of f-bombs which finally got him moderated (very rare for mods - just ask Admiral who was once considered untouchable, but was quickly suspended several times and later banned after he lost mod status). Error has a tendency to repeat words when excited ("hockey") or stressed ("beep bep"). I'm just a guy with a goofy avatar who can't make an actual diagnosis, but I'd say he's got something. Error has alts in the triple digits right now, or close to it, and has bragged before about how many hundreds of messages he removed in a day and what his record is.

He was in a podcast with friends a few years ago which went nowhere and was filled with awkward pauses, until someone would bring up Metal Gear and then he just geeked out on an autistic tangent every time. He had his own Metal Gear blog/site that may still be archived somewhere out there. They were also legit concerned about him at times because he has an addictive personality and blew some mad bucks on virtual Hearthstone content. Every time they started the show, it would be casual first-name intros followed by "I'm John, John Sherman, Error1355, follow me on twitter/youtube etc." When youtube wouldn't monetize his automated content, he accused them of exploiting children. "I'll be downvoting" was a brief meme after I told him I was going to downvote all his videos because he kept plugging them. Error has only posted a few times on IGN, showing up to complain about people there after they said he was the reason Gamefaqs sucked.

Error also mods r/gamefaqs. Most of the activity there came from people complaining about moderations and reposting their suspensions, so he hated that and blocked all talk of it. The place quickly became a ghost town. He also spammed his discord to hell and back on CE which would've been considered disruptive if it was anyone else - in fact, everyone else WAS blocked from advertising theirs. Allen got asked about it and he said there wasn't any policy against mentioning it once or twice (Error spammed his way more than that), so it appears that Error took it upon himself to eliminate competition with his mod tools and block out anyone else's server but his, and he also got bover to be the bouncer for it. Bover, the guy who hijacked another person's account and went unnoticed for years until the original account creator came back.

Krystal came up earlier in this thread. Not only was "cultural differences" a thing, she spent the whole weekend telling that longtime user from back in 2000 that he was wrong, and all the users who remembered him and vouched for him that they were just whining babies, until Allen came back on Monday and had to step in with a 180 admitting that bover had actually hijacked the account. That whole incident blew any mod credibility to bits when it was already hanging on a thread, especially when they said it was common knowledge among many mods for some time. I keep this in mind whenever the mods say there are internal processes to catch abusive mods. As if. Krystal was quickly canned and Allen never got the money for a replacement, the higher ups clearly have no interest in investing anything into the boards, there's no oversight. The boards are an afterthought to everybody and they're never entering the 21st century. So it has basically become the leftover trash kingdom for mods and wannabes like bover, who still like to pretend that they are mods.

The three circles of moderation hell on Gamefaqs consist of community boards, general site boards, and at the worst, specific boards with a heavy mod presence like Ask the Mods or Hellhole. Say anything they don't like on Hellhole, and you're gone. Many users fall into this trap where they get their topic locked by some mod, they make a new topic asking why it was locked, then that gets hit with a severe punishment for lock dodging or something stupid like that. Gamefaqs removed 3kls recently and now they go straight to a warning for almost any offense. So someone could get warned, ask "why was I warned?" on one of the mod boards and get instantly suspended just for asking the question. They removed mod notes in disputes so you're left in the dark, and they cut out any appeals to admin entirely (one of many areas where Allen has gone MIA).


Mods have the approval rating of mosquitoes these days, but they still have a few defenders. Starfighters76 (born in '76) is just one example. All he does is hang out on Hellhole defending every mod decision ever made, even when he knows absolutely nothing about it. He is from back in the Sailor Moon era and those were his golden years, he's never moved on in life. So Hellhole is basically guys like that and a few other cranks who appear to be like this irl as well, who you would never want to meet since you could probably smell them before you see them coming and they'll always want to speak to the manager. My favorite (aside from Starfighters) is the guy who threatens to file complaints with the Better Business Bureau, can never hold down a job because he was always paranoid that the janitors or female workers were stealing his stuff, and wouldn't leave the McDonalds drive thru until they gave him the My Little Pony toy that he wanted.

Moderation on general boards is the default but also very strict if the mods don't like you. Users complain that mods never go after blatant racism/Holocaust denial and so on, and that it's left up for days. This is because the mods instead spend their time going after borderline accounts looking for gotcha moments, or giving full body cavity searches to accounts they don't like. Finally there's the newer entry, community boards, which are supposed to have looser terms at the owner's discretion, but can still have mods police and over-police them out of the blue. I used my board to confirm that they would sometimes dip into the board to moderate someone even if it had never been marked in the queue at all, and KOS definitely still exists for a select few accounts (one of them showed up to say "hi" and was instabanned).

The common strawman overreaction is to take everything down if one person claims they are offended, but Gamefaqs goes one step further and takes things down even if there have been zero complaints. Most of the time when they moderate someone, they are looking at who the user is rather than the content.
 
Is Sashanan still a mod there? I remember being around when it came out he was grooming a 14 year old girl.
 
Yeah, I'm lurking. It's how I get my daily "That guy is a TaiIs alt!" entertainment: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/573081-hellhole/78868429#27

Active messages? That's all old stuff from the past year or so. Gamefaqs changed its purge/archive rate to keep the board activity artificially higher. Old users might remember that topics closed on their own after something like 10-30 days with no activity. Everything got extended so the boards would look more active than they actually are. Now it's based on how many topics are on the board, and if there's only 1 topic that means it stays "active" forever even if no one's posted in it for years. So my old board hunter account still has a bunch of active messages as well, even though I haven't posted on it in at least a year.

It all has to do with gaming the site rankings and was announced around the same time they rolled Gamefaqs into gamefaqs.gamespot.com. They are trying to bump up the activity on paper to save advertisers. Gamerankings was shut down recently and CBS has laid off a bunch of employees in recent months. They are consolidating and ditching the other Gamefaqs-era sites. It would not surprise me if some higher up looked at the 20th century layout on Gamefaqs and decided to pull the plug soon.
 
I'd say error and Cyric would be on suicide watch if that happened but no one would be there to watch
 
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Dunno about Cyric since I only go after current mods. Error, though, would be on watch perpetually if he wasn't so fat that the rope would break.


The typical self-lock when someone challenges him in any way.


He's back to retweeting edgy lyrics like he's a depressed tween, which is where his maturity level is still stuck at. This was the same day he declared his support for terrorism against "fascists" (aka people who disagreed with him on CE). There was also some discord leak where he said his father was perpetually disappointed in him and that he's not a real man.

So a mod can say "I'm a terrorist" (something they would fly off the handle to moderate for legal reasons if it was anyone else, like people who joke that they're a fetus) but I can't say I'm antiracist. I dunno man. I would still love to know why that happened, but I doubt I'll ever get an answer.

My headcanon is that SBAllen secretly likes me. I think he was telling me through that ban, "Go on with your life, TaiIs. It's too late for us, but you're still in your 20s. Don't waste your life here like we did. Fly away, free bird, fly!"
 
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Dunno about Cyric since I only go after current mods. Error, though, would be on watch perpetually if he wasn't so fat that the rope would break.


The typical self-lock when someone challenges him in any way.


He's back to retweeting edgy lyrics like he's a depressed tween, which is where his maturity level is still stuck at. This was the same day he declared his support for terrorism against "fascists" (aka people who disagreed with him on CE). There was also some discord leak where he said his father was perpetually disappointed in him and that he's not a real man.

So a mod can say "I'm a terrorist" (something they would fly off the handle to moderate for legal reasons if it was anyone else, like people who joke that they're a fetus) but I can't say I'm antiracist. I dunno man. I would still love to know why that happened, but I doubt I'll ever get an answer.

My headcanon is that SBAllen secretly likes me. I think he was telling me through that ban, "Go on with your life, TaiIs. It's too late for us, but you're still in your 20s. Don't waste your life here like we did. Fly away, free bird, fly!"
If you're in your 20s there are theoretically people posting there since before you were born.
 
I haven't posted there in a month and I could step away for 10-20 years, if the site is still around by then I could come back and nothing would change, it'd be like I had stepped out yesterday. There are some heavy OCD behaviors going on there. A few people will still be around, accusing other users of being a TaiIs alt 10 years later. I will live on in the minds of these screwed-up individuals for quite some time.

I actually did step away for well over a decade, came back, and CE was the same brand of catty bullshit like it was before, only instead of fedora atheists whining about G.W. Bush, it was troons whining about Trump.

Come to think of it, there was one tranny in the very early days of CE: Andrea Blackheart, but he/she (born a man) was actually really cool at the time.

Here's her pic from December '02:
andrea_blackheart.jpg


And now that I look at it again, I.. have no idea if that was a troll or not. If she was born a man, she certainly passes with flying colors. Then again, that 2002 digital photography hides all the detail.
 
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The forums are not well trafficked, are they?
Their daily polls get about 10k votes but that translates to like 50 posts about the poll in the forum. And in each of the boards for the games whenever they run polls it's between 50-200 votes.
 
Man, GameFAQs. That was a trip.

GameFAQs used to keep the account password stored in the login cookie unencrypted. You could steal a password by tricking someone into giving up your cookie file. I think there was a trick that was used to get the cookie from people, but I can't remember. Was fixed very fast.

I can't remember who the first person was that made a GameFAQs-like forum, but it was a shitty open-source project that had multiple bugs, such as stealing someone's session to login their account and most, notably, having unencrypted passwords stored in the database. So multiple spinoffs existed with unencrypted passwords. Users would use the same password in between sites because they were idiots that password recycled. Someone may have given BigRedMachine, a KOS Krew permabanned user, access to one such database for laughs, but it's hard to say who did this or why anyone would do such a ridiculous, crazy, chaotic thing.

Moderation on GameFAQs was always nonsense.

I'm not really sure why GameFAQs is still up. The site serves no purpose and its community is unappealing at best.

Secret boards are life.

Remember the KOS Krew? They were a cabal of super sekrit haxxors who jacked accounts. CJay even called one's ISP once to try to put a stop to it, instead of fixing his shitty code.

Haha, I can confirm this happened to at least one individual (the one I can think of had only very little infamy), probably more than one.
 
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I'm not really sure why GameFAQs is still up. The site serves no purpose and its community is unappealing at best.

The mods and others always got mad when I'd say that and claim the guides still got tons of views. Cyric especially would get upset when I'd say he was obsolete in a world where Youtube existed. I never actually cared enough to see if I was right though cause I was mostly just trolling.

I'm surprised the message boards are still open. I have no idea how much it costs to maintain a forum of that size but I'd think it would be enough to close it if there are only less than 2000 users on at any given time, most of whom use adblock.
 
Man, GameFAQs. That was a trip.

GameFAQs used to keep the account password stored in the login cookie unencrypted. You could steal a password by tricking someone into giving up your cookie file. I think there was a trick that was used to get the cookie from people, but I can't remember. Was fixed very fast.

I can't remember who the first person was that made a GameFAQs-like forum, but it was a shitty open-source project that had multiple bugs, such as stealing someone's session to login their account and most, notably, having unencrypted passwords stored in the database. So multiple spinoffs existed with unencrypted passwords. Users would use the same password in between sites because they were idiots that password recycled. Someone may have given BigRedMachine, a KOS Krew permabanned user, access to one such database for laughs, but it's hard to say who did this or why anyone would do such a ridiculous, crazy, chaotic thing.

Moderation on GameFAQs was always nonsense.

I'm not really sure why GameFAQs is still up. The site serves no purpose and its community is unappealing at best.



Haha, I can confirm this happened to at least one individual (the one I can think of had only very little infamy), probably more than one.

The community is the only reason to go to GameFaqs if only to laugh at the petty drana. The best example has been the Smash Ultimate board. A lot of the users there are always in some autistic slapfight about something.
 
I'm not really sure why GameFAQs is still up. The site serves no purpose and its community is unappealing at best.
The one reason to still use it is for the countless walkthroughs and save files for old, obscure games. I hope someone rips the database and compiles them all into one colossal wiki, to make them easier to skim through. If that ever happened, GameFAQs could be fully deleted, and nothing of value would be lost. Or hell, they could just convert the entire site to a giant wiki themselves, that'd be great. The current interface is cold and dated.

Wiki guides are the way to go now, anyway. Imagine trying to play Minecraft with a colossal .txt file and little descriptions of what each block looks like. Why were PDF guides never made standard back in the PS2 days? Yeah, lots of people were still on dial-up back then, but it's not like PDFs have to be 100mb goliaths if they're formatted properly. More often than not, I've just needed a map, and the ASCII maps in so many guides are hard to read and often unreadably autistic, and I would have happily taken even a shitty MSPaint map someone drew than those vague text-based ones that never matched the game quite right with anything more complex than a small, flat maze.

I actually got stuck at around the halfway point through Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (CJayC's favorite game, according to the radio interview), and GameFAQs' FAQs were worthless at helping me figure out where to go next. If the game's not linear, the writer always assumes you're holding their hand throughout the entire game, so it's very easy to guess where you left off, follow directions on where to go next, and then get stuck again because you haven't cleared other areas or found other mcguffins. McGuffins that the FAQ writer mentioned way earlier in the guide, but they just assume you already have the Holy Crystal of Bullshit with the game giving no indication that that's what you need to open the gateway to Mt. Niggerhead or whatever.
 
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