Wapanese Weeaboo
(?)Community Member
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- Posted: Sat, 02 Feb 2013 13:16:38 +0000
Quibuz
Wapanese Weeaboo
While, of course, it's not my place to question what happened since I don't know the whole story, I just find it odd you state a moderator "basically harassed" you for creating a "false report." Without knowing the whole story, I'm limited in what I can give on the subject but that just doesn't seem right. Was it harassment or was it simply the moderator educating you on what the situation you reported was and how your report against it wasn't valid?
It was through a pm sent by a site moderator. It clearly states that this particular moderator has noticed that I have a tendency to report any thread, post, or signature with the word "sex" or "p***s" in it. Which is not true at all. I normally only report explicit graphic materials posted in the forums. And there are a lot. In the past weeks i must have reported over 20 threads containing pornographic images. However this time i reported someone's signature as i wanted to make a point that certain repeating violators of the ToS and R&G circumvent the optional gaia wordcensors, by putting spaces in certain words. And this particular moderator tries to convince me in an unfriendly manner not to make similar reports again. In a similar case (also involving the use of certain words in a signature to bypass censors), which was handled by a different moderator, I was thanked for helping to keep the site safe for kids. Which underlines the double standard some moderators seem to have.
I created this thread to gather enough information about opinions of other gaians concerning this topic. Based on that information i might take further steps that may involve, but not limits nor excludes contacting gaia staff and/or management. I prefer not to digress too much on that at this point in time. I am willing to explain my motives though.
In the past 7 years i have seen changes in gaiaonline's and gaians attitudes towards eachother. Many of my the people i knew from then left gaia as it (and i loosely quote) "gaia has losts its appeal as it has become too much part of the commercial industry. It has lost the joyfull, warm, welcome feeling it used to bring."
It is a fact that the given number of people being online on the site has gone down drastically. If anyone likes to contest that.... just take a look at the following information:
The gaiaonline main forum site as of the moment of creating this reply:
Who is Online? - 7111 users. (5836 visible, 1142 hidden, 133 guests).
Gaia has 2,116,349,584 articles posted with 26,844,083 registered users.
Most users ever online was 77,655 on Mon Nov 08, 2010 1:31 am
Gaia has 2,116,349,584 articles posted with 26,844,083 registered users.
Most users ever online was 77,655 on Mon Nov 08, 2010 1:31 am
The gaiaonline main forum site as documented by the web archive on june 29, 2007:
Who is Online? - 65699 users. (58782 visible, 3844 hidden, 3073 guests).
Gaia has 1,074,609,046 articles posted with 8,081,368 registered users.
Most users ever online was 86,738 on Thu Jan 04, 2007 3:00 pm
Gaia has 1,074,609,046 articles posted with 8,081,368 registered users.
Most users ever online was 86,738 on Thu Jan 04, 2007 3:00 pm
For your information... i picked a random date out of available data for comparison.
The amount of registered user accounts has increased a lot, but that is no surprise. Such an increase can easily be explained by the following reasons:
- there is no means of deleting an account on gaia over time a population growns many gaians have multiple (mule) accounts next to their "main" account.
Surprisingly the amount of articles posted has merely doubled in value. Over that time with such a large amount of users one would expect a lot more articles to be posted. A possible reason for that can be that non-public accessible parts of the forums (like closed event forums) are not included anymore.
Times mentioned in both observations can't be compared as I do not live in the same timezone as where the internet archive index bots reside. Nonetheless, back in 2007 one could get similar results at any given time of the day. Whether it was in the middle of the night or during the day, there were always more than 50,000 unique visitors online.
What i find striking is that at this moment there are 7,111 unique users online. On june 29, 2007 that were 65,699 unique users.
Possible reasons for that are:
- gaia has lost contact with the original targetgroup. It has seized to be the warm, tight, loyal community it used to be. gaiaonline has become too much of a marketing thing. In recent years gaiaonline has become more and more focussed on making profit, than investing in what their targetgroups really wanted. An example of that is the announcement last year made by certain developers that zOMG! (which has been gaiaonline's spearhead for a long time) would be discontinued. This hasn't happend yet, but that can only be contributed to the amount of concerned posts made by many zOMG!players due to above reasons a lot of gaians have moved on to other website communities.
If this trend continues gaiaonline will seize to exist within a few years. Of course the marketing department of gaiaonline (which is larger than the game maintenance/developing department) will prevent that from happening. However, it is likely that more and more institutes (like the OpenDNS systems, parental control software, schools, libraries, campuses, etcetera) will block access to the site as it clearly is not the PG-13 site it claims to be and therefore is not "safe for (young) teens". Let us all put some effort into this and make this site safe for everyone.
Ah, I see you've disregarded the other part of my post. That's fine if you have no response to that. 3nodding
As for the point you've brought up, I'm failing to see how that is "basically harassment." You reported something, the moderator messaged you back letting you know they have noticed you report a lot of content that's sexually explicit, or what you believe to be sexually explicit, you then state they told you in an "unfriendly manner" to not make reports like the one they contacted you about again. At this time, unless there's proof of what was said, this is all entirely one-sided, he said she said if you will. You're not required to prove what was said of course, however, I find it highly unlikely the moderator would have been unfriendly or harassing in their reply to you. After all, moderators that harass users don't stay moderators. I'm pretty sure the moderators are well aware that users attempt to bypass certain word blocks via altering how they're spelling something but like I mentioned in my original post, it all comes down to context which is why I'm sure the other moderator you mentioned thanked you for reporting because in the other context, it may very well have been a violation.
As for the numbers you're quoting there, I find it a bit funny you mention bots (referring to the "internet archive index bots") because that's where a lot of those "online" users came from when the numbers were much higher years ago, and why the counter was reset. As for why there aren't a lot of users online compared to before, well, you're going to have people give different answers because everyone has their own view on it and some of those views may be spot on. For example, people leave due to loss of interest, I'm sure quite a few of the older users on here joined in their mid-teens and over the years have grown apart from what used to keep them entertained, thus leaving Gaia. Real life got in the way, people growing up means they're leaving school to start working and whatever else may keep them busy in the real world, they no longer simply have the time for Gaia that they once did. Nothing has really changed over the years, this is sort of goes in hand with my original one where Gaia is still a forum based site with games thrown in here and there as well an avatar dressing aspect to it. Perhaps a lot of the users have just grown out of that "dressing up avatar" phase and the forums no longer appeal to them and they've grown bored with the games as they can't compare to the countless other types of games out there on the internet (as well gaming consoles) so they've lost interest there as well. Maybe some only joined because a friend of theirs joined and said friend has left and they only really stayed around for their sake, with that friend gone, there's really nothing else to do without that feeling of starting over to look for others to enjoy their time with. There's tons of other reasons people can come up with as to why they feel the numbers have dropped over the years and more than likely, that reason that they came up with may very well be a reason why at least one person has left.
I'd love to hear your reasoning on your "gaia has lost contact with the original targetgroup. It has seized to be the warm, tight, loyal community it used to be" point you made. Who did Gaia exactly "target" before when the number of users was higher? Tight and loyal community? That's something that's going to be impossible to keep on a site that grows and has as much traffic as Gaia does. The more people that join and participate in the site, the more "drowned out" the tight and loyal becomes, it's just a fact of online communities I'm afraid.
As for your second point that Gaia has become "too much of a marketing thing," well, yea, money is what makes the world go round. Without constant income, Gaia goes away. It only makes sense that try and make money. More money means more money to pay developers and artists to create other things that can make more money and give the users more to do.That's pretty cut and dry right there. For zOMG!, I would like links, if you have them, to where a developer has stated zOMG! will be discontinued. All I've heard about zOMG!'s future lately is that it has been placed in "maintenance mode" meaning that it's still here and not going anywhere, and literally it's not going anywhere, as in no new content to provide, just the bare essentials to keep it running. From my understanding, while zOMG! did rack in some money, it just wasn't enough to keep the amount of attention that the users wanted to see. Like the real world, from a business standpoint, you don't keep feeding money to something that you see isn't making you money. Instead, you use that money for something that either you know will make you money, or you branch out and try new waters (in this case, Gaia's Facebook games they've been pushing out) until you find that little gem that everyone likes and is putting enough money towards it to show that.
As for places blocking Gaia, only thing I really have to say to that is my job blocks Gaia simply for "gaming." That's literally the reason that comes up on the firewall if I were to try and visit it from the office. However, as for being blocked for not being "PG-13," I don't see this happening because this isn't how Gaia shows itself nor would the staff allow it to, hence we have moderators that clean the site up.