I Was a GameFAQs Moderator for 5 yrs.

It was an interesting experience that I have wanted to share from time to time but GameFAQs has changed so much that I almost feel a little worried that anything I write here will cause secret CNet/GameFAQs agents to kidnap my wife and kill my cat because some people over there get a little crazy when people tell their "secrets". Not that I plan to post screenshots of the inner workings of the place but I might say something that would freak one of them out and all hell will break loose somewhere in the world over something pretty stupid.

Let me makes some quick comments in case someone actually does read this and wants to start some sort of e-fight. GameFAQs is a great place for what it is intended to be. That is a place that people can go to to get info and help in a almost any video game created on a ton of different systems. The message boards are secondary to that. There are some great boards on GameFAQs and sometimes you may get some help on a game board but don't get your hopes up. As the days, weeks, months, and years go by, the level of help you receive has diminished. Some people will disagree but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see it.

I would also like to state that some of the things I will write could easily be hypocritical. I can admit that, unlike most other people. Some of the things that have lessened the greatness that GameFAQs once was were things that I myself used to do. It wasn't until last year that I realized it and did my part not to be that person.

GameFAQs for me was a place to waste time. When I had nothing to do or when I was playing poker online it was a nice place to mess about. When I first started going there back in 2000 it was quite small compared to today. I spent most of my time on the Final Fantasy 9 board getting help and helping others. Shortly there after I decided to take a shot at FAQ writing for the site and started to spend time on the FAQ Contributors board. That was the place to be. All the prolific writers and the moderators would hang there. Everyone was very nice and helpful and through that I made some cool e-friends. I started getting interested in the inner workings of the site and the rules. I was not a big internet person at the time and GameFAQs was the first message board I had ever participated in. I found it all quite fascinating.

Things were much simpler then. You had levels based on your time there and when you got modded you either got a deletion or you were suspended and then banned. No karma, no varying degrees of punishment, no purgatory, no contesting your deletions, etc. Delete or good bye. Maybe you would get warned. I can't remember but I bet you could, either way, it was much simpler. I started hanging out at Questions and Suggestions. That was the early Message Board Help (MBH). We had fun there, a small group of us. Things were not as volatile as they have been the last few years. Very little complaining and a lot of general questions.

As time went on I became quite knowledgeable of the Terms of Service and decided to apply to be a moderator. I got selected on the first attempt I took and that is where the fun began. It was a small group back then. Not many people knew the inner workings since there weren't all the leaks and screenshots and mod hackings there have been since. It was a pretty stressful job at first. At GameFAQs, if you are not aware, the sites users mark messages that they feel violate the ToS/ToU and that sends them into this queue. As a mod you have access to this queue and you go in there and can look at the marked posts and decide the punishment. I remember when I first started it took me forever to moderate. I would read the post, read the topic it was from, read the mod guidelines to get an idea on the rule it was marked for, check the users moderations history, read the post again, read the guidelines, etc because I didn't want to unfairly mod someone. It got easier. I would skip ones I wasn't sure of and then quickly mod through easy ones. Basically modding loses it's luster rather quickly and it just becomes a duty in which you want to clear the queue so you don't have to bother with the banner on the top of your page telling you there are posts to moderate. Some will disagree but none of them can honestly say they take the time to mod a post they way they did their first month. If they did they wouldn't mod as much as they do these days.

Early on the group was small and tight. We all got along and we all worked for the good of the site. Very little cliques going on and very little jockeying for positions. We were all moderators of this great site and we enjoyed it. It wasn't till I believe the next batch where things started to turn. A couple mods from the next batch were not the best choices. One being CronoGamer and the other being crimsonassasin. Crono was okay but after awhile he got sick of it I guess and decided to use his powers and go out with a bang and mod the living day lights out of a not so popular user on the boards. Did it really hurt anyone? No. Was it stupid? Maybe, but really, it is just an internet message board. If he did something like that in real life and at his real job he would have to suffer some consequences, but on the internet you just log off and be done with it.

Crimson was a different story. I didn't quite understand his game and what he was trying to accomplish but he was the first mod to attack other mods through moderation or just by posting violations on the mod boards at other mods. I won't go into great detail as this seems to be one of the "secrets" that could result in loss of life in my family, but CA was known to flame, troll, use SPI's against mods and even admins. For a long time he was left alone for some reason. One reason would be that mods had an unwritten rule back then that you could not mod a mod on the mod boards because then people using metamod would see it and OMG all hell would break loose. So CA's SPI towards me on Mod Social got to stay and truth be known, Ceej wasn't very active on the mod boards as many people might have expected so nothing much was done about it. I think the straw that finally broke the camel's back was when he posted some troll/flame towards a Gamespot Admin on the GS Mod/GF Mod board. After he got booted he knew the mods were not allowed to talk about the actions that got him booted so that gave him free reign to troll and cause problems on the board. Another by product of GameFAQs staff wanting to remain so mysterious.

Around that time is when things seemed to start changing for the worse in my opinion. By then the site had really grown to the point of Jeff selling the site to CNet, the need for more mods meant a larger group and the lack of any admin support resulted in chaos on the mod side of things. The level of consistency was ridiculous. I remember making topics on the mod boards that some of us worked on to try and get an idea on where people's heads were and it was amazing to see the complete mess it was. Some people would NKL one thing while some would warn for the same thing, a couple would suspend, and a couple would notify, and then about 50 mods would never even bother to read or participate on the mod boards. It was a mess. And I have no doubt that it still is but not as bad as I suspect that SBAllen contributes a lot more support than Ceej did.

I don't post much anymore on GameFAQs. I still visit every now and then and it is either to get help on a game I am playing, check reviews of a game I might want to get, or check out my private board, KGB. I no longer bother with the side of GameFAQs that I used to. The moderation/MBH side. Having gone on to other forums I can honestly say I have never ran into the oddness that is GameFAQs and it's users preoccupation of mods, moderations, and the rules. I have also not run into a site that allows it's users to contest deleted posts even once whereas you can contest a deleted post 3 times at GameFAQs. It amazes me how much hand holding goes on at that site. I was a cranky person when I was a mod. Not because I am cranky by nature, but because of all the ridiculous crap I had to endure. Moderate this, answer this stupid question, get flamed, get nasty emails, go into the contest queue and read how this one guy thinks that saying he wants to rape his cat and then cut it's head off should not have been deleted because this is America and the Constitution gives him the right too post that without penalty. Deal with that everyday and you can get an idea of why most mods who post a lot are complete fucking assholes. I was. But then I grew up a bit and realized how utterly lame and foolish I looked. Some people need to step back and look through their posting history to see they too might need to do the same thing.

Being a GameFAQs mod was fun at times, boring and annoying the rest of the time. The first 2 years were great. We were doing something, but after that it became this odd little society where people were backstabbing each other and trying to gain more power and control.

The rules are just odd as well. Some make perfect sense and back in the day they seemed to fit but as the world and internet changes I think some of the rules make GameFAQs...bad? How many sites out there use the ignore function? Many do, all of the sites I go to have it. Well GameFAQs got it not too long ago and since the site likes to try and control so may aspects of a users posts, you can get modded for telling someone you are going to ignore them. That is the perfect example of how uttely ridiculous that site's rules are. Fine, nude pics, swearing, graphic sex discussions, and hardcore insults are deleted, but modding people because they want to tell a troll they are ignoring him because that will annoy the user and he may respond in a flame? Give me a break, it is like elementary school, not a video game site on the internet. Does this mean the mods are at fault? Not all of them. Talking to some I know they disagree with that rule and many others, but they are instructed to moderate these posts so they are just doing what they should do.

The site does not allow you to post a hyperlink. Why? Because someone might post porn. ????

The site does not have a Private Message system. Why? Because the mods would have a hard time monitoring what is being sent through the PM system. ???

The site does not allow people to edit their posts? Why? Because people will post a flame, or a link to ROMs/Porn, etc and then quickly edit it to not get in trouble. ???

So the basic theme is that they think all their users are a bunch of retarded monkey children who will do anything they can to break a rule so may as well live in the old ages of internet forums. I understand no avatars and pics for speed and simplicity but the examples I posted show what the staff is all about.

Quotas were a sore subject on the mod boards. Basically Jeff always said that he would not set a quota since it was a volunteer position. That makes perfect sense. There were weeks were I would touch 200 marked posts/contests, and then there were weeks where I would mod thousands of posts and handle many contests. Whatever I had time for. Some mods would do thousands in a day. Those mods begged for quotas because some felt that it was not fair they would do so much and others would do so little. People wanted Ceej to set up a quota and boot anyone who didn't meet it or had not done anything at all in years, which sadly there were many people with mod titles that did nothing at all. They posted everyday but had not handles even 50 marked posts in over 2 years. Is it a big deal. I didn't think so for the reasons many said. I think you boot them because why not, they don't do anything. The reasons other people wanted them booted was because they might be leaking the big ol' secrets. The moderations staff love their secrets. Oooh, let's not let them know MMA still exists. Let's not let them know that there is another queue full of marks that during my time were left untouched for weeks and months until someone group decided to tackle them. If anyone is reading this, there was a day a couple years ago where MBH and the site when crazy when people started getting modded like crazy for old stuff. That was the time some mods decided to spend a weekend going through the queue filled with marks that had low MMA and the mods just let the ranting and raving go one without just simply telling people the truth. For some reason telling people that marks from low MMA users go into a different queue because 80% of them are bad marks and take time away from handling the marks where 80% of them are good marks is going to do something bad. As a smart person it makes sense. What doesn't make sense is the fact that we had to hide it. Stuff like that just made me start to think how utterly ridiculous things have gotten. OMG, don't tell the peeon users that we get stars based on how many messages we handle a day. That might cause some sort of rift in the time space continuum. The reason people get mad and frustrated is that keeping such ridiculous secrets does make it look as if the mods are vastly superior to the regs. Like the regs are too stupid to handle it. Excuse me while I take this time to make some phone calls to make sure my wife and family are still safe.

When I left the mod staff last year things were ugly. Quotas were imposed somewhat, some people thought it was wrong to set them on volunteers, others could care less, and others thought that the quotas were too lenient. Mods were urged to spend free time in the queues and not posting socially. Fights ensued and me being a blunt person never hid behind my feelings of what was going on. I rubbed a certain group the wrong way during the quota discussions and some consistency type topics but big deal. I still have emails from mods thanking me for saying what some were not in a position to say. Most mods just hide in the corner and just do a good job and doing their best to get rid of the crap that actually does get posted on that site, while others act as if it was their actual career. One mod told me that we owed it to CJayC to be on the site every time we had nothing to do and dig through the queue. I disagree. Help out when you can and when you want too. If you want to go hang out on Current Events and shoot the shit about some new movie or what someone did over the weekend, go ahead.

Overall it was a great experience and I had fun for the most part. When it stopped being fun and became more serious than the job I do for money is when I realized how it wasn't for me. If some want to sit there and moderate 2000+ posts a day then more power to them, it was no longer for me. I am sure this post will ruffle some feathers and create some controversy if it ever gets to GameFAQs but I don't care. My blog, my experience, my right to post about it. I never signed anything that said I could not talk about it. But maybe they make them do that now. It would not surprise me. At least I left out a lot of juicy secrets that should remain secrets. Or maybe that is just me creating more conspiracy theories for the pure hilarity of it.