Why does BGA claim that *other game site* is illegal?

[AsmadiGames]

This is absolutely inappropriate (quite possibly illegal) conduct from BGA, and you should be working to correct it immediately.

You're better than this.

[philip9999]

I have worked in software for a long time. I know what defects are. You don't just happen to "accidentally" libel your competition (even your nonprofit competition) and tell people it's a bug, at least not if you want to be taken seriously.

However, that's exactly the behavior I'd expect if you thought you could get away with it and then realized you can't. Just claim it's a bug.

New versions of the site are usually deployed on thursdays.

Any tech organization in the world is able to rush a deployment if it's necessary to avoid legal hot water, such as libel or slander.

I'll probably not play on here again unless I see a substantive change in approach. Pity, as there's one specific game I like here, but it would be hard for me to enjoy it.

[shrouded figure]

I am somewhat amused by the phrasing "obviously" a bug, doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

Although, from a software pov, why does there have to be a list of both illegal and legal websites? I'd think merely the illegal list is necessary to trigger any warnings, while the legal list is not necessary, since nothing needs to be done?

[N_Faker]

I am somewhat amused by the phrasing "obviously" a bug, doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

Although, from a software pov, why does there have to be a list of both illegal and legal websites? I'd think merely the illegal list is necessary to trigger any warnings, while the legal list is not necessary, since nothing needs to be done?

Presumably the 'legal list' would say that BGA doesn't condone advertising other sites. While the 'illegal list' would tell us off for using a criminal site?

Advertising being any mention of other similar(?) sites what so ever, it appears.

[ufm]

I am somewhat amused by the phrasing "obviously" a bug, doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

Although, from a software pov, why does there have to be a list of both illegal and legal websites? I'd think merely the illegal list is necessary to trigger any warnings, while the legal list is not necessary, since nothing needs to be done?

As above, advertising competition is not so favorable. This applies not only to BGA but all businesses.
Think about someone spouting 'BGA is better than here' or posting BGA link out of nowhere in other board game platforms.
BGA needs a better advertisement detection algorithm (and some leniency) though...
Trying to censor everything is obviously not the way to go.

[Lizard_King]

Of all the ways to deal with unsolicited advertisements of other platforms, censoring any discussion of other sites while falsely describing them as intellectual property thieves seems like one of the least likely to do anything but antagonize otherwise satisfied BGA users. I use BGA for a lot of games, and I use other platforms for other games. There's no conflict between the two things on my end, I happily pay several subscriptions though my usage ebss and flows, and I suspect I am not alone in that approach. It would never have occurred to me to talk about other platforms here, but only because my use of BGA communication functions is pretty limited to game feedback and "gg" etc in game.

This kind of policy, an overreaction to an edge case problem (which itself would not be particularly likely to be detected by most users) is just forcing users to have to ask hard questions about ethical corporate conduct and oversight of personal communications, things that shouldn't have to be an issue for a relationship between a boardgame player and a boardgame platform. Is it really worth approaching this with a Microsoft circa antitrust suit mindset when it's clear that BGA and the other platforms have thrived under a much less litigious and aggressive interpretation of how to defend intellectual property and customer bases?

I urge BGA to reconsider this policy wholesale as a matter of optics, if the ethical problems with the "obvious" bug and the degree of injury it delivered to an honestly-run company aren't enough. There's still plenty of time to simply say "this was a mistake, we thought it over, and we are a website that will succeed on the merits of our products, not by overreaching with our terms of service or attacking the reputations of other companies in this space unfairly. I don't even call them competitors, because it doesn't really work to describe how people subdivide their time between platforms for boardgames.

[dschingis27]

Guys, calm down a little bit. BGA isn't really censoring. A simple BGA forum search of 'yucata' reveals 186 occasions in the BGA forum. It has been mentioned often in the forum and it can be still be used in PMs and chat (and soon won't give a false warning). I've also seen other competing sites mentioned in the forums and in the general chat. The BGA admin only claimed that it's against ToS to link it, no one claimed it is forbidden to mention it.

For some reason it got completely censored in the current thread, which is hard to understand to me, but it hasn't been censored in the past and probably will not be in the future. There is absolutely no general policy of censoring on BGA (or at least hasn't been in the past).

[FeiJai24]

I have actually been a member of this website for longer than I have been on the *other game site*

I have played 5 games on here and 544 games on the *other game site*

I find this website to be overly complicated in its user interface, not as welcoming in the community and generally just not as good.

I cannot believe that this website would accuse the other of being illegal and I for one do not believe it, given how much information is shared by the developers on the *other game* site about licencing of new implementations, or even games where their licences have been revoked

My loyalties will continue to be with the *other game site*

I only come on here to try a game before I consider buying it, if it isn't on the *other game site*

[sourisdudesert]

I'm sorry but this is going way too far, so let me explain (again) what happened.

1. ToS

Like any other kind of services, we try to protect you against spammers, so we need to write something in our ToS that "this is forbidden to post links to others boardgaming services".

This way, when someone register on BGA just to post links and messages like "Hey, I don't usually play here, I prefer to play on XXXX, join me!", or post advertisement on the forum, we can take action, otherwise we could not be able to do anything (and guess what, there are spammers).

And by the way, this is not new: this is the case for 11 years.


2. Enforcement

We do have a filter on chat to automatically discourage this kind of spam. It does not prevent you to tell the names of other services, but it discourages spammers, and it is working very well.

Despite of this filter, we have 1-2 spammers every months, but that's fine, we can live with this, and without the filter we would have one every day, so filter is mandatory and useful, and we cannot run this service without it.


3. Distinction

The filter distinguish between legal/illegal and ethical/unethical services.

For legal services, we do practically nothing: it is just helping us to detect and prevent spammers.

For illegal services, we do add a warning, to inform players about this.


4. Bug

There have been an update on BGA on Sept 22th, with a bug that broke the filter and mix legal / illegal services.

For those interested, this is a stupid large list "a OR b OR c OR d" list of Javascript "indexOf( xxxx ) != -1", and a "indexOf( xxxx ) == -1" was introduced by mistake in the middle. As a consequence, it switched a large list of websites from "legal" category to "illegal".

The bug has been reported on Saturday Sept 25th, and despite I way away for the weekend I made a quick answer to explain that it was a bug less than 24 hours later, and fix it immediately in our development environment.


5. Fix

Each update of BGA, every week or every 2 weeks, do not bring just 1 or 2 changes, but dozen of changes, upgrades, bugfixes.

This is not like clapping your fingers, this is something that requires procedures, coordination of the whole team, in order not to break the thousands of players who are playing on BGA at the exact moment when we are doing the update.

Usually, BGA upgrades are done on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday (more rare), every week or 2 weeks. This week, a release was planned for today, Wednesday.

We obviously have emergency procedures, so yes we could have risk to break the whole website by making a release last Sunday. We also could have change our release plan and fix it on last Monday.

However, this fix obviously do not worth the risk! We are talking about a reinforcement of something that is prohibited by our ToS anyway. So yes, I understand that some other services owners are yelling about this (after all, this is free advertisement they can make thanks to our mistake), but the consequences are super limited, and I support this decision not to change our plan and to fix this bug today, as planned.


6. Conclusion

Bug reported on Sept 25th, acknowledge on Sept 26th, fixed on Sept 29th.

Feel free to consider that we are not taking our job seriously, but I'm sorry to disagree on this


This is all that need to be said on this issue, all the rest is unnecessary controversies. My first answer to this should have been enough, but it was flooded by other answers. I don't want to lock this thread, so this answer is going to be posted again to make sure it is not missed.

Thanks for playing on BGA.

[Igthorn]

Quote:

However, this fix obviously do not worth the risk! We are talking about a reinforcement of something that is prohibited by our ToS anyway. So yes, I understand that some other services owners are yelling about this (after all, this is free advertisement they can make thanks to our mistake), but the consequences are super limited, and I support this decision not to change our plan and to fix this bug today, as planned.

End Quote:

This implies that your ToS allows you to label other sites as illegal? This is damaging to those sites since it is libellous: a published false statement that is damaging to a person's reputation; a written defamation.

They are not "yelling" about it - they are expressing a legitimate frustration with a "bug" that labelled their sites as "illegal". Characterising as "yelling", in no way suggests you are taking it seriously. Phrases like "super limited" do the same.

You seem to be under the impression that you are in competition with Yucata (how about leaving the name in rather than removing it to show some actual ownership of the issue) and have apparently missed the general sense that the players use a combination of sites to accommodate their gaming preferences. Up until now the other sites have quite happily accommodated the different sites in the online boardgaming community - probably to your benefit. You might want to consider their model a little more seriously rather than reacting like a playground bully - the easiest fix would be to update your TOS rather than be checking what the gamers are saying to each other...

A lot of this is in your head not in the heads of gamers and the very clumsy reaction to the situation does not help