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

[joezg]

But we are not censoring legal sites in any way. This was a bug.

This existing in a ToS is completely sane, I would say, as well as not enforcing it like we are not. You can freely talk about other legal game sites in private chat. This was a bug.

[robinzig]

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

I couldn't agree more with this post.

I'm relatively new to BGA but I like the site, and have even started developing game adaptations to go here. I'm not about to stop doing that or stop using the site, but this whole episode has given me pause for thought.

I understand that mistakes happen, and while I don't see why this one couldn't have been fixed quicker, as a professional developer I do also understand the argument about risk and following approved release procedures. What is really making me uncomfortable is 2 things:

a) the treating of other boardgaming sites as deadly rivals that you don't want people to even mention. I don't actually personally use any other such sites, but I recognise that they all provide a service to the boardgaming community (which despite recent expansion is still pretty tiny by entertainment industry standards), offering different games and with different pros and cons in user interface, competitions offered and so on. There is room for more than one in this world, and it should have been obvious that many of even your loyal users regularly play on other sites - you shouldn't treat them as unmentionables, but as people like you who started a service to help a community, who you may be able to learn from and whom you certainly shouldn't begrudge having users and even making money from their users. I understand that there is some element of competition in that some users might only choose one site to pay a subscription to, but really, if 2 huge supermarket chains can be relatively cordial about things on social media (for those in the UK, I'm thinking of the "Colin the Caterpillar" row earlier this year - google if you're unaware - but I'm sure there are many other examples), there's no excuse for owners of hobby sites to treat the name of other sites as a dirty word.

b) most importantly of all, the fact that the official responses from BGA very much give the impression of "this is a non-issue, why are these stupid people making me spend time dealing with it". Publicly making false and derogatory statements about other companies IS a big issue. This could have been quickly sorted by making a public apology, but responses that do not even seem contrite - like the one above - absolutely do not help the PR situation here.

I genuinely like BGA and hope they don't lose users over this, but I am sad to say I think they will because it has been appallingly handled when it could have all been smoothed over with a quick response and some words of genuine apology, not an apparent attempt to sweep it under the carpet.

[sourisdudesert]

(As stated before - this is a re-post of the official answer since the early statement we made 24 hours after the problem has been reported has been flooded by other messages in the forum)


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.

[voriki]

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.

Please read the thread.
There are legal sites, who work by the book, have license agreements with the publishers, etc... and there are illegal sites, working without agreements by publishers.

There is a legal list, they prefer not to have been mentioned on the site, and there is an illegal list, whose names they actively want to avoid for liability. The bug mixed those lists up.

[Igthorn]

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.

Please read the thread.
There are legal sites, who work by the book, have license agreements with the publishers, etc... and there are illegal sites, working without agreements by publishers.

There is a legal list, they prefer not to have been mentioned on the site, and there is an illegal list, whose names they actively want to avoid for liability. The bug mixed those lists up.

I am not suggesting otherwise - what I am saying is that the statement implies that publishing a libellous statement in a response to a TOS issue is ok. The original sentence - "We are talking about a reinforcement of something that is prohibited by our ToS anyway."

The main point of the post is not that the statement was made but that the response to it and the impact that it might have had, has been tepid, if you are looking at the optics of the situation from the perspective of someone who is aggrieved by the message.

[joezg]

a) the treating of other boardgaming sites as deadly rivals that you don't want people to even mention. I don't actually personally use any other such sites, but I recognise that they all provide a service to the boardgaming community (which despite recent expansion is still pretty tiny by entertainment industry standards), offering different games and with different pros and cons in user interface, competitions offered and so on. There is room for more than one in this world, and it should have been obvious that many of even your loyal users regularly play on other sites - you shouldn't treat them as unmentionables, but as people like you who started a service to help a community, who you may be able to learn from and whom you certainly shouldn't begrudge having users and even making money from their users. I understand that there is some element of competition in that some users might only choose one site to pay a subscription to, but really, if 2 huge supermarket chains can be relatively cordial about things on social media (for those in the UK, I'm thinking of the "Colin the Caterpillar" row earlier this year - google if you're unaware - but I'm sure there are many other examples), there's no excuse for owners of hobby sites to treat the name of other sites as a dirty word.

I will repeat, we have nothing against loyal competition. This was a bug.

You can mention legal gaming sites without any limitation on private chat. It was true in the past and will be true in the future. It was not being true for a couple of days due to a bug. I really think this should be very clear from my and sourisdudesert post. Mistakes happen and we can talk about the way we are treating ours, but why talking about us hating the competition? This is counterproductive as we stated in this very same thread a couple of times that this was an error.

[Lammkeule]

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.

I miss your understanding that this criticism is absolutely justified. An apology to Yucata for being defamed as an illegal site would be more than appropriate.

[Otithes]

You keep saying it was a bug. What you haven't said is "We're sorry we screwed up, and we apologize to yucata.de, boiteajeux.net, Tabletopia,... (am I missing any? how long is this list of "legal websites" that you keep?) ... for the harm our bug has caused them." You owe them an apology, even if it was just an unintentional mistake. Instead of an apology, they get further insults and accusations from you about how they're "yelling" and how they're really just benefiting from the situation through "free advertising." This is why your insistence that it was "just a bug" reads like an insincere cover-up. People who make honest mistakes typically want to make up for what they did wrong. You just keep pointing at your TOS, and pretending like other people are wrong for being upset with the situation.

[sourisdudesert]

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.

I miss your understanding that this criticism is absolutely justified. An apology to Yucata for being defamed as an illegal site would be more than appropriate.

Absolutely true, and here it is: we apologize to all online services that has been concerned by this bug.

[imoatama]

Extremely unimpressed with how BGA seem to handle this, even if we accept their 'bug' story at face value. I was considering buying premium today to continue to play New Frontiers (which despite being in Beta has apparently moved to premium in the last couple days). Seeing this has definitely put me off.