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

[Baron Frog]

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.

Why don't you create a locked thread in which you post a proper apology to the sites affected and list them all? Leave it there for a couple of weeks or even a month, by way of apologising for the bug that has caused them to have to spend time defending themselves against accusations that they are running an illegal site?

[RobRoyDuncan]

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.

Repeating the emphasis on this bug really makes this come across as a non-apology apology. At this point, I believe you that this was a bug; I don't believe that you recognize that you reacted badly to the situation, and will do better if it comes up again.

[robinzig]

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

I agree that this was indeed a bug and am glad that it is fixed. But beyond the fact that the long-overdue apology was late and seemingly very grudging, what was being complained about here, as quoted in Igthorn's post that I was amplifying, was this:

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.

I don't know how to read that other than as saying "well it's not a problem that we defamed other sites because users aren't supposed to mention them anyway". This may not be censorship (I don't recall that I used that word), but it shows in my opinion an unnecessarily petty and jealous relationship with other sites that provide the same sort of service as BGA does.

[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.

[Silene]

How about you put a formal apology INTO this big statement that you obviously intend to repeat over and over. It's sad to see the only apology is a one-liner as a response to a serious (and repeated) request for it that feels like "well if we have to - well there, i said it, you happy now?". You don't even name any sites nor does it read in any way like you mean it seriously. It would make more sense to repeat a formal apology over-and-over again and not the excuses.

[Igthorn]

This is what we are looking for....

Dear Gaming Community

It has come to our attention that certain board-gaming sites have been incorrectly labelled and described by our spam filter as being illegal.

This bug, introduced in our last update, has caused legitimate and understandable unhappiness to those sites (insert list here) who have been mis-characterised in this manner.

We, in no way, stand by this description and are empathetic to those who have been hurt by this error. We issue an unreserved apology to all those who have been impacted by this issue and state categorically that there is no truth to the statements. We are also sensitive to the fact the the time that it took to implement a fix could be seen as a tacit approval of these descriptions even though there are technical challenges to making an unanticipated update and we apologise for the confusion this delay may have caused.

[LaOread]

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.

You say "legal/illegal and ethical/unethical" but then you don't define this terminology. Illegal makes it sound like you are saying "against the law"... is that what you mean? And how are you defining ethical and unethical? Do you have a team of layswers who have defined this? Can you share these definitions and the list of illegal/unethical things that we aren't supposed to mention?

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.

Yelling because they can get free advertisement?!?
The way you talk about them as if they are the bad guys taking advatage of the situation to win some free advertising is just not the way I see these other sites... and I think I'm not alone here. Most gamers, they don't view them as competitors - options help bring more people to the hobby. There are some games that are on both of the sites mentioned - I play them on both - who cares?

If it's the ToS, fine... but your choice of words keeps making it sound like you are rivals. I urge you, and the whole BGA team to reconsider that thinking.

And I still don't think you addressed the censoring in the earlier part of the thread... unless I missed it?

[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.

[Silene]

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.

So apparently in your opinion "all that need to be said" does not include an apology. Excuses should not be missed, but apologies should.

I totally get the things that you say in that statement and understand how the mistake could have happened. Yeah, stuff like that does happen. I would never assume it was on purpose. But when you hurt someone, you need to make up for it. Not only if you hurt intentional, also when it happens accidently by a mistake of yours. But instead of "making up for it" you "add more hurt to it" - and this time intentional it seems - by characterizing them as "yelling" and saying "they should thank me for my mistake". And that repeatedly in your big post that you say over and over.

[sourisdudesert]

So apparently in your opinion "all that need to be said" does not include an apology. Excuses should not be missed, but apologies should.

Apologizes has been made, so this is another proof (if needed) that too many answers in the forum makes the situation totally unreadable for anyone.