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

[Baron Frog]

(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)

Repeating this huge excuse rather than simply issuing an apology does nothing more than make some of your own users feel less and less good about this website.

[Silene]

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.

Yeah, on a one-liner-sidenote some pages back. It is not within the post that you summarize in the end with "this is all that need to be said". It's a good thing you repeat the relevant information after some posts. But i criticize your choice of what the relevant information is: all the excuses and more stinging comments about other sites seems to be a part of those most relevant information to you. While your apology is not.

[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.

[sairam71]

First of all good job for fixing/in process of fixing it. Second of all how you are approaching this as a business is amateur. Yes please protect us from spam but the specific example
You gave justifying your tos is poor. If I walk into a face book chat and type to my friend, snapchat is better should that be censored? Cmon now…. Also you are not competing with other sites. Just because I use yucata doesn’t mean I won’t use bga. We are a small community and work to help each other. Don’t bring competition into this let your product speak for itself and let thr users choose. Compete by providing value not through strange tos loop holes. You are releasing great games. Don’t fall prey to amateur business practices that actually ruin the good
Work and good will.

Some others care about an apology I personally don’t. What is more important to me is the attitude behind it and how it will affect future situations like this.

[sourisdudesert]

how you are approaching this as a business is amateur

We are answering in 24 hours on Sunday and fix the bug within a week, and you call us amateur? Well, I wish all websites are amateur!

[Harryp19]

Are you still not realizing the issue here? The issue isn’t your response time, it’s the way you chose to respond. Fixing the bug is obviously good. However, the issue is the lack of a public rebuttal of the statements your automated response was making about perfectly legitimate sites, as well as the lack of a truly public and sincere apology for this defamation afterwards. (the VAST majority of your players isn’t reading up to page 5 in this thread to find a half hearted one sentence apology)

[sourisdudesert]

Are you still not realizing the issue here? The issue isn’t your response time, it’s the way you chose to respond. Fixing the bug is obviously good. However, the issue is the lack of a public rebuttal of the statements your automated response was making about perfectly legitimate sites, as well as the lack of a truly public and sincere apology for this defamation afterwards. (the VAST majority of your players isn’t reading up to page 5 in this thread to find a half hearted one sentence apology)

We made the exact answers that were needed: we inform quickly everyone that it was unintended and a bug. At BGA we choose to release often because we prefer to make mistakes sometimes than update the service once in a while like others. So these things happens: there are bugs sometimes, some games crashes once in a while, some players have all sort of bad experiences, we try to be quick to fix things and we apologize every time it is needed, like we did on this situation.

[Lammkeule]

It is hopeless.

[phil0]

I think you'll probably have to prove your point in a courtroom. You have no right to call anybody illegal without any proof.

[Harryp19]

Are you still not realizing the issue here? The issue isn’t your response time, it’s the way you chose to respond. Fixing the bug is obviously good. However, the issue is the lack of a public rebuttal of the statements your automated response was making about perfectly legitimate sites, as well as the lack of a truly public and sincere apology for this defamation afterwards. (the VAST majority of your players isn’t reading up to page 5 in this thread to find a half hearted one sentence apology)

We made the exact answers that were needed: we inform quickly everyone that it was unintended and a bug. At BGA we choose to release often because we prefer to make mistakes sometimes than update the service once in a while like others. So these things happens: there are bugs sometimes, some games crashes once in a while, some players have all sort of bad experiences, we try to be quick to fix things and we apologize every time it is needed, like we did on this situation.

If you think a simple post on this forum equates to informing 'everyone', you're not realizing this forum is far from the main page being used here.
Most of your players will go directly to the "play now" page, with some portion going through the front page first, and rarely, if ever, visit the forum. Meanwhile, your bug was causing defamatory statements to be made about other sites. Truly informing everyone the bug existed in the first place is necessary at that point, and you didn't do so by making posts in this forum that the vast majority of your players doesn't read.

I understand it wasn't your intention to cause harm, but the way you've been responding definitely makes it seem like you don't care at all about what actually happened here. There are more public channels on this site than the 'discussions' forum. Use them.