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

[sourisdudesert]

Okay.

An issue was reported => I answered that this was a bug in 24 hours, and fixed it within a week.

We were told that more explanation was needed => I took the time to provide a long explanation with a lot of details to make everyone understand what happened.

Someone remarked that an apology was needed => I agreed and apologized.

Now I see that the apology was not at the right place / not at the right moment / not in the right format / (add here any other things).

So yes, this is hopeless: we are discussing about an issue that has been already solved hours ago, and it seems that nobody will be satisfied by anything we can offer anyway.

[el cosimo]

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

To call a site illegal? So I must get my bosses also to court room because they make bga as an illegal site to visit.

This topic is a really joke, storm in a glass.. i think a lot of services block access or even prevent posting links to use other similar sites. It just depend on their own policy of they want you to post links to other site or not. Every site is free to do this.

[Silene]

I find the courtroom-comment rediculous as well. But how you do an apology is relevant. If you were on the other side and THAT was the apology you get (outweighed by stinging comments that get repeated again and again), you wouldn't be satisfied either.

[phil0]

Ridiculous or not yucata is already looking for a lawyer, be careful...

[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.

[el cosimo]

Ridiculous or not yucata is already looking for a lawyer, be careful...

i wish them success.. I think 99,99% of users here don’t even notice this bug. So why should they get any chance to get succeed in this.

[Harryp19]

Okay.

An issue was reported => I answered that this was a bug in 24 hours, and fixed it within a week.

We were told that more explanation was needed => I took the time to provide a long explanation with a lot of details to make everyone understand what happened.

Someone remarked that an apology was needed => I agreed and apologized.

Now I see that the apology was not at the right place / not at the right moment / not in the right format / (add here any other things).

So yes, this is hopeless: we are discussing about an issue that has been already solved hours ago, and it seems that nobody will be satisfied by anything we can offer anyway.

It's far from hopeless. The decent thing to do would have been to make a simple, sincere statement in the news section that would also have appeared on the front page, perhaps on the social media as well (which you can still do, mind you). That is a public statement, unlike this forum thread. Instead you first stonewall us by repeatedly posting the same explanation, then make an insincere sounding one sentence apology five pages deep in a forum thread, and then do the equivalent of throwing your hands up and saying what we're asking for is entirely unreasonable. In the parallel thread on BGG, you basically called a fellow player dishonest because they're a new account there, without even responding to the actual statements that person was making. That is the lack of professionalism people are complaining about here. Bugs happen. Bugs get fixed. Entirely normal. But when bugs affect other things than a simple game on this site, don't pretend creating a forum thread informs everyone involved.

[Silene]

Someone remarked that an apology was needed => I agreed and apologized.

Now I see that the apology was not at the right place / not at the right moment / not in the right format / (add here any other things).

While you did a one-liner-apology "as requested" (not from your own understanding) - after that say this sentence:

This is all that need to be said on this issue, all the rest is unnecessary controversies.

"This" refers to the content of that one post where the apology is not a part of.

So by that you label your own apology as "unnecessary controversies" - Is that intended? Do you think an apology is unnecessary controversy?

[Fatty]

I am genuinely surprised at how hard it seems to be to make a sincere public excuse to Yucata and the other concerned sites. I don't think it is asking too much in light of what has happened, and it would be a good way to show people that you are taking this issue seriously.

Also it would be nice to know if BGA has taken any steps to ensure this won't happen again.

[Silene]

Btw. I don't think a public statement would be necessary as only few players even noticed the bug. IMO here would be enough. Because the people that noticed it are reading here.