Reminder about livestream chats and the rules

There has been a recent pronounced increase of some really unfortunate behavior from a small minority of our users in the live stream event chats. I'm not even talking about throw-away accounts made just to troll...many of the issues are coming from long-time members, some with premium subscriptions.

We don't ask much, but what we do expect from people can all be summed up by Giant Bomb's golden rule that we have always lived by - don't be a jerk. Well, what Ryan originally said to me before the site even launched was "I don't want people being dicks", but that's neither here nor there. However, for anyone that needs a short bullet point list, here are the basics:

• Don't attack other users or Giant Bomb staff - keep it constructive and civil.
• No hate speech or victimization of others - we don't mind a little profanity, but sexism and racial or homophobic slurs are strictly prohibited.
• No linking to porn, warez sites, hate speech, or any other site which would generally be prohibited by common sense and the rules.

The long version can always be found pinned to the forums in the Rules document.

Top Men are working on improvements to the chat as well as chat moderation tools. If you want to discuss specific problems or issues with chat unrelated to the above, please send a message to @rorie and he will be happy to talk to you and then forward your suggestions on to the engineering team.

Finally, please be aware that what you do in the chat does carry over to the rest of the site. If you get banned from chat for something really awful, chances are we are going to immediately ban you from the forums as well, and we don't want to have to do that.

Thanks everyone

I'm usually pretty surprised at how nice and respectful people on the forums are here, but man that doesn't always translate over to the chat. Also, I'd take this a step further and say don't be a jerk in real life either.

I like that. "I don't want people being dicks."

I think that would be a helpful distinction to make, because being a jerk still seems like it technically falls within the rules, as long as you're not directly being a particularly horrible jerk to another user. So, "Don't be a horrible jerk to one another" seems like the applied rule. "I don't want people being dicks", on the other hand, would seem to cover some of the ways in which people commonly get around the rules to still say insulting or ignorant things and get away with it.

Anyway, thanks for noting the rules and explaining that they apply in chat just as much as they do here. I appreciate recent efforts by the mods to convey the rules a bit better and try to reign in some of the excesses that may have occurred over time. Hopefully it'll make a difference here and in chat.

So in short:

I think people think they can get away with stuff in the chat because it goes so quickly and none of it is archived.

Yea, I was a little shocked by how things went in the chat for the PS4 livestream. I really thought our community was better than that.

On another point, you don't see nearly that level of immaturity during premium streams...

Plenty of people have learned the hard way that even when that chat starts scrolling pretty fast, the mods and staff can and will take notice of people trying to sneak in something horrible.

It's really pathetic how every time there's a female on the stream people start freaking out. I couldn't—or maybe I could and I didn't want to—believe that people were going "GIRL GAMER" when GB randomly popped in a woman's stream of ACIV.

Relevant:

The difference was that Ryan was loveably so and generally was affectionately dickish. He was not a shitty human being, like a lot of random chatters seem to act like sometimes.

It is incredibly pathetic. It's kind of sad how people behave like that and then start wondering why a lot of female members will hide their gender to keep from being singled out for it.

Also, everyone should follow Wheaton's Law.

For the most part, the community here is very respectful and I love it. I haven't spent much time in the forums since I'm a relatively new member, but from the short time I have spent there, it's been great. The chat also hasn't been too bad for me. Most people have been great, but the recent live event with the PS4 had the most amount of trolls and disrespectful comments I'd seen so far. I hope this thread encourages everyone to be a bit more civil because the community calling out offenders will go a long way in making it a better place for everyone. <3

Since there seems to be an influx of problems on public chat streams, was it ever considered to give new unsubscriber accounts a 48 hour cooldown period before being allowed to post in live chatrooms? Would hate to squash new user chatting so much, but still.

Dealing with a chatroom of over 3000 people seems like an impossible problem to solve. I do want to give a kudos to the moderators though, as the GB chat is still the best compared to every other chat room of its size that I've seen.

I still shudder when I think of the twitch chat during E3 presentations. What an absolute cesspool of people trying to vie for the worst kind of attention; absolutely unusable.

I don't know why it's so hard for people to be themselves online. Or why so many people feel the need to be angry, insulting, and down right mean.

I know the task you mods have and I hope it cools down soon as these consoles release. I assume some of this is after weeks and months of debating back and forth over which would be better.

I guess people get overexcited with instant communication where a staff member can potentially see it.

I missed the live stream live, but if this warranted a thread it's very unfortunate.

Weird that it's also some long time members with premium subs, meaning they probably know the rules and mean well and might be getting dinged on stuff like the aforementioned "taking off pants/now I'm masturbating" situation.

@datajack: That's definitely something that is being considered. We're actively discussing possible ways to calm things down in the chat, but we'll make an announcement if/when anything is actually changed.

I generally don't look at the chat anymore because more times than not, someome is posting some awful shit there when I look. I hope this will make it a bit better, but I guess there's only so much you can do with 5000+ chatting in the most watched streams.

Can I still say that Brad is leaving?

Both the staff and moderators are extremely sick of that, so do it at your own risk. It's an old, stupid meme that ran its course a couple of years ago.

I think this is worth revisiting. Sadly, some chats are getting really bad again.

If you insist on being a jerk to staff or other members in the chat, you'll get one written warning via PM to clean it up and then the next step could be a sitewide ban from all community features. Enough is enough, this type of behavior is unwelcome and will not be tolerated.

Remember what Wil Wheaton said.