RIP BGG RSP

Man, fuck those guys.

It was toxic and, I’m sure, difficult to moderate.

n815e wrote: It was toxic and, I’m sure, difficult to moderate.

I was in there all the time. I don't think I ever saw anything toxic. I've seen way worse in their regular forums. Stuff that was banished to it usually came in well down the page, with stuff started there (often good debate) being higher in the queue.

I quit going there a few years ago.

One particular thread that mixed anti-immigrant xenophobia and islamophobia that was being pushed by one of the site’s moderators made me swear off visiting again.

I don’t mind differing opinions. I like a good discussion or debate. Outright hate has no place being promoted on a board game hobby site by one of the site’s moderators. I’m glad he was removed as a moderator, but the posts remained.

It's a tough call. I used to be a regular there many years ago but pulled back (as part of a general reducing-my-internet-usage regimen) and gradually dipped my toe back in, mostly in the casual threads.

The forum was there for about 15 years, so it's hard to generalize about it. It had good times and bad times. The bad times increased along with the USA's general increasing polarization, but then things got better after Octavian started banning the real asshats.

There was an unfortunate tendency for people to join and flame out quickly. I think due to the pile-on effect of ten different people disagreeing with them and it gets out of control.

Overall RSP was a positive thing for me. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun shooting the breeze with fellow nerds about non-game stuff.

My life improved the day that I stopped reading forum posts at BGG. It wasn't just the toxic political and cultural garbage in RSP. I also despise the vast bias in favor of certain types of boardgames there which has poisoned the hobby. I don't completely ignore the site, as I still see some limited usefulness to the reviews and comments about the games.

Makes sense. I prefer when sites focus on their core purpose.

RSP didn't make sense for a site the size of BGG, it was inevitably going to be a problem. I'm actually surprised there hasn't been a big controversy about it before.

I also feel the current political culture of the anglosphere and specially gaming makes these kinds of discussions a powder keg. Not a day goes by without seeing someone on American Twitter being mobbed for not being radical enough. So yeah, makes perfect sense.

Right now, people in Reddit are arguing whether Freedom: The Underground Railroad is a racist, white supremacist game that denies afroamericans people a voice in their own struggles or a brillant anti-racist game that should be mandatory learning in school. No matter where you fall on, you are going to ruffle some feathers quite hard.

My vote, after one play: neither.

I'm reading a couple of threads in RSP where people are saying goodbye to each other, and thanking each other for being there to express opinions that they wouldn't have seen otherwise. I just ran into a post by a Bi/Poly man thanking an LDS man for their RSP conversations. Each had learned something from the other. The bar is about to close.

In spite of its sinister reputation the community is tight, and has clearly served a liberating and enlightening purpose for some of the people that frequently post there. In some ways it has been the most honest place on the site, where truly disparate people could come together due to a pretty arbitrary point of commonality -- a childish hobby. What will remain when it's gone will be discussions on sleeve sizes and the crappy build quality of Terraforming Mars.

I don't go to the BGG forums unless I'm looking something up so I've never seen RSP in action, but this seems like a CYA move from BGG itself rather than anything the community would have wanted. Hopefully they find a place to congregate afterwards and don't lose too many folks.

Octavian more or less said that having this long history is just a bad idea. But deleting it on their servers doesn't really delete it from the Internet. Frankly, I think they'd be better off rolling off anything (in RSP) that is more than 90 days old. But given the environment I think they just don't want to have it there and don't want to police it.

Most of the nasty stuff I've seen on BGG has been in threads prior to them getting ghetto'd to RSP.

Maybe someone will start a /r/bggrsp subreddit or something.

A subreddit has been floated, as has a discord channel. Part of the problem with those is that they are highly ephemeral, but part of the appeal of old-school fora generally is their persistence. You can engage with topics started literally years ago, and take your time crafting a response that you know will not be buried under 200 throwaway memes within a day of writing. Fora are, broadly, on their way out. More’s the pity IMO, for both RSP, and TWBG.

It currently looks like RSP will be subsumed into the guild system, to further remove it from easy view. I think this is the least bad solution.