It's Hammer Time

As a serious gamer, when I'm not playing I like to read about games. I like knowing what's new, what's coming soon, and what's good or not. Like many of you I have my favorite sites to visit. My personal favs are Kotaku, Joystiq, Game Politics, and N4G. I've been active on N4G (with a couple months away, long story) for about 6 months. I like the fact that the registered users on that site collect and submit original articles from just about everywhere in the internet. Submitted articles are, of course, linked back to the original site, but that's not what I'm writing about today. I also happen to like the N4G forums. The N4G forums are a place that I go to interact with some great people that really love gaming. I never know what I'm going to see there, and that's the fun of going. Unfortunately, there are some people there that try to spoil it for all of us.

One of the problems with a social news site like N4G is that all people are different. One gamer may want to read more stories on the PS3, another the 360 only. To me, the console itself doesn't matter, just the games on it. That's why I don't understand some of these people. Luckily, there are some very active mods and admin on the site today. This wasn't always the case, but since I've decided to be active in the site again, I've noticed a change. Take a look at this thread and see the mods in action. And here's the same guy again. Snoop swoops in to save the day. Some people just never learn, and that's the problem with a lot of forums, the people themselves.

Quite a few people just love to cause as much trouble as they can online. Why do they do it? Because they think it's fun. I don't know why, I never thought giving people a hard time was ever fun. Then there are the ones that try to be as offensive as possible. There was one such person on N4G today. Take a look at this guy's profile. This person signed up to N4G just to cause problems, how do I know? There is absolutely no personal information on his profile. There's no gender or location. There are no interests or occupation listed. There's no bio or even gamer tags and everyone lists at least one of those. The only thing on there is a link to an e-mail address which, undoubtedly, is not a permanent account for him. I know you can't see his comments now and due their offensive nature I won't repeat them here.

Anonymity can be a great thing for some things, but when people like this populate sites, we all ultimately suffer. And that is why seeing the mods of N4G wield the almighty banhammer is such a good thing. Banned users can always try to create new accounts to cause some more animosity, but with the diligence of moderators we all can have a place to write, converse, and share who we are.