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The sad state of the GPGarage...

Sharkull's picture

I recently decided to send a quick message to GPG regarding the sad state of the Garage, and actually received an email in response.

Sharkull wrote:
You seriously need to decide what to do with the GPGarage...
http://garage.gaspowered.com/?q=tracker

It is being blasted with literally 100's of SPAM posts every week.
Close it or moderate it.

Leaving it as-is looks horrible... and I would think a for-profit
company would care about public image.

GPG Webmaster wrote:
Hello Sharkull,

Thank you for the submission. I agree, the GPG garage is in a pretty
sad state right now. We don't have the resources available to
effectively moderate it so we have been looking into shutting it down.
There is still quite a bit of useful information in there relating to
Dungeon Siege and we don't want to just take it offline though. We are
looking into what is involved in moving that info possibly to the
existing forums or another location.

In the meantime we will look into disabling new posts in there because
the spam does overwhelm anything useful and it's not benefitting anyone.
The value in the garage is really the historical data.

Thanks,
GPG Webmaster

Thanks Sharkull for your efforts! Laughing out loud

...in particular because I gave it up, i just can't understand their ignoring attitude towards the own forums and their (remaining) community. Also on the new GPGnet forum site i mentioned the spam problem twice and nobody seemed to care about it - assumed they check their forums at all.

So, it's a little wonder that they read e-mails. Smile

However, i expect another 1000 spam posts until somebody at GPG lifts a finger... :o

Sharkull's picture

Actually, I didn't send an e-mail, I used their "contact us" site:
http://www.gaspowered.com/contactus.php

I saw your comments in the new forums, and am not surprised they were ignored. Such things wouldn't necessarily be seen by anybody but a moderator (low level employee) but I suspected that they might have better business procedures around their main site's contact method.

I don't see how it would be so hard to clean up every once in a while... do a database back-up (should be routine), then hire a college student temp (for ~ minimum wage) to delete all the spam. Probably wouldn't take more than a day (at most two). Surely GPG can afford a couple hundred dollars...

Well, maybe there could be better places for my thread/posts, but if a forum moderator is not able to react himself on important events (doesn't matter if sincere customer feedback or V!agra spam) shouldn't he forward it to people competent enough to treat it appropriately!?

Generally a business company always should have knowledge about the state of their forums. So either you have somebody to check this or you spend yourself a half coffee break to scroll through a forum site to see if it's burning.
It's simply unbelievable that spams in a public forum stay over weeks/months and there is no reaction. Sad

...wow, at least it seems the (evident) spam has gone.
And this before X-Mas - that's not bad...


However i distrust it.
There are still many posts without a real context on DS2, but probably just made to leavet a link:
==> http://garage.gaspowered.com/?q=node/7947


Although not displeasing at first sight, also this is very painful, such posts confuse the reader quite a lot.
I always need to think twice what's the sence of this post and how far it affects the game, and if i doubt and click on the link listed, then i have to learn that somebody mucked me. Sad

Sharkull's picture

Yeah, it does look like there was a clean-up done (lots of stuff set to unpublished... posts which still count in the # of replies column, but invisible when reading the thread).

Not perfect, but much better than it was.
Smile

I can't understand why GPG doesn't close/lock the garage. :?
Either they never go there themselves or ignore the dimension of this matter or ...

The longer they wait, the longer it will take to clean out all the mess - and actually i doubt this will ever happen. Sad