The unwritten and only somewhat enforced rule was you can't have off-topic discussion on the on-topic board for an active game. The mods eventually landed on the thinking that 'active' means 'does it have a guide'. If a game didn't have a guide, you'd see that and just click back to Google or something. If it does, you might click on other stuff and stumble on to two guys having off-topic discussion. So trolls would go hunting for 'claimed boards' and then write guides for the associated games to get them pushed out.
There was at least one guy on LUELinks who admitted to having a series of completely made up guides on games no one could really fact-check him on for that purpose.
If they were trolling people that way it was a bluff. Topicality for older games was arbitrarily put in place based on system, with the Commodore 64 being the largest one free from topicality rules. Some old systems had it and some didn't, across the board per system. The reason for this was unknown by Allen's time, and was possibly an oversight on account of their not so great coding history there.
Early on you could tell by the post preview page because it had a reminder to follow all the rules, and the line for topicality wasn't in there for off-topic boards. After they made some changes there, you could still tell after posting if you tried to mark your message and "off topic" didn't appear as a reason. You literally could not report it to them that way. If mods were making up bullshit arbitrary reasons like "does the game have a guide" that's news to me, but it wouldn't be surprising since they've always made up "rules" that fit their personal headcanon rather than what can be found in the TOS.
I remember there was a GameSpot oversight that took a long time to fix. Making the 500th post in a topic would normally lock the thread, but if you made the post through GameSpot, it would stay open until a GameFAQs user made a post. Big threads would start derailing as the post counter approached 500, as everyone had to make sure everyone else knew about the GameSpot glitch. Then a troll would just post something like "lol" and lock the thread. I can't remember if there was ever a thread that went over 550 posts.
There was even a team of folks who did this, which I found and joined while board hunting. They became the "Officail 500+ Team" [sic] and they also got a dedicated troll who would hunt for their topics to close them.
One of their topics on the 280 zzzap board ended up going over a million posts. The mods ended up going after the script kids who autogenerated their messages (spam) and they ended up banned for a time, but would come back when the heat died down. Yeah on top of a troll looking to close the topics, we also had "violation hunters" who would spend hours of their time board hunting just to snitch on people for any violations they could find.
Eventually what happened was Devin Morgan also had to mass delete the archived topics because curious people would visit them and it ended up screwing with their site metrics (average topic size 500+) along with other things that began to break from the gamefaqs side.
During the 500+ shenanigans, we found out that the listed post count of a topic didn't always match up with the actual post count. The counter was dropping posts in translation from gamespot. Then we noticed that each time it would drop a post, we'd get a whitescreen instead of being redirected to the topic. This was "random" at first but then someone figured out that longcat ASCII consistently broke the post. From there it was found that actually any post with enough characters would break the posts. It might've been because of differences in character count limitations between gamefaqs and gamespot. In any case it'd go through gamespot but wouldn't register on gamefaqs.
If this happened during topic creation, gamefaqs would create a second topic that was completely blank and sat at 0 posts, hovering at the bottom of the board in between the active topics the archived topics. I went looking for zero-post topics on the more active/modern system boards, and indeed there were a bunch of them that would just pile up in limbo over time. You could post in them as the fake OP under someone else's name in the topic list. I have no idea what this meant for moderation. It's just another sign of the things that broke during the shared boards period with gamespot.
There were many topics that made it over 500 that were deleted later by Devin. But he didn't get them all - you can still see one of the topics survived in the archives on the board for Shadow Dancer. Ol Devin's been laid off since then and I don't think the MIA Fandom "engineering team" that replaced him will do anything to it these days, so there you go.
If I remember right that was largely how the KOSed troll Gavirulex did his work: exploiting all the bugs from the merge.
It was stupid easy to find exploits around that time. Gavi was an amateur afaik and was still able to find these things, or piggybacked off what others found. One of them was a link that allowed you to change someone's email address. If Gavi or the other trolls in his circle didn't like someone, they would submit a new scrambled address that would prevent them from logging in anymore. Another user on the white hat side found a link where you could basically make other people mods. The gamespot era was goofy broken. During the community board era I managed to take the link for the mod functions on my board and apply it to messages on other community boards, no verification step or perms check for any of these examples, if you knew how to get there you were in.
Gavi later became outright psychotic and claimed that he was the lookout for a rape gang when he was younger. He would brag about it on CE and none of the mods gave a shit, either because he bought them off, or because he had predictably joined the gay gang to get mod protection. He had en entire period where he would hang out with his modbuddies on Hellhole and make up stories about his gay partner and his 3 adopted surrogate kids. It was unbelievably stupid, but the troll gets mod protection because we're so LGBT++ friendly and anyone questioning it must be purged for being a bigot.
Gavi finally did leave Gamefaqs, not because he was banned but because he was under investigation for additional sexual abuse and he closed the account on the advice of his lawyer. The only people who did get mod-punished regarding Gavi were the ones who reposted the details of his case, or who questioned his bullshit rainbow flag grabbing for mod protection.
To give you an idea of the mods we're dealing with, lead moderator RaptorLC was bought off with a couple Gamefaqs T-shirts. And not because Raptor wanted the shirts, nobody did, which was why Gamefaqs was desperately offloading them from the warehouse in bulk. If Gavi bought 10 shirts for Raptor, he'd verify the purchase with Allen and get a karma bonus. And keep in mind that this dude is at least 50 years old at this point, mentioning in past AMAs that he already stepped away from gamefaqs at least a decade ago because he thought he was way too old, only to come back because he had nowhere else to go.
So there you have it, you can brag about being part of a rape gang on gamefaqs and be loved by the mods, because you bumped them to the top of a meaningless karmiepoints list that no longer exists. But if you're antiwoke you will be banned for life!
One of the things I miss about GameFAQs when I was there was the moderation log, which I can only assume is gone now. You could go into your profile and see a list of all of your posts that got deleted by moderators and the actions taken (I called it my "Best Of").
Yeah the moderation log page was removed some seven years ago. The system was changed so your viewable mod record is pruned about six months after the fact, so there wasn't a need for a formal history page any more. Former staff has suggested this comes at the cost of basically every career troll from the early days getting a clean slate unless whatever mod can remember specifics.
Nobody on gamefaqs gets a clean slate even when they have a clean slate. The boards are so small these days that the mods know who's left and who they want to target. It's an obscene ratio now, the same 80ish mods when the site was exponentially bigger vs. less than 300 active visitors at night now. And the obsessed ones have openly admitted that even if someone has a clean message history, they will tag them or call back to how they once had messages there, and hold that grudge forever and until they get that user banned.
Common practice starting in the 2020s is that they'd just sweep through the message history of users they didn't like, look for violations, suspend them at first glance whether they found a violation or not. This was usually on a Friday night when normal people had lives, but the mod(s) involved thought it was a great time to double down on Gamefaqs because you'd be suspended all weekend until the admin came back Monday. Maybe even longer than that because the admin these days is incompetent and doesn't keep up with things.
When people complained about the Friday night mass purges, the mods responded by banning discussion of suspended/banned users. Every step is for less transparency and no review for any of their actions. When people complained about suspensions on first offense, or that the "offense" actually didn't break any rules, they decided they didn't even have to pick a message to suspend the person for. The widespread suspension practice now is to hit "suspend" on the account directly, no post given and no reason necessary. The dumbfuck admin then rubberstamps it and the user falls out a window. The great thing about an insta-suspension now is that you can't appeal it, and if you ask on an alt wtf is going on the mods will then declare you are suspension dodging and ban both accounts.
The days of requiring reasons, mod history and a three-tiered appeal system(!) are long gone, the mods have declared themselves Always Right, and it's too much work for our adult child admin installed by Fandom, who cares about this necrotic web 1.0 site even less than Allen and would rather let the tire fire burn than do any sort of oversight or "work" from home.
