Stop Unfair Forum Moderation

Message boards are a place for people to express their opinions, to seek help, or to offer assistance, and this is no different with the PlayStation.com message boards.  Unfortunately, to the aggravation of gamers, including those that actually own PlayStation consoles, sometimes meaningful posts are deleted because of unreasonable intolerances.  It is understandable for a forum to have content standards and for certain types of posts to get moderated, but some of the moderations are unrealistic and unfair.

As a case in point, there appears to be zero tolerance for any mention of anything pertaining to gaming that isn't specifically related to the PlayStation brand.  For example, if you read a topic complaining about a feature in a top PlayStatation-exclusive franchise and you go to defend it by pointing out that the alleged problem also appears in their most direct competition, your post can get removed because it referenced something non-PlayStation even though it was still totally relevant to the issue at hand.

The word filters can be a bit of a problem, too, as they can sometimes censor out words that shouldn't get censored even by anybody's highest standards, just because the word contains a sequence of letters that, by themselves, would have spelled out an undesired word.  Case in point, you can't type "cockpit", because part of the word by itself might be offensive, even though the term cockpit is totally unoffensive to anybody anywhere without exception.  Now, if the word is important to the topic at hand and consequently you really need to post it, you can try to modify it so that it doesn't get automatically censored out and people know what you're typing, but a moderator might still remove it because you bypassed the censor, even though the word should never have been censored in the first place.

We understand that standards must be set and enforced, and that we are talking about a board owned by Sony and as such can be run however they want to run it.  Being able to do a thing, however, does not necessarily mean that you must do a thing, and there is no reason for the forum administration to stubbornly remain unreasonable.  Yes, a topic or a post about a game totally unrelated to the PlayStation consoles does not belong on a PlayStation board, but making a relevant reference to one, for example as an illustration to a point about a PlayStation game, is a different story.  We, the gamers of the world, simply ask that Sony be reasonable.  Heck, Microsoft's Xbox board doesn't see the moderation of every single post mentioning anything outside of the world of Xbox.  Insecure, are we Sony?

Message boards are a place for people to express their opinions, to seek help, or to offer assistance, and this is no different with the PlayStation.com message boards.  Unfortunately, to the aggravation of gamers, including those that actually own PlayStation consoles, sometimes meaningful posts are deleted because of unreasonable intolerances.  It is understandable for a forum to have content standards and for certain types of posts to get moderated, but some of the moderations are unrealistic and unfair.

As a case in point, there appears to be zero tolerance for any mention of anything pertaining to gaming that isn't specifically related to the PlayStation brand.  For example, if you read a topic complaining about a feature in a top PlayStatation-exclusive franchise and you go to defend it by pointing out that the alleged problem also appears in their most direct competition, your post can get removed because it referenced something non-PlayStation even though it was still totally relevant to the issue at hand.

The word filters can be a bit of a problem, too, as they can sometimes censor out words that shouldn't get censored even by anybody's highest standards, just because the word contains a sequence of letters that, by themselves, would have spelled out an undesired word.  Case in point, you can't type "cockpit", because part of the word by itself might be offensive, even though the term cockpit is totally unoffensive to anybody anywhere without exception.  Now, if the word is important to the topic at hand and consequently you really need to post it, you can try to modify it so that it doesn't get automatically censored out and people know what you're typing, but a moderator might still remove it because you bypassed the censor, even though the word should never have been censored in the first place.

We understand that standards must be set and enforced, and that we are talking about a board owned by Sony and as such can be run however they want to run it.  Being able to do a thing, however, does not necessarily mean that you must do a thing, and there is no reason for the forum administration to stubbornly remain unreasonable.  Yes, a topic or a post about a game totally unrelated to the PlayStation consoles does not belong on a PlayStation board, but making a relevant reference to one, for example as an illustration to a point about a PlayStation game, is a different story.  We, the gamers of the world, simply ask that Sony be reasonable.  Heck, Microsoft's Xbox board doesn't see the moderation of every single post mentioning anything outside of the world of Xbox.  Insecure, are we Sony?