Re: I'm leaving the audiogames.net comunity in 5 or so days.
This has been done to death.
We want to stay away from copyrighted material and its potentially illegal distribution as much as we can on the website because as unlikely as it is, we want to provide plausible deniability if anything does go wrong.
We've also seen cases where people think that morally grayer stuff like audio description means we're suddenly okay with all illegal downloading, and that's just more mess than it's worth. So when push came to shove, we decided to cut it all instead of taking selected pieces out and playing favourites. Because let's be honest with ourselves, if we'd hand-picked the exceptions, I guarantee you there'd be people howling about that, too.
We don't care what you do elsewhere, but we ask that you don't do it here. We're not your only source of information, downloads or anything else. Hell, we can't even see your private messages, much less edit them. Are we really, truly cutting into your freedoms that much? Me, I'd say no.
I feel like a broken record at this point. I'm getting seriously sick of having to justify this over and over and over again.
Let me be even sharper for just a sec.
We could all decide as mods that we just don't feel like hosting this content, and to hell with legality and explanation and justification; and if this was the rule we decided to enforce, we could do it. Your options would either be to comply or leave. Well, I suppose you could protest, but you wouldn't have any ability to change decisions by force because I highly doubt that a decision like this would cause a large majority of users to permanently go elsewhere. We're here for gaming, after all, not audio described media.
We didn't do this though. We used logic and reason, have explained it literally dozens of times over, and I'm at a point where I feel that any demand to have us explain further is just bad faith. Yeah, I know, you're probably tired of me citing bad faith, but tough luck. That's what it is at this point.
Boiled down, it comes down to the fact that we want the forum run a certain way, and that is how we're running it. We've tried to explain our reasons, but for some of you, nothing we say or do will be good enough until we agree with you, so speaking personally, I'm about done trying to honour your bad-faith requests for explanations that you don't seem to give a rip about. If you don't like it, you are free to take Brad's option and leave, though I hope you do it without the backhandedness displayed previously in this thread. Personally though, I'd wager that there are many, many better hills to die on than this one. This community is far more than one issue of us coming down on the distribution of links to illegal material. And you know what else? I refuse, utterly and completely, to be demonized for being one of the people interested in keeping this forum safe. You're not being abused, hurt, tortured, abandoned. You're being asked not to post very specific links or methods to obtain illegal content on this forum specifically, and you're being asked to either let it go or show yourselves the door. What sort of person do you have to be in order to take this so personally that you consider it a violation of your rights or freedoms? Seriously. Get over yourselves. I am done being gentle.
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