I had an avatar for like a decade, it was a picture of my cat. Suddenly, in the last month or so, it's gone.

Edit: Sorry, it wasn't a decade, probably more like 7 years.

@Pffrbt:

You're not getting it. Once you "accidentally read" their post, you stop thinking about it and move on with life. That's called ignoring someone.

@Pffrbt:

I was talking about simply ignoring the person, not clicking a button.

I streamed some of the press conferences in 2011. Back then, they seemed to work fine. I didn't bother with the press conference streams this year, but that's mostly because NONE of the video content on their site currently streams properly, and hasn't for a long time. I gave up on watching videos on Gamespot. It takes 30 minutes to buffer a 5-minute video. I think their video servers are stuck in 1999 or something.

@Pffrbt:

You could always try ignoring them. That's what adults do.

Gamespot strikes again.

Today I noticed I no longer have an avatar. Awesome. It's too bad I can't find that picture anymore. I guess it's gone for good.

Gamespot videos never load in a timely fashion. Occasionally, if I set the video to the lowest setting, will it take only marginally longer to load the video than to actually play it (it still doesn't actually stream properly). If I leave it on high quality (not HD), it takes about 10 seconds to buffer 4 seconds of video. (Edit: That was an optimistic estimate. I just allowed a video to buffer during the three minutes it took to write this post and I had about 10 seconds of video to show for it.)

I know it's not my internet connection because I'm not an idiot and I routinely get 10 MBps (that's bytes, not bits) downloads, and I rarely have problems with other sites that have videos. Given that half of Gamespot's site is now video, half of the website is essentially broken.

The filter could be easily improved by simply using it to filter out profanity, as it was designed to do. By profanity, I mean profane words, not every single word that might be construed as at all offensive to any person. In addition, automatically editing those profane words out, using asterisks or whatever, instead of pending the comments and having moderators reject them later would be simpler and more effective in achieving that goal. A profanity filter is fine with me, as long as it doesn't turn posting into the chore that it already is.

I know you guys have your terms of use, and it's your site and all that, but the only reason the site exists is that people want to use it. If you keep pushing away the users who are asking to converse intelligently, then all that will be left is the trash that you're trying to eliminate. You get a paycheck because people like me use your site.

Your filter is broken. You don't need to remove it, you need to fix it.

Whether it's new or not has no bearing on whether it is more effective than the current way of doing it, and the current method isn't eliminating crudeness or hostility, either (interesting that you only care about the "crass" hostility).

By telling people why their posts are being rejected, you're effectively telling them how to circumvent the filter. A person who is just trying to write a legitimate comment will edit out their language but a person who is just trying to be rude will replace letters with symbols or choose different words for the same effect. As I said 9 posts ago, a filter cannot filter out offensiveness, all it can filter out is words. That's why it's not working. It's not capable of doing what you guys want it to do.

Ignore would be nice, considering other sites have had that function for about a decade now.