Hi! As you may be aware, this account is ran by one person ( ). I am the community manager for RetroAchievements, and I am available for a chat regarding the situation today.

Here's something to pass on to the admin team. Good start, but this momentum shouldn't let up. Start by unbanning all the folks who spoke up against the game existing on the site. Also consider the "all sides" rhetoric, you really don't want to be centrist here.

Nazism should NEVER be on the table.

If you have 10 people on the table, a nazi sits on the table, and nobody leaves or chase the nazi out, then you have 11 nazis on the table.

Thank you for listening to the outcry and posting this out after an afternoon rather than taking days to post it. It shouldn't be controversial to say "bigotry and hate are not welcome here."

Good decision, though i don't expect too many hacks to exists that are good enough in quality to warrant an achievement set, yet contain hate speech, so hopefully this should be a rare problem to deal with.

Also, it's worth mentioning that the aformentioned pokemon romhack is not even the only fucked up game that has a set on your platform. Y'all have a set for Custer's Revenge, for crying out loud! I think it's worth looking into that as well.

Might want to let know about this. I wonder what he has to say in that regard. (And maybe it should be time for the "Banned Games" section of the docs' "Unwelcome Concepts" to be updated, too.)

I don't know who that is, but maybe

Scott is the original creator of RetroAchievements.

oh, then yes

Hopefully he'll get the chance to reply regarding that.

true, specially cuz this situation is bad, I mean there's the fact that the romhack was there, the way they addressed the community, the fact this isn't even the only problematic game there (why is Custer's Revenge there, why?), etc.

Would you like to bring that up to the community moderator as well?

I'm pretty sure plenty of people already have, not to mention I already made a reply to their apology post on bsky mentioning it.

I brought that up to the apology post, too, as well as the question on updating the Banned Games section of the Unwelcome Concepts page on the Code of Conduct.

So are you going to ban people who are just blatantly posting ableist, racist, and outright nazi apologia? Like it’s not even dog whistling, they’re just saying shit. Your community is a cesspool and if you don’t clean house you’re going to be The Nazi Game Site

Do you have any names of users and screenshots of said blatant posts? If so, it would be a good idea to post them here instead of a vague gesture of these posts existing (which they do, I've seen them too!) so the mods can much more easily deal with them and know what people are frustrated at

Got one here, and Clammomeel dropped just a straight up n-slur, hence their account being banned

Good find. Sending over to RAdmin now

It's a tough situation to be in, and it is just a start but I think it's a good start! Thank you.

Will you be unbanning/unmuting the people who pushed on the forums for the decision to remove it?

Hi, as someone who was on the forums pushing to remove Clover, no clue who you are talking about. Would be easier for the mods if you have any usernames though. Feel free to @ the community mod that runs the RA account

sure, tietuesday was one of them bsky.app/profile/tiet...

tietuesday was not muted. It was their first forum post, meaning it needed to be manually verified before the comments would show up to everyone. This is a manual process that applies to every user on RetroAchievements.

Removing the hack is a good start, but you also need to remove the users defending the hack. It’s like the “Nazi bar” story, you need to remove the bigots before they infest the rest of the site.

whew, thank you

NGL this is good but the fact this is the first time ever I see the RA team admit to fault ever is quite funny, like it took something THIS extreme for you guys to enforce your rules

Please stop acting like you are an archival website. You do not host these games, you do not preserve them, you actually host content that fundamentally transforms the original experience. That's the opposite of archival.

Thank you for taking a stance and making it clear that hate speech, "ironic" or otherwise, has no place on RA.

Very glad to see the right direction taken on this, I love RA and am glad to be able to continue to using it

I use retro achievements for the achievements. Not for hate. Also if comments are locked on site it doesn't send the message that you 'welcome discussion on policy'

good move

The fact you even let it get this far and defended the decision this long is severely damaging my interest in your website. Being “””neutral””” about hate speech just means defending bigots and driving their targets away. This is too little too late. Please learn from this at the very least.

It's not a good sign when googling your community and "Nazi" produces results. It looks like you didn't even deal with the influx of dog whistle posts in your original decision on the matter as well. Not a good look.

What is wrong with you people? Why does every community have to be policed by reddit mod esque perverts? Why does every retro game community self destruct because of selfish leadership like this? Democratize your communities or they will collapse and all this work will be lost.

unless this policy is applied to community spaces like the forums or discord server and these bigots aren't removed this isn't enough to convince me to cancel my deletion request. I do not for a single second need to humor sharing a space with these creeps.

Cool now ban all the dickheads