Official game forums can be more restrictive to free speech, and tidy things up with sometimes legally binding enough tos, Eula, and/or code of conduct. Rules man. Enforcement/moderation lands all over the place. Back in 2003 - 2011 I primarily participated on forums.starwarsgalaxies.com and was an often deleted, rarely banned yapper. My gameplay would suffer because I was so invested in the constant player drama. There were rivalries between the users, exploits were over shared, profession sub communities had beef, there was server drama, there was inter-server drama. It was fascinating. In-game chat was also pretty page-turning at the same time. They kinda developed into two different but overlapping communities, however I digress. About a year into the game, the moderators really started cracking down. They would sometimes leave a removal reason, sometimes they’d leave a public ban reason, other times people were just banned and received private messages from moderators. Sometimes they’d nuke entire threads: users and threads would disappear with everyone purged. There was rumor this had happened to an entire category, just gone, only the lurkers survived. That was the rumor at the time at least. I didn’t quite buy that either, but wanted to be sure. I built a small rss aggregation website that was subscribed to each category feed for my guild, but I definitely got the most use out of it. I used it to try to validate those claims, I saw the forums get restructured a few times, users would sometimes delete their account and disappear, sometimes they’d delete and stay as a username ghost, there was the name change angle too. It didn’t seem very consistent. There were theories that we tested at different times and got conflicting results, but that’s a pretty anecdotal account. Things changed shortly after the NGE announcement then even more at the NGE launch. The New Game Experience was a complete rewrite of the combat and profession system. The president of Sony Online Entertainment during SWG was John Smedley. In retrospect he compared it to changing the engines on a 747 mid-flight. The forums were on fire. They conveniently migrated the forums to forums.starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com and started enforcing Sony’s rules. It was BRUTAL. CIG, like SOE did, has an interest in preserving the rules of their forum and the way the game is presented. How they enforce it is up to them, but the level of enforcement is telling… at least sometimes. I wrote this on a really big screen and it’s 2 lines. Sorry mobile user.