Why aren't there any female users on this site anymore?

[Hedra42]

padib said:

Ka-pi96 said:

amp316 said:
Long story short. It was all because of a joke that Galaki made about PMS when a female (I think that it was Marucha) typed PMs in a thread title. It wasn't an offensive joke at all but she flew off of the handle, told off all of the mods because nothing was done, took off with some of her female friends, and created her own site called VGirlz which ironically doesn't allow men (not that that's sexist or anything).

So basically it's all Galaki's fault.

A joke like that wasn't needed though and probably should have been moderated, then by the looks of it her thread about how sexist VGC was was treated as a bit of a joke. It really isn't surprising that she and other users left. I hope the mods are now better at dealing with sexism, although to be fair there isn't that much of it now so it's hard to tell if they deal with it well or not.

She totally went overboard even though she was right. And many people told her that in that thread she made. She just took the wrong approach to a real problem, and it made the matter worse because people now had a reason to dismiss a legitimate problem.

She fucked up.

This.

Unfortunately Galaki's joke was not the best example to use to highlight what was perceived to be a valid issue at the time; it only served to weaken her argument and open it up to ridicule. The responses in that thread are divided as a result. Later on in the thread, she went even further by demanding that moderators should clean up and delete offensive posts - a method that has been tried with undesirable results in the past, so I understand. Having moderated a gaming forum for a few years about a decade ago, the backlashes I've seen against that kind of moderation have escalated to the point where Godwin's law has come into play.

The best post I came across in Marucha's thread is this:

Kantor said:
Alright, I'm going to be direct here.

Galaki's post was not offensive. Galaki's post did not break the rules. Galaki's post was a pun based on your thread title. If you do see anything that offens you, by all means report it. If it's moderatable, it will be moderated. If it isn't, then it won't, and you need to accept that although it was offensive to you, we didn't consider it to be objectively offensive.

I'm going to try to put this as nicely as possible, so I apologise if it still seems a little bit harsh. But we are not here to deal with people being offended. That's far too subjective. We are here to maintain a certain level of discourse and keep this site from becoming a giant flamewar. No part of that requires the banning of jokes that certain people find offensive.

Women are more than welcome here. You, personally, are more than welcome here. But that doesn't mean that we are going to bend over backwards to do everything that every user wants us to do. That is not feasible.

Sure, it doesn't address the problem she had with sexism on the forums, but maybe if she'd approached it better and with stronger evidence of sexism going unchecked by the moderators, the focus of Kantor's response may have been different.