User blog:Bluesonic1/Storm8 Censorship

I wanted to highlight an important issue that's currently occurring in conjunction with the project running (namely the petition) to help save Storm8's older titles from being retired.

Has anyone noticed how quiet the official forums are with regards to this sudden change, the retirement of old titles, especially when compared to the comments left on Storm8's Facebook page on various postings Storm8's made about their newer titles? There's a reason for this. The forums themselves are being censored on a grand scale to prevent any conversation between members that could spark hope or ideas for saving these older titles. I posted out the link to the petition on the forums to let people know there was a place they could speak out on, and these posts were promptly deleted. This then escalated to all of my posts being wiped, whether they contained a link or not. People who were mentioning the petition (no link), were (and apparently still are) also having their posts deleted or edited to blank out where they spoke of it. Likewise, Tyler Cole (or tyman on the forums), offered an alternative solution to saving the games and got his entire thread completely deleted, despite the fact that it was purely discussion and no links of any kind were posted.

All this censorship is apparently under the forum's rule of "Please do not post outside links." yet I highlight the rule's exception clause: "Exceptions are fan links posted in the associated Fan Links forum and approved links.". Apparently this petition is not a fan project or a fan link, or has anything to do with fans of Storm8 games (not to mention that it doesn't account for the times when no link was posted). When I attempted to contact one of their community managers, I was promptly permanently banned (despite the fact that I had stopped posting at this point). I can see I'm not the only one who's encountered issues on the forum as this same "community" manager posted in a thread discussing the retirement to remind users of this rule (by the looks of things, the posts this warning was directed at had already been deleted).

And by the looks of the Facebook page comments on Storm8's various announcements, I don't need to remind users that we're completely blocked from posting feedback to their Facebook page. I'm not sure if anyone else has tried other social media outlets such as Twitter- if you have, let us know if you were blocked too. There were some users commenting that they were unable to leave reviews on the app's store page even.

'''Did you get censored on the forums as well, or somewhere else? Speak up about it, and show the new customer base for Storm8's newer titles just what a wonderful customer service this company provides.'''

p.s. If staff from the forums or "community" managers are reading this, contact has been made with various media reviewing sites that will help give your company some much needed exposure, for this and the monetary issues your newer titles are having. Thank you for providing the great material these journalism sites can use to review Storm8 and its customer service.