On 5th January 2010, I spent several hours writing a blog post (10 standard pages of text size), summarizing my experience with WGT.com in 2009. The blog post was titled: 2009 Winners at WGT.com: Quitters & Abusers.

In the afternoon of 7th January 2010, WGT deleted that blog post of mine in its entirety, without any prior warning or communication with me. Needless to say, I'm upset. I only received an email from WGT after the blog post was deleted, saying, without any specification, that the article was deleted because it was "inflammatory". 10 pages of nothing but "inflammatory" blog text? I really don't think so.

I then asked WGTalex via email whether it is permitted at all to criticize WGT.com; whether users of this site enjoy freedom of speech or not. She said yes, I was free to criticize WGT, as long as I "do not attack other players". I said it was definitely a part of my experience in 2009 that I was very unhappy with some of the fellow site users I encountered here. Therefore I trust it is permitted to say this openly, especially if I am (unlike others) not naming any names. WGTalex said I may go ahead and post a summary of that deleted blog post here, which is what I'm doing below.

Deleted Blog Article Summary

• [1st paragraph: can, just as many subsequent paragraphs below, hardly be considered "inflammatory", and I'm reproducing it here in its entirety] WGT.com offers a superb, free golf-game with great potential for the future. Let me be clear I'm a big fan of this game; I encourage every golf fan to set up a user account here and play the game; I also recommend purchasing the upgraded equipment (including the various ball types), because this heightens the enjoyment of the game considerably. For a game still in its Beta stage, WGT.com is an astounding achievement. Granted, the development of the feature that everyone has been requesting the most – full 18-hole stroke-play courses – has been slow, but otherwise the game made substantial progress, software-wise, in 2009.
• [2nd paragraph said:] When it comes to the "community" aspect of the web site, however, 2009 was an unmitigated disaster. It appears that there is a lack of staff at WGT.com to take proper care of the site's community features, and to ensure that they aren't abused. [I then went on to say that instead of protection from abuse, users who complain about being abused, may get banned themselves.]
• [3rd & 4th paragraph detail what was not working in 2009 with WGT's forums; reproduced here in their entirety, with slight modifications] For this reason, I shall, starting from 2010, be boycotting WGT.com's forums, and I appeal to decent site users to do likewise, to give WGT.com's staff a wake-up call. As an alternative to discuss the WGT.com golf game, I recommend for everyone the Ladders Site WGTLS forums that are properly moderated around-the-clock. Attacks among site members are strictly forbidden there, and are immediately halted; you can see a team of moderators there, promptly responding to user requests, often within minutes after they are posted. Forum threads get promptly merged, split, moved, locked, or re-named as is proper and necessary. In contrast, the typical characteristic of WGT forums is to see dozens of redundant, duplicate, and frequently offensive forum threads languishing in the forums for months, and no merge/split/lock/renaming (etc.) of threads occurs even after the users specifically request it. It is obvious that there is no one on WGT.com's staff who reads all forum posts in the chronological sequence in which they are submitted, although this is the first duty of any forum moderator. Then, after forum abuse happens, a WGT admin hastily arrives on the scene (often many hours or even days afterwards), and retrospectively tries to reconstruct what happened. Due to time pressure, he/she often fails to recognize what occurred, mistakes the victims of abuse for the perpetrators of abuse, and the wrong forum users are penalized (by bans, or by deletions of posts or entire threads, carefully written by the users). To sum up, there seems to be no one on WGT.com's staff to take care of the forums properly.
  
  For many months, WGT.com has been called upon by forum users to introduce standard forum moderation, to prevent virulent, habitual forum abuse. WGT.com ignored these calls, and never installed forum moderators, while imposing moderating duties on other WGT staff members (admins) who are quite manifestly overloaded with other work tasks so that they cannot pay proper, round-the-clock attention to the proceedings in the forums. It should be stressed that a number of experienced site users offered their moderating services to WGT.com for free, but these offers were ignored.
• [5th to 15th paragraphs introduced apologies that I expected to receive from WGT.com staff and from some of the site users, so that the wrongs of the past can be corrected; reproduced here in excerpts, and re-worded with the effort to be as polite as possible]

As to my boycott of the WGT.com forums, I might post to them very occasionally from now on, but most likely won't be participating in them at all. I shall only return to regular participation in the forums after WGT.com staff apologizes to me for what happened in the days following Christmas 2009. If WGT.com staff wishes to apologize to me, I would respectfully ask them to publish the following text on behalf of WGT.com, as a new forum thread:

Apology to Faterson

WGT.com staff wishes to apologize to Faterson for mistakenly issuing a ban to him following the Christmas 2009 events. WGT.com staff incorrectly identified the victims and perpetrators of abuse during those events. Faterson should in no way have been banned while his abusers were allowed to continue with no penalty. A multi-sided ban might perhaps have been acceptable; WGT.com staff made a mistake, however, and one-sidedly penalized the victim of others' aggression.

WGT.com staff will do everything to avoid such situations in future, by increasing the monitoring of the forums (ideally, by installing standard forum moderators) as well as increasing overall transparency. WGT.com staff will from now on make the effort to specifically reply to every site abuse report that is sent to us. We made a series of mistakes in having ignored a series of abuse reports submitted by Faterson in the days preceding the escalation, having provided no feedback whatsoever to those abuse reports, and WGT.com apologizes to Faterson for these omissions. 

From now on, every reply sent by WGT.com staff will be signed by a WGT staff member's name (or nickname), instead of only "WGT", because not signing the emails we send to specific users makes it impossible for these users to determine with whom they are trying to resolve a specific issue.

WGT.com may modify the above text to their liking, however in such a case I can no longer guarantee I would consider the apology to be fully satisfactory and recognize it as a valid apology.

There were a number of site users who had publicly said that Faterson's forum posts were as bad as the posts by site users who had attacked and maligned Faterson. I shall no longer talk to (or play golf with) any of these site users, unless they publicly apologize to me. If they wish to apologize to me, I would respectfully ask them to publish the following text, as a new forum thread:

Apology to Faterson

I apologize to Faterson for having publicly suggested his forum posts may in any way have been abusive, and for publicly suggesting his forum posts may in any way have resembled forum posts by serial abusers and notorious multiple-account holders.

You may modify the above text to your liking, however in such a case I can no longer guarantee I would consider the apology to be fully satisfactory and recognize it as a valid apology.

As to the users who attacked me in the days following Christmas 2009 (but also previously), I am not a vindictive person, am perfectly willing to forget everything that occurred, and move on as if nothing happened, provided that these people apologize to me. If they wish to apologize, I would respectfully ask them to publish the following text, as a new forum thread:

Apology to Faterson

I apologize to Faterson for publicly attacking, abusing and insulting him (given no personal provocation), in reply to Faterson's standard on-topic posts in various forum threads.

You may modify the above text to your liking, however in such a case I can no longer guarantee I would consider the apology to be fully satisfactory and recognize it as a valid apology.

• [16th paragraph describes that the standard "Report Abuse" process in WGT forums currently isn't working; reproduced here with a slight abbreviation] There is currently no transparency, no fairness, and no justice in the whole process: if you complain to the WGT staff of being abused by others, you are in fact calling the staff's attention to you. WGT.com staff always seems to act under time pressure; they do not seem to have the time to examine instances of abuse carefully and without bias. Because you are (relatively) new, you will likely be perceived as the problem, rather than your abusers. So, the end result of you demanding protection and reporting others' abuse, may in fact be that you will get banned, instead of your abusers. I know of at least 2 separate instances in 2009 where this happened. I for one have completely lost trust towards WGT.com staff and shall never turn to them again with any concern; because, if you do turn to them, asking for protection and reporting others' abuse, this is perceived as "trouble-making", taking the staff's time away from more important (to them) matters. Incidentally, the Report Abuse link in this site's forums has always been broken, so you need to report forum abuse via separate emails, which decreases the overall transparency, and probably heightens the staff's impression that you are only a trouble-maker, bent on increasing the staff's workload, if you do report other site users' abuse. In this way, a feature (Report Abuse) whose original intention was to help the web site owners and admins to run the site smoothly, has been turned into its exact opposite: if you report other users' site abuse via email, you are in fact increasing the staff's workload, and they won't thank you for it, and you may well end up being banned for having taken the trouble to report site abuse.
• [17th paragraph describes the lack of transparency when communicating with WGT about site abuse via email; reproduced in its entirety] The impression that WGT.com is understaffed is increased when you consider that they appear to be afraid to sign the emails they send to you (if they ever do) in response to the abuse reports you submit. Many abuse reports I submitted myself received no feedback at all. If there is feedback, it is frequently unspecific, containing only a vague 1 or 2 lines of response, and signed generically "WGT". This prevents you from effectively dealing with recurrent abuse by certain habitual site abusers, because you really have no idea which WGT staff member you were talking to the previous time when you reported abuse by the same offender. It appears, however, that there may only be 2 people managing the members@worldgolftour.com mailbox, and they appear to be so overwhelmed by other tasks that they seem unable to respond to abuse reports appropriately or process them properly.
• [18th to 20th paragraphs draw the analogy to WGT.com's treatment of quitters; reproduced in their entirety] The sad and ironic thing is that WGT.com's approach towards site abusers has been the same as that towards quitters: their approach shields the offenders, while punishing the offenders' victims. There is, indeed, some perverse consistency in this approach. WGT.com's random-pickup multi-player feature has been sabotaged for many months by hordes of quitters: players who quit after a few shots or holes, so that it appears impossible to finish a random-pickup multi-player round as launched. If you try it 15 times, you will most likely fail 15 times. (See another article, with statistics, in my blog.)
  
  Now, to address this issue, WGT.com introduced "reputation tracking" in their December product update. The feature was so utterly flawed it had to be recalled after only 1 day. WGT.com staff, however, did not admit that the feature was fundamentally flawed; instead, they professed that there were "only a few bugs" to be removed.
  
  In reality, the "reputation tracking" feature, as introduced in December 2009, was dysfunctional in its fundamental concept. It punished the quitters' victims along with the quitters. (For 3 key suggestions on how to fix reputation tracking so that it works 100% fairly for all players at all times, see this post.) And, WGT.com does not allow you to "name and shame" quitters publicly: after all, many of them are among their best paying customers, and purchased upgraded equipment from WGT. The common non-quitting user needs to sign up to a WGT.com-independent community web site, the Ladders site (wgtLS.co.uk), in order to avoid quitters; quitting is not tolerated on WGTLS.
• [21st paragraph, deleted by WGT half a day before the entire blog article got deleted, had a screenshot attached to it, and detailed a specific instance of abuse left unpenalized by WGT.com, banning the victim of abuse instead, who had reported that abuse to WGT]
• [22nd paragraph describes that WGT's "forum ban" is buggy itself, banning the user from all WGT.com webpages, not only the forums; reproduced in its entirety] What is worse, due to another WGT.com bug that had been pointed out to WGT months ago, if they ban someone from the forums, they actually ban the user from accessing his/her profile page as well, so the user has no access to his/her Wall posts or Private Messages either, cannot edit his/her avatar's appearance, etc. I could not reply to any of the new year's wishes and other messages from friends I received on my profile page at the turn of the years; in fact, new abusive Wall posts appeared on my Wall during my ban, with me being helpless to do anything about it (and the staff doesn't monitor Wall posts, of course), but that is no longer surprising. WGT has so far never reacted to bug reports alerting them to the fact that the forum ban mistakenly also extends to all other WGT.com webpages (except for the gameplay window that needs to be launched manually from the gameplay window's URL that you must enter manually into your browser's address line; any user who is less versatile in handling computers won't be able to launch the game during the alleged "forum ban" at all, with all WGT.com webpages being inaccessible to him/her).
• [23rd paragraph summarizes the situation regarding prevention of abuse on WGT.com; paraphrased here to be as polite as possible] There is, unfortunately, a pattern to be observed, where abusers get protection, while victims of abuse get penalized. About one particular forum poster, many abuse reports were submitted; there was never any feedback to them; the target of this person's numerous attacks was banned for a week, while the attacker was allowed to post without any interruption. It appears that a number of the users who had engaged in the attacks also regularly meet in a privately managed off-site chat-room; otherwise, the concerted nature of their attacks on a common target here in WGT.com forums, as well as standing up for each other even after manifestly engaging in personal attacks, is difficult or impossible to explain.
• [24th and final paragraph says I'm optimistic about WGT.com's development in 2010; reproduced in its entirety] Meanwhile, I am optimistic about this site's development, from the point of view of software; we should see some new stroke-play courses on WGT.com in 2010, and the battle for the best online golf game, between WGT.com and Tiger Woods Online, will be intensifying, which is the best possible news for online golf enthusiasts. Happy New Year 2010 to everyone!
• [A postscript, added on January 7th, 2010, said:] 2010-01-07 Update: See this forum post. [That forum post describes WGTalex's reaction to some of the content of this blog article.]

To conclude, I should mention WGT also deleted another blog post of mine, a short one, that was in response to another user's abusive blog post. I'm OK with that deletion, because the other user's abusive blog post got deleted as well. Also, it is perplexing that before deleting the entire long blog post, WGT had deleted just one paragraph of it; 12 hours later, though, the entire 10-page article got deleted. The lack of transparency in all this is palpable and, unfortunately, confirms some of the issues described in the original blog post.

To learn about the famous Boilerplate Nonsense Awards, go HERE.

[permalink] For proposed solutions on how to deal with quitters, see this forum post.

SUCCESS / FAILURE RATE
for completed random multi-player games as launched:
0 / 13 (0%)

• Everyone disconnected: 39%
• All but 1 player disconnected: 47%
• All but 2 players disconnected: 14%
• No one disconnected: 0%

• 20090809: 4-some launched; one person apparently disconnected after the Tee Off button was pressed, pulling everyone else into a prolonged time-out of several minutes. The game did not start at all & everyone disconnected without playing a single shot.

• 20090809: 4-some launched; 1 player recognized as a quitter from a previous round; let's see how long he/she can last this time!    Update on hole 4: one player got into multiple bunkers & disconnected without saying anything, despite having chatted previously. Prior to tee-off on hole 5: the remaining 2 players disconnected as well, including (without saying good-bye) the player formerly recognized as a quitter; the other person mumbled something about connection problems & quickly disconnected without waiting for an answer from the only remaining co-player, despite having engaged in profuse chatting previously. Faterson, left alone on hole 5, duly disconnects as well, because it wasn't a single-play round he wanted to play. So, that's 2 attempts at a multi-player game, and both of them failed. Is Faterson likely to attempt another multi-player game? Not so! And if he does, it's very likely that the games will fail just like the 2 previous ones...

• 20090809: 4-some launched; one of the players, having double-bogeyed hole 1 & left with a 10 ft putt for par on hole 2, lets his 90 seconds for the putt pass, then disconnects, crashing the game for everyone else. The error message Please close this window and try again later appears & the game is over before it really began.

• 20090809: 4-some launched; 3 Pros & 1 Master. Hole 2 update: the Master, after a par putt on hole 1 and missing a birdie putt on hole 2, promptly disconnects without a word (having chatted previously). Hole 5 update: player 2 leaves without a word. The remaining 2 players complete the round.

• 20090809: 4-some launched; Hole 1 update: a player disconnects after his drive. The remaining 3 players complete the round. 

• 20090809: 3-some launched; prior to launching the game, the host asked the other 2 players whether they're likely to quit, and they both denied it. On hole 6, lying +5 over par, trailing the other 2 players by 4 shots, one of the players disconnected. The remaining 2 players completed the round.

• 20090812: 4-some launched; one of the players, the only Hack among Pros, disconnected prior to his drive. Why don't you do that while still on the players selection screen?!    The game host had made sure not to click the Tee Off button immediately; he gave everyone the chance to cancel their participation in the round. Once the game host presses the Tee Off button, it's too late and you've spoiled everyone else a foursome round due to cancelling after the game was already launched!   Update on hole 9: a player disconnected on the green of the final hole without saying good-bye (his bad score would have inscresed his average score), pulling the other 2 players into a 4-minute time-out before they could finish their rounds. 2 players completed this round.

• 20090812: 4-some launched; one of the players, waiting for his turn to tee off, disconnected, thus wrecking another intended foursome before it began. If there was a penalty for doing this, he probably wouldn't dare to do this!   On the green of hole 1, a second player, the only “Master” in the group, left with a bogey putt, disconnected wordlessly. The other 2 remaining players agreed to cancel the round and everyone disconnected.

• 20090812: 4-some launched; prior to teeing off on hole 9, one of the players apologized, saying that a football game was just starting on TV, and disconnected. Well, that's tolerable. On the green of hole 9, another player disconnected without saying a word. That's perhaps less tolerable, and while it's no big deal, it will still serve to skew the player's average score. 2 players completed the round.

• 20090813: premier 18-hole 4-some launched (at Kiawah); the first player disconnected on hole 5, the second player on hole 7, and the third player after hole 11. Faterson, left alone on the course, disconnected as well.

• 20090816: 18-hole 4-some launched (Bethpage Black); the first player disconnected after the game host pressed the Tee Off button, reducing the 4-some to a 3-some before it even started. Another player, left with a bogey putt on the first green, disconnected without a word. Faterson, obliged to work & play, which is not practicable in a pair, apologized to the remaining player and, with his consent, disconnected as well.

• 20090816: 18-hole 4-some launched (Bethpage Black); one player left wordlessly on hole 11; the remaining 3 players completed the round.

• 20090904: 9-hole 4-some launched (Kiawah Island); first player apologized on hole 3, citing family emergency, and quit. On hole 7, another player, having fallen behind the other 2 players, left wordlessly. The remaining 2 players completed the game.

As of today (July 2009), WGT's interface does not make it possible for you to reply directly to a Wall Post published on your profile page by another golfer. This is although the email notification containing the wall post features a link described as You can reply to this message with the following Link:. Yet clicking on that link simply transfers you to your profile page, and you can't make any direct reply to the wall post.

To do that, you need to go to the sender's own profile page and leave a wall post of your own. Of course, maintaining a sense of conversation under such circumstances is next to impossible. You can't quote the other person's wall post; there's no hyperlink between the 2 posts, etc.

For this reason, here's my conversation with Tibbets (from yesterday, 25 July 2009) in a more legible form. The posts are shown chronologically as they originally appeared on the two users' profile pages. Should you only read Tibbets's or my wall posts in isolation, you'd probably end up wondering what the deuce each of these folks is talking about. Only in conjunction and correct sequence do the 5 wall posts make sense and, perhaps, amount to an enjoyable conversation to read.

And why make so much fuss about a particular conversation between 2 users of a website? Well, it ain't just two ordinary users, you know, by which I am not referring to myself, obviously. The fact is an achingly mediocre golfer  isn't frequently likely to get approached by the (virtual) world's no. 1 golfer the way it occurred here; that's like seeing Frank Sinatra or Madonna picking a common guy from a crowd to say, "Hey, aren't you so-and-so?"

In that spirit, enjoy the archive of the conversation below...

Curiosity by Tibbets

I was wondering, are you [XY]? It sure seems like it by your writing style :)

I'll be damned, Tibbets! by Faterson

XY would certainly feel flattered to be recognized by WGT's best virtual golfer only on the basis of his (a foreigner's) writing style; although one might perhaps equally recognize him due to his obstinacy, synonymous with obnoxiousness for some. Or, it could just be the national flag, not frequently seen on English-speaking sites. I'm sure XY would have by now conducted a thorough search (for the term "tibbets") of his email archives, going back many years, and, having come up empty-handed, would have wondered where his and Tibbets's paths may have crossed before, and whether it was under agreeable or disagreeable circumstances; it couldn't have been on a golf course, virtual or otherwise! Perhaps Tibbets would be willing to help him out of his predicament, although he can be surly enough in his own right (see forum altercations).  

No worries, sir! by Tibbets

Your secret is safe with me, though by choosing such a user name for yourself I hardly think you meant to keep it all that secretive. Our paths have not crossed before, a cursory search of the user name and some follow up reading directed me to ask in the first place. Your fascination with quotes gives you away! Mr. Wolfe would be proud!

If indeed that's who you are, then I applaud your literary acheivements and your passion for the peoples of your region. It's a fascinating area of the globe that I have yet to visit.

Best wishes and good fortunes in the game to you.

Thanks! by Faterson

Every line of your reasoning is as precise as I'm sure your putts are.   The first folder to look at was, indeed, the Nero Wolfe mailing list folder, and there actually used to be a (male!) person named Tabby on that list (sufficiently surly, too). Why was it the first folder to look at? Well, I'm sure Mr. Wolfe would have chuckled with appreciation if he could see the level of (written) eloquence exhibited by the no. 1 virtual golfer. It crushes some stupid but still prevalent prejudices in the line of, "computer games fanatics can't really be literate people".  

PS: As is well-known, the opening volume of the Nero Wolfe saga, Fer-de-Lance (1934), deals with murder on a golf course, by means of a devious poisoning mechanism installed in the victim's driver (was it?)!    And Mr. Wolfe, despite his monumental girth, did not feel totally disinterested in the game of golf; he examined the various golf clubs on his office desk, if I remember correctly, and had a prolonged conversation with the victim's caddy.

PPS: As is your custom, feel free to delete these comments of mine from your Profile Page. I'm sufficiently vain to have made an off-site back-up of them and, in case they vanish there, I'll be posting them to my blog. That's another bug on WGT's part, where people are only capable of posting comments on each other's Profile Pages, but there's no sense of conversation and it's not made clear which comment is meant as a reaction to which other comment. (The link You can reply to this message with the following Link: in the email notifications we receive is, likewise, incorrect both grammatically and factually.)

Thanks to you as well! by Tibbets

Were it not for my disdain for language, I might be able to keep up with you, in the literary world. That being said, if one is to bother to speak out at all, one might as well wield the language with both hands, so to speak.

You are correct about the lack of thread-communication between players. Often times comments end up getting lost in the proverbial sea, and context gets lost in retrospect. This happens most frequently with someone such as myself, who ends up deleting the comments from the wall!

WGT laid the groundwork for a great many things here last year, and it's been a slow process of tying up all the various loose ends that exist. Just the game in itself takes quite a bit of effort to get right on their part, nevermind the social networking, website design, and forum moderation. It will be some time before all the gaps are filled in.

• al1404 / 20090729
• arnar94 / 20090716
• BigDawg18 / 20090729
• blcrow33 / 20090715, 20090721
• ch1ef / 20090816
• clarky13 / 20090725
• crispy68 / 20090713
• dorey / 20090816
• explosifjosif / 20090629
• gato28 / 20090809
• Gerrard8 / 20090812
• Goodii / 20090722
• hilder / 20090713
• hotboy0533 / 20090720
• jake16 / 20090728
• JCarrier / 20090816
• johndinman / 20090709
• johnohutch / 20090719
• JonnyBuckets / 20090729
• jshimmield / 20090723
• julioma / 20090714
• lmay / 20090729, 20090809
• MADE4GOLF2 / 20090712
• marcglewis / 20090809
• Mircofait / 20090809
• MJCA / 20090719
• notbalanced / 20090721
• NubsMcNubberson / 20090729
• OverMark / 20090809
• paultreacy / 20090710
• pekk24 / 20090719
• prbernitt / 20090716
• RCFox / 20090812
• ripper3030 / 20090709
• Stumpstaa / 20090713
• Talc / 20090812
• tarheelbaby / 20090724
• texas1971 / 20090721
• Toddone / 20090729
• usmra / 20090716
• varcetty21 / 20090716