After 5 Years On Roll20, I Just Cancelled and DELETED My Account : DnD

This is a long post, quoting multiple comments from various sources in case the original sources get deleted as a result of this post.

TL;DR: r/Roll20 admin u/NolanT banned me from the subreddit for criticizing Roll20. Roll20 customer support backed him in his decision.

I have been a paying member of Roll20 for 5 years, using it to run my D&D games, both in person (with a TV battlemat) and online. I have routinely told people online and in real life it is the best virtual tabletop on the market, and I've gotten a dozen or so friends onto it personally.

I just canceled and deleted my Roll20 account due to their customer service.

A few days ago, I get a message on Reddit that I had been banned from r/Roll20. I thought, This must be a mistake. I've barely ever posted there, let alone done anything abusive.

As it turns out, I've only ever posted there twice, here and here, both three days ago. I believe it is that second comment which caused NolanT to ban me. If that comment gets deleted, the content was basically a copy-paste of this comment I had made on r/DMAcademy.

Here's what the ban message said.

You have been banned from participating in r/Roll20. You can still view and subscribe to r/Roll20, but you won't be able to post or comment. Note from the moderators: You were banned from this subreddit approximately a year ago. We are banning your alternate account as well. If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team for r/Roll20 by replying to this message. Reminder from the Reddit staff: If you use another account to circumvent this subreddit ban, that will be considered a violation of the Content Policy and can result in your account being suspended from the site as a whole.

Banned a year ago? I'd never even used that subbreddit until this week. And I don't even have an alternate account, let alone one that had been banned. I figured there must have been a mistake. And the fact that this threatens to possibly ban my account from Reddit altogether, I became upset.

I sent a message, asking for clarification and correction.

What is this about? I don't have an alternate account. Look at the history of this account. I've used it for 5 years. I've done nothing worthy of a ban. This must be a mistake. Please respond.

I received a response a few hours later, from the admin, u/NolanT.

https://www.reddit.com/user/apostleoftruth/ Too similar a posting style; not taking the risk on coincidence. Don't have a way to check IP here on reddit, so we'll be erring on the side of caution.

I thought, Wow, that username is suspiciously similar to mine. Fair enough. How close are our posting patterns? So, I checked with a tool I've used in the past for getting statistical data of Reddit users' posting patterns: https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/.

You can view the analyses here:

It shows that u/apostleoftruth and I have quite different posting patterns. I became more upset, feeling like this was based on nothing other than my username.

I then got curious. What did apostleoftruth do to get banned in the first place? I figured it would have been some verbal abuse, as is so common on Reddit. The analyzer doesn't show him as being terribly toxic, at least on the statistical level. And his most downvoted comment of all time was only -7. But what stood out to me about that comment was its content. It was criticizing Roll20. I thought, alright, maybe he got a bit heated in a comment at some point and said something out of line. I looked through his comment history to find the last time he had posted/commented in r/Roll20.

Here is his last post on r/Roll20.

I recently had the opportunity to look at the pro forums at a specific thread. https://app.roll20.net/forum/post/5565388/can-we-have-a-serious-discussion-about-paid-gming In this thread, the OP is making his remarks about paid GMing, a heated and controversial topic that has been going on around for quite a while. The thread ends with Nolan going on his usual defensive stance by bringing the code of conduct, he, of course, fails to mention what the link to the code was for and in a very cold manner. In that same post, we also get some new information about when we can flag pay to play posts and what their intention is (which by the way is not in the code of conduct's paid GMing). The OP in question has deleted their account. And by the flair, you can see that they were a Pro user. The user clearly had a problem with paid GMing (perhaps a mishap in the past) and instead of entering a civil discussion to convince him otherwise, a dev response shuts down the thread and halts the conversation. I do not know about you, but this is breaking the code of conduct of Roll20 in its entirety. Specifically, it is an infringement of common courtesy and civil discussion rules. I would understand shutting down any other topics that are either off-topic or offensive outside of Pro forums due to how easy it is to spam it, but in the Pro forums, you only have paying members posting. The current norm in Pro forums is that if someone brings a topic that demands discussion it gets a single response from devs and then shut down unless it is in the interest of the devs to respond to. This passive aggressive, mild-dictatorial stance is casuing user opinions to get shut down. A pro user just left, that is a minus in Roll20's revenue and this is due to a lack of interest from the devs to keep their top tier paying users in. Consider this topic as an announcement. I do not expect replies or visibility but I had to raise my voice for the guy who deleted his account feeling betrayed by Roll20.

In that same thread, NolanT makes a comment stating that he had banned the user.

Firstly, I've gone ahead and removed /u/ApostleofTruth from the Roll20 subreddit. Their recent history of seeking every opportunity to drag the Roll20 staff on a subreddit that we curate makes it difficult to have a constructive conversation (doubly so as we're soon bringing on a new Community Manager). My hope is that by removing the most harassing elements of these (and other) ecosystems, we'll be better able to facilitate publicly interacting with the community's concerns. To the discussion in this thread about forum moderation; for us, Paid GMing is a closed conversation. For those who aren't Pro users, my response to the thread was as follows: We view paid GMing as a choice similar what rule set a group utilizes; a question of consent between those choosing to participate in a game that warrants no input from those not part of the game. Just as someone might say that, "4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons is a terrible roleplaying experience and not what was ever intended by TSR," the fact that someone else is playing that game doesn't stop you from having a 2nd Edition game or playing Pathfinder. To dispel a few conceptions; paid GMing is not a particular large portion of the games played on Roll20, similar to how few games on Roll20 are actually a result of our Looking for Group system or forums. Checking with our Customer Support Representative, "the amount of emails we get in regards potential scams from Paid GMing does not even fill up one hand." As far as our intentions we do not intend for paid GM's to be responding to others that are searching for groups unless specifically requested, and we will continue to take moderator action against such replies (and if you see such a response yourself, please FLAG IT to help us get to it faster). Additionally, as we improve our Looking for Group search tool, we intend to continue to offer options to remove or highlight paid postings per your individual preferences. As for locking the thread, the content was essentially off-topic. Like many other products-- particularly software as a service ones-- we actually don't want to have a forum community. It's not that there aren't some really excellent people (because by and large, wow, have we been lucky), but there is a small segment that continuously look to cause sweeping debates on such forums. In this particular thread's case-- outside of the initial poster being off-topic and expecting said sweeping debate to occur-- the thread was amazing. Yet, by allowing such a thing to be open, it makes for a future argument as to why the Roll20 forums needs to allow verbal fencing over the merits of rules-heavy vs rules-light play, etc. As such, we have an extremely narrow focus on our forums-- looking for other players, reporting bugs, requesting features, troubleshooting the program, and working on things like our API or character sheets. All of that said, there is an impetus on us at Roll20 to find ways to facilitate some of the more soul-searching community questions folks have as to the philosophies and intent we have for the program. I'll be on Twitch tomorrow at 1PM PT discussing those sorts of things, and I would like to get such conversations to be a more regular part of our interactions.

Now I'm not just angry for myself, but for this other guy who got banned a year ago. He got banned for criticizing Roll20, and pointing out moderation abuse trying to quash criticism. Ironically, I never would have known about the history of mod abuse if NolanT hadn't pointed me to it himself. One particular part of NolanT's comment was infuriating:

Like many other products-- particularly software as a service ones-- we actually don't want to have a forum community.

Well that's readily apparent at this point.

At this point I'm fuming, but I decide to keep my appeal as courteous as possible, if only to maximize my chances of having the ban reversed.

I sent my appeal with the above statistical evidence.

Too similar a posting style How so? Text analysis shows our styles are not similar at all. Moreover, our posting patterns are entirely different. We frequent different subreddits. https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/#apostleo https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/#apostleoftruth I don't know if this factors into your decision at all, but look at my Roll20 account: https://app.roll20.net/users/107573/apostleo. I have spent hundreds of dollars on Roll20. I've been a paid member since 2013, almost the entirety of Roll20's existence. If this isn't overturned, I'm going to cancel my Roll20 account immediately.

I received no response for a day. I got more upset. Is this something silly to be getting worked up about? Sure. But on top of threatening to ban my account from Reddit, this had become a matter of principle. I was being wrongfully accused and punished, then my appeal was being ignored. And this was turning out to be part of an ongoing pattern of mod abuse.

u/NolanT, It's been 24 hours now, I'm still banned, and you haven't responded to my evidence of my defense. If you truly believed that this was an alternate account, you could escalate the issues to a Reddit admin to verify the IPs and ban me altogether. I wish you would try, because they could confirm my claim that I am a different person. You're going to take a 5-year paying customer and promoter of your service and turn them into an active detractor on social media.

Here's the full message chain, to show I'm not omitting something.

I also sent an email to Roll20 support directly, at [email protected]

Your forum admin, NolanT, banned me from your subreddit, r/Roll20. He claims that he believes my account is an alternate account of someone he temporarily banned a year ago. I've given evidence that this is not the case (textual analysis of our posting histories shows very different patterns), but he has not responded. I've done nothing worthy of a ban. I have been a paying member of Roll20 since 2013, and I've purchased many things through the Roll20 Marketplace. I expect the ban to be lifted and an apology given by NolanT by the time of billing for next month, or I am going to cancel my subscription. You will not only be losing a long-time customer and promoter of your service, but you will be making an active detractor on social media. Reddit account: https://www.reddit.com/user/ApostleO Roll20 account: https://app.roll20.net/users/107573/apostleo Thank you, Cory

Again, I received no response for over a day. Now I was not just upset at NolanT, but at Roll20's support in general.

I sent another message to the r/Roll20 moderator queue (rather than just u/NolanT) and another email, pretty much the same content, outlining all the facts above.

It's been 36 hours since I sent the previous email. I have received no response. I'll provide additional details of the issue, in case they are needed. I received a ban notification on Reddit a couple days ago, notifying me that I had been banned from r/Roll20. Note from the moderators: You were banned from this subreddit approximately a year ago. We are banning your alternate account as well. I sent a message to the sub, asking for clarification, figuring this is a mistake because I don't have an alternate account, and I've never done anything worthy of a ban on r/Roll20. (I think I've only posted to the subreddit once or twice, ever.) The response I received: https://www.reddit.com/user/apostleoftruth/ Too similar a posting style; not taking the risk on coincidence. Don't have a way to check IP here on reddit, so we'll be erring on the side of caution. I have presented evidence that my account and the referenced account do not in fact have a similar posting style. Too similar a posting style How so? Text analysis shows our styles are not similar at all. Moreover, our posting patterns are entirely different. We frequent different subreddits. https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/#apostleo https://atomiks.github.io/reddit-user-analyser/#apostleoftruth I don't know if this factors into your decision at all, but look at my Roll20 account: https://app.roll20.net/users/107573/apostleo. I have spent hundreds of dollars on Roll20. I've been a paid member since 2013, almost the entirety of Roll20's existence. If this isn't overturned, I'm going to cancel my Roll20 account immediately. It has been about 48 hours now, and I haven't heard anything else about this. I asked for an update yesterday, but received no reply. It's been 24 hours now, I'm still banned, and you haven't responded to my evidence of my defense. If you truly believed that this was an alternate account, you could escalate the issues to a Reddit admin to verify the IPs and ban me altogether. I wish you would try, because they could confirm my claim that I am a different person. You're going to take a 5-year paying customer and promoter of your service and turn them into an active detractor on social media. Please respond. I have about lost my patience for this matter. If the ban is not lifted, and I do not receive an apology from NolanT, by tomorrow morning, I am cancelling my Roll20 account, and I will be sure to tell this story on every social media platform I can. Whenever virtual tabletops come up in conversation, you can be assured that I will speak my mind about Roll20 and your abysmal customer service.

Apologies for the repetition, but I don't want to omit anything and risk being accused of giving an incomplete or misleading depiction of the events.

I also sent a message on Twitter, hoping a more public forum might get their attention more quickly.

@roll20app I have attempted to contact your support twice now over the past two days, both on Reddit and by email. I have not received a response. How do you recommend a paying customer actually receive customer service regarding your product and forums?

Hi Cory Owens, We had reached out to Reddit admins to confirm or deny whether or not the other account shared an IP address. However, this influx of messages-- particularly in response to a ban from a sub reddit where you have only posted twice-- has cause for concern, just as much as the initial belief of ban evasion. It is due to this concern that we will be maintaining your ban from our sub reddit. Regards, Miles

I couldn't believe what I was reading. I still can't believe it. They are going to follow up with Reddit admins to confirm my defense, but they are going to uphold the ban because I got upset by it, and I had the nerve to fight it? You've got to be kidding me!

And so, I responded one final time, informing them that I would be cancelling my account.

Miles, However, this influx of messages-- particularly in response to a ban from a sub reddit where you have only posted twice-- has cause for concern, just as much as the initial belief of ban evasion. It's the principle of the matter. Someone wrongfully accused me of abuse and circumventing a ban, a threat which implied a ban from Reddit as a whole. I have had that account for 5 years, so to be threatened with it being banned for something I didn't do got me quite upset. It's funny. I looked into why that other person's account was banned in the first place. I figured it would be some verbal abuse, racial slurs or misogyny or what have you. Nope. As far as I can tell, he was banned for criticising Roll20. That seems to be the reason I was banned as well. It is due to this concern that we will be maintaining your ban from our sub reddit. Alright. I'm done with your service. When you get your confirmation from the reddit admins that the those two accounts have never used the same IP, I hope you feel foolish. Don't bother apologizing at that point. I've already cancelled my subscription and deleted my account.

Attached were two images, one showing me canceling my account, and one showing me deleting my account.

Here are all the screenshots together.

Now that I've had a bit to cool off, I can admit this was an overreaction. I barely used that subreddit, so it's not like I was losing anything substantial by being banned. I still believe that Roll20 is the best virtual table top available, despite its many, many, many faults. (It's like that old adage about democracy. "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.") So, I'll be losing out by canceling, and possibly hurting my own campaigns I'm running. But I am the sort of person who doesn't make idle threats, so I felt I had to follow through, and I refuse to monetarily support a company that would insult me and call me a liar.

And so, as I stated in my emails, I'm telling this story to anyone who will listen. I'm going to be trying Fantasy Grounds, GM Forge, MapTool, and any other options I can find. (Maybe I'll start working on a virtual tabletop service of my own.)

If you have complaints about Roll20, but you are sticking around hoping it will improve, I would recommend you bail as well, because it is quite apparent that they are vehemently opposed to hearing criticism.