yeah it's genuinely hypocritical to allow hitler as a username while banning people for saying "srebrenica." (no other text)

i think it's just a rule of convenience. it's not worth randy's time to deal with all the kids giving themselves edgy names

Spend a while trying to find this thread: https://war.app/Forum/101084-supreme-leaders-personal-diary-top-secret-3 .

OP's profile pic was of Kim Jung Un if memory serves correctly. Later another player turned up and named themselves after Kim Jong Il and used that as their profile pic.

Point being you don't know a player's actual intent. The thread was all in good fun. Their names, profile pictures and content shouldn't be suppressed (which would be ironic since they are dictators).

(I've been around here since mid 2013, used to be a mod here and won non-official community member of the year award on the "Warzone awards" if that makes any difference. I'm actually level 64 and this is my newest alt that I haven't deleted.)

used to be a mod here

If you're gonna mention that you should complete the story.

I have no problem with the name because it's historical but I do get offended by Nazi imagery on profile pages or clan pages. it's also odd it's the most popular name

I'm in favour of the name being allowed for the following reasons:
— I myself am not offended by it (though I could be: Germany invaded and occupied my home country during WWII, and hunted down, tortured, deported and killed hundreds of thousands of my countrymen). You could say my personal feelings don't matter, but the personal feelings of at least some who complain about the name appear to matter: who's to say why one should matter above the other? Why the opposition to "normalising" a character should matter over said normalisation?
— This game is for players from all around the world, not only from Western country whose historical consciousness puts Hitler at the foreground. In other parts of the world, that only look at the West from afar, Adolf Hitler is mostly viewed as an impressive statesman, leader, and conqueror, the same way Westerners would view Gengis Khan (and being currently on holiday in Asia I have hard evidence for this). Hitler's crimes are ignored or overlooked because they aren't part of those others peoples' moral legacy. Starting to enforce such moral legacy would set us on a slippery slope, and that is not an irrational fear or bad faith argument. There is one poster close above me named l4v.r0v and whose clan displays the Imperial Japanese flag. That could be felt as offensive by both Asian countries occupied and massacred by Japan during WWII, and Ukrainians invaded by Russia. Consistency would dictate his profile to be policed, and all other profiles too.
— I don't know if those players who use the name of Hitler are admirative of Hitler or not. They might be. Holding beliefs, however contemptible they be (in our eyes), is yet no ground for policing. Acting on those beliefs can surely be, but it's not obvious that using Hitler's name as a profile name constitutes such an act, as others already pointed out, especially in a game that refers to History. The one example we have at hand is one where the player refused to confirm or deny what his politics were, thereby granting no political dimension to his name.
— Of course what's offensive or not is relative, both in time and space. Politics and their culture are ever-evolving. The censorship of today is not that of yesterday and might not be that of tomorrow. We should do well to remember it before we ask for censorship to be applied (yes, even in the case of the "N-word", as it is called with near-reverential fear of blasphemy: ask yourself what its use was 50 years ago, and what it will be 50 years from now).

If you're gonna mention that you should complete the story.

Didn't seem relevant to mention it. But here it is anyway:
I created tooling to assist with modding. No actions were being suggested or performed automatically. I kept it secret and only shared with others who I already knew were mods. It highlighted "bad" words in the forum, game chat logs, global/clan chat. Also had buttons that would insert a preset for the recommended action.

I don't remember what lead to my permissions being removed. (Someone falsely reported me I guess.) But I was given one last shot with report handling removed and I blew it, I guess. I wanted notifications of when "bad" words were used, so that I could investigate further. It was before chat logs even existed and I had a program running overnight. Overnight my time used to be highly under-moderated.

Before I was recommending which actions should be taken and including notes like chats or other general warnings, moving threads from one category to another, Strategy forum when it used to exist, Uservoice for cleaning up feature requests with 0 votes and dealing with dupes back when Uservoice was being used for feature requests, Twitch chat timeout.

I never lost forum category moving, Uservoice or Twitch permissions until I deleted my accounts for my own reasons. Fivesmith kind of pushed me to delete my main, Uservoice was replaced with feature requests forum to prevent spending a fortune so I deleted my account, Twitch is ran by an abusive ad company and I suspected they'd add age verification, similar to the Australian social media ban but for my own country. Submitting ID to prove age to enable chatting on livestreams is an unnecessary risk, so I pre-emptily deleted my account.

I have nothing to apologise for. Someone likely reported me for their own reasons. I was sticking to the procedure. The tooling didn't exist, so I created it, even if it meant going behind Fizzer's back to create it. I was 15-18 at the time, can't be perfect. When there's a backlog of 10-100 reports per week, having a quick way makes it a lot easier.

Edited 2026-08-14 04:36:29

i hope you’re more honest to yourself than you are to the public, dan.

anyway back on topic: i think allowing even hitler names is forced if you’re going to be a global site. different cultures are sensitive to very different things, and you can’t accommodate all of that without shutting down open speech. eg serbian nationalists will get mad if you mention serbian war crimes in bosnia, while americans will get mad if you make them go through the effort of looking up “serbia” to learn it is a real country. you just can’t please everyone via speech restrictions. except maybe ones that legitimately block like harmful and dehumanizing speech (e.g., calling for violence or discrimination against groups based on their identity alone). but that’s really hard to do with a username alone- killthejews1488 is where imo the line should be drawn, while EnolaGayFan or Mullah Omar Is My Hero should be allowed.

Case in point: in Chile you can get Hirohito sushi rolls. In China or much of the developed world that would be pretty offensive.

Probably the method to go behind Fizzers back was not good. If this was the reason for whatever happened. (And I dont wan to know it). But the tool cant be too bad, since Fizzer and mods are now using a built-in "bad word filter" as pre-filter for public- and private-game-chats as well as for global-, clan- and group-chats as well.

Edited 2026-08-22 19:32:03