Facepunch forum smartness points

[Hudson633]

The Facepunch forum had an automatic moderation system that seemed to judge the punctuation or spelling of a user's comment, and potentially ban them if the quality of the comment was too low.

Even on the first capture of the forum (June 2005) the welcome message stated "We're a bit harsh on people using AOL talk on the forums. We want people to type real sentences and to take the time to speel things right."

Since atleast 2006, some users got ban lengths of over 600 days, and received the ban message:

AUTOBANNED Either really stupid or really stupid. Lost over 5,000 smartness points in one post

Since atleast 2007, a notice on posts appeared to include a negative score counter, and read:

Edit your post and fix the mistake to regain your smartness. Click this text for tips.

The use of "AOL-speak" was common on the internet at the time, which was described as the practice of shortening words such as "your" to "ur", and was particularly common when people would use text messaging on mobile phones. The mobile phone market was growing rapidly around the time that Garry's Mod/Facepunch were created (2004).

A mod reflected in 2023 that the forum: "took the still-hot irons of many young users' communication skills and bashed them into typists who can finish a coherent thought, which was a TALL ****ing order pre-2010".

Some users didn't like the system. One recalled in frustration that the word cleaver was considered to be a spelling mistake.

References

• https://web.archive.org/web/20050610234111/http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/
  
• https://web.archive.org/web/20060326061436/http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showbans.php?offset=180

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