GayGamer.Net Taken Offline After Coordinated Hate Attacks

The well-known gaming site GayGamer.Net is now offline due to a series of hate speech attacks taken out against the site in their forums and comment sections. We’re not just talking about a few comments either. There were enough comments causing trouble that the site’s host GoDaddy.com pulled the site offline until the attack could be stopped. At this point, no one knows who perpetrated the assault, but it obviously sounds like something that was coordinated against the site by unknown parties. I checked a few moments ago, and their site is still not functional. It’s sad that it comes to things like this and we hope they can get their site back up and running soon. Every game site has the right to share their opinions on the net.

After a series of hate speech incidents and forum postings to GayGamer.net, the site was taken offline by a set of denial of service attacks. Flynn DeMarco, the site’s owner, said things started going wrong toward the end of last week until the site’s host, GoDaddy.com, finally took the site offline until the attacks could be stopped. They are currently attempting to get back online and hope to be finished by Monday.

A couple minutes in an Xbox Live Halo multiplayer session should give anyone an idea of why safe havens like GayGamer.net exist (along with Gaymer.org and Gamers.Experimentations.org), but for someone to go out of their way to attack the site is extreme. In the year since its existence, the news site and forum has given voice to issues that were previously rarely discussed. We share in Kotaku’s sentiment, where DeMarco is weekend editor, that “it’s sad to see that even in the virtual worlds of gaming and game coverage people decide that the only way they can express themselves is by attacking others.” GayGamer has sought to bring demographic inclusion into the industry and we hope to hear their voice back in the cacophony of these internets soon.

Via Joystiq