Gearbox Community Architecture
A forum jail that rehabilitated trolls instead of banning them, at one of the largest game developer communities of its era.
At Gearbox Software I oversaw the websites, community, and internal tools for what was then one of the largest, most active game developer communities around. My title kept changing — Community Manager, then Online Architect (the one I put on my own business cards), then Director of Applications, then Director of New Media — but the work stayed the same: design the systems that let a big, rowdy community actually function.
A few of the pieces I built:
The Ban Bin — a forum jail used instead of permanent bans. When someone crossed a line, they got a thread with their name on it where the violation was stated openly and could be disputed. It worked: only two users were ever jailed twice, and none more than that. I wrote it up in "The Ban Bin: How Effective Is A Forum Jail?"
Gearboxity - a news platform dedicated for our active community.
The Illuminate — a hidden reward forum for trusted members that quietly became an informal community council.
Internal Combustion — a members-only flame forum that gave complaints a place to go, and turned a surprising number of them constructive.
Gearblogs — an early developer-diary platform, before that was a common thing studios did.
ARG campaigns — collaborative puzzle hunts where the community had to work together to unlock game content.
We initially built all of it on a custom PHP framework I wrote from scratch, then eventually migrated to CakePHP as the scope grew. The rehabilitative moderation ideas in particular kept showing up across the industry years later.
