Spotlight, Then Denied

If he made it this long without any complaints, then he should get to keep it.

Wow, Microsoft just shafted you Cow. I’m sorry to hear this and I would personally slap my way through the MS HQ to whoever made you change your name. The rest can’t be said without cursing but you get the point.

This is sad, I knew about Cow for a while, but never knew him like I do now. I can also vouch for everyone at ATC that we are behind him!

what goes for one, goes for all. the GT got complaints and should be changed. the name suggests beastiality and that’s a big no-no.

Since M$ facist mods locked Cow’s thread, I thought I’d post my reply here as well as on a couple of other forums:

I have to say I saw this coming when Cow was in the spotlight. I knew some jack arse would complain about the tag. Wasn’t sure if Ms would be stupid enough to listen to the complaint though.

Some helpful facts.

Everyone is offended by something and if we ban everything offensive then there will be no available gamertags left.

Cow Molesting can mean to bother Cows and does not automatically mean that it is a sexual reference. How can Cow be blamed if somebody assumes that this is what he meant and got offended by it. He can’t be held responsible for people picking up on things the wrong way and then getting offended by it. Basically that person may have just offended themselves.

Cow Moolesting isn’t Cow Molesting. It is therefore not a tag containing the word molesting or about molesting directly and is not strictly against the terms of use, same as the hundreds of other tags that play on words like this. This is similar to the use of the word baxtard on an Irish tv show. I’m sure the broadcaster got complaints about it but they didn’t take action because the word only sounds like another word, it isn’t that word. You can’t make people change their gamer tags because they sound like offensive terms, otherwise I could go around complaining about half the gamertags on Live.

Ms have not given Cow reasonable notice about this. I think if they had notified him within 30 days of his gamertag creation then that would be fair enough but now everyone knows him with this tag and he has built relationships and is known to many people as Cow Moolester. To force him to change for just sounding like something offensive is ridiculous and over the top. Surely Ms have a system in place that checks gamertags as they are being created or soon after. Even if they didn’t, Cow has been participating on Live for ages with this tag with little or no complaints. In addition, Ms allowing Cow to use this gamertag and highlighting it in their gamer spotlight and on the front page of Xbox.com is recognition that they do not feel his gamertag is offensive and that the only reason he is being made change it is because a user complained.

How do we know this user just doesn’t like Cow? If someone doesn’t like me, can they complain about my gamertag and then I’ll be forced to change it? It doesn’t make any sense to listen to a few complaints when there is no real premise for the complaint in the first place as can be seen by the huge support here for Cow, the fact that he has been using this tag for 2 years without incident or other users reporting it that he has gamed with and the fact that Ms felt it was okay to highlight it in the spotlight.

I am very disappointed in Ms decision and the decision of the team that makes these judgments. To make this fair, they should perform a regular expresssion search for every gamertag containing words with an 89% similarity to a potentially offensive word and force all these users to change their gamertag too.

To people who defend.
Since molest dont seem to be sexual by nature,how about word GAY in GT.
GAY means HAPPY not homoseuxal..
This is how the modern world works..Think people..Think

@DjDATZ
Do you find lets say GT “child molester” bad?

@ Tapio

but it’s not Child molester, it’s Cow moolester,
moolester isn’t even a word FFS

we all wub you cow