"Leaks"

[Noomz]

I'm getting pretty sick of them already and we're not gonna get the new expansion announcement until at least Blizzcon. Can we please hand out infractions for all the garbage "leaks" threats people are making? They're basically baits anyway.

[Lochton]

I'm getting pretty sick of them already and we're not gonna get the new expansion announcement until at least Blizzcon. Can we please hand out infractions for all the garbage "leaks" threats people are making? They're basically baits anyway.

I have noticed that the moderators are handling the 'leaks' that is completely garbage. Problem is with leaks, until there is something out from Blizzard, they are hard to bust. I mean, you could've shut down the real one.

Of course, I think @chaud, @Tziva or @Darsithis can explain it better.

[Noomz]

I have noticed that the moderators are handling the 'leaks' that is completely garbage. Problem is with leaks, until there is something out from Blizzard, they are hard to bust. I mean, you could've shut down the real one.

Of course, I think @chaud, @Tziva or @Darsithis can explain it better.

Which also means that anyone could post anything at any time and ALL the time. Which is why I feel there needs to be a lid on it. Let MMO-champ officially handle this kind of information, if there is any.
And a majority of them are clearly either copying something someone else already wrote or are blatantly fake.

[Soulwind]

I have noticed that the moderators are handling the 'leaks' that is completely garbage. Problem is with leaks, until there is something out from Blizzard, they are hard to bust. I mean, you could've shut down the real one.

Of course, I think @chaud, @Tziva or @Darsithis can explain it better.

There is no benefit to a leak, unless it's a big one with lots of pictures, models and lore information. Which hasn't happened since Cataclysm.

Since then, leaks have always happened about a week or less before the announcement and they've either been disregarded as one of the many fake leaks that were around at the same time, or downright ignored.

A "potential leak" doesn't do anything that couldn't be done by writing it as speculation. So, in my opinion, any thread that tries to pass information as a real leak should be closed, and the author should receive an infraction.

It's fine to let people speculate in a hypothetical environment until the announcement happens, and, if someone happens to have real information, let them drop it as an idea in there for others to discuss about it.

Rewarding this insincere behaviour is not good for the community.

- - - Updated - - -

It isn't about benefits. People enjoy theorizing and well,some enjoy guessing. In the end, I believe that one of the main reasons would be, what if a moderator had ended up closing the 'right' leak?

Nothing? Absolutely nothing at all?

What's the difference between reading a speculation thread and seeing some of those ideas in the announcement a week later and reading a random leak thread and seeing some of that info in the announcement a week later? It's not like calling it a leak makes it more believable, most people here have already grown skeptical about those.

If anything, I've seen the opposite. People ignoring or insulting the leakers because they considered it dumb or unbelievable. That's not healthy speculation, that's what happens when someone is lied to everyday for months and is presented with a truth in the same format as those lies.

If moderators force an environment where leaks aren't allowed unless they're presented as speculation, then leakers will have the opportunity to drop clues or shape their information in a friendly way that invites others to talk about it. If they're unwilling or unable to do so, then their leak wasn't worth anyone's time anyway.

These threads that are just a shopping list of features, a randomly generated title and a paragraph of poorly written lore aren't engaging, they're pedantic and impersonal. And since most of them are false, everyone immediately gets defensive. Nobody wants to be the fool that believed in the fake one, so they look for flaws and attack anyone who defends it. It creates a hostile environment for those who participate and discourages everyone else from even reading it. After all, what's the point, they've seen a dozen of those that week and they're all fakes. And if one of them isn't, they'll get more and more accurate information in a matter of days anyway.

[Tziva]

As said in the tons of other leak threads in Suggestions & Feedback: As a general rule, we allow leak threads.

The moderator team has no way to tell which are legitimate and which are not. We don't want to accidentally shut down a genuine leak thread, and we HAVE gotten genuine leak threads in years past.

Not only do we not want to do delete a real thread, we also don't want to give people false hope with action on a fake thread. We have also have discovered from the past experience that closing or deleting threads also leads to people reading into it overly much and thinking those leaks are real (track record so far from prior expacs: none of those aforementioned closed/deleted have been). There's a thread here recently in S&F as an example. We've also had people make threads of Reddit, etc, reading into the accidental deletion of a thread. Any action we take on these is interpreted by the community as a sign of validity.

People like to speculate. As long as people are having fun speculating and discussing in leak threads, that is a good thing. If people stopped caring and responding to them, they would probably lose their appeal to make when they got no replies and dropped off the first page, and everyone and their mother would stop making BS threads. But so far the community has suggested with their focus and action that they enjoy these.

If you see a "leak" thread that is obviously trolling or fake, report it and we'll review it and close if necessary. And by "obviously fake" I don't mean "this doesn't sound genuine" I mean things that are really, really, really blatantly made up: parodies of other threads, MS paint "screenshots," Dora the Explorer themed, whatever.