This is basically what happened on my side:
"Huh… someone is spamming the forums… "
flagged, went and did other things
Came back an hour later
“Oh… wow it’s worse. There’s just nothing interesting to read”
flagged some more, went and did other things
Came back an hour later
"… still bad. He is now targeting individuals who respond. "
flagged.… CS ticket made
… ticket responded to 15 hours later.
All it would have taken to respond to this was one person on notification of a mass of flagging. This didn’t happen for over 5 hours. A company this large that wishes to have a forum should do the bare minimums to keep it useable for the people who wish to use it.
otherwise don’t bother if it’s so inconsequential. My current job involves being one of the people in my company who is notified of problems in our statewide network and who then dispatches and reacts appropriately. As such I am very aware of how this particular notification could be lumped into someone else’s responsibilities easily and cheaply. It very much seems like there was nobody “at the wheel” or even in the escalation chain for a very large gap.
That attitude of let them trash the place, we’ll fix it later so that you can go back to using it was EXACTLY what the attacker pointed out. They knew nobody would do anything because nobody cared or was in position to do anything about it. They brought focus to make a point of exactly how little this place matters to blizzard… Whether intended or not, not a good look.
Nobody was stressed… perhaps the word “desperate” was the wrong choice. There was no system in place that was doing anything about it in any effective way. If they want to allow disruptions to happen and the attitude is “well… go do something else till we can get around to noticing.” (BTW I understand the opinions you express are NOT blizzards) then I really don’t want to bother being around here anymore.
The forums isn’t important, but keeping a standard and maintaining accessibility should be.
If nothing changes after what just happened , then that is just as much a message to us as anything else. Allowing one user to turn an entire subforum into irrelevant garbage for hours shouldn’t be possible.
I tell you these things so hopefully you express to the contacts you have (and maybe the CR who reads some of these) how bad it looks to the few users who DO bother to give well intentioned feedback here.
TLDR: Nobody lost anything important , no revolutions were had, but dang did that ever look bad.