Update 2: We've been watching the comments, of course, and have seen a better solution that for some reason didn't come to mind in our discussion. Some have mentioned we could put an editor's note on each of the past articles we wanted to remove previously. We think that this is a fantastic idea and we will do this moving forward. So, we are NOT removing all of the articles, but each of the remaining articles (which constitutes the vast majority of those affected) will have an editor's note explaining that this is not content that would meet our editorial standards today. Some articles will indeed still be removed due to the nature of their content, such as accusing people with little to no evidence. That is 100% against our ethical practices and that sort of content is not redeemable. The redirects will remain until the process is complete.

Update 3: All of the affected articles have been moved to an archive category and given an Editor's Note at the beginning of the article. The redirects have been removed. Of those affected, three of them will be unpublished. All three have factual inaccuracies or accusations that have far less than sufficient evidence to back them up. These three have been removed (archived):

We’ve covered Gaming and Technology since the site’s inception but have now come to the decision that we need to step back from Technology coverage for the time being. We could never keep up the staff interested in writing on the subject and having a severely lacking section of our site was not something we wanted to take up space. You may see the odd technology article or two, particularly if it pertains to gaming, otherwise, we're not focusing on it. We will be updating our menus and site navigation in the future to be more gaming focused. We’ll let you know when that takes place.

We are making some more changes to make TechRaptor more gaming focused. We will be removing some articles from the site.

If you were to compare TechRaptor late 2017 to late 2014, there would be more differences than similarities. Our knowledge, while still significantly lacking as we continue to learn, has increased by a considerable amount in areas like reporting, gaming, writing, editing, and everything else it takes to run a site like this. We’ve been more selective with staff and have our best group of writers working right now.

The recent events regarding the Steam Curator update obviously caught our attention. We were completely surprised and did not realize that so many still held us in such low regard for articles written about a certain subject years ago. We have moved on and had assumed that other parties had as well. Apparently, that is not the case.

For what it’s worth to those concerned, we’re not entirely happy with many articles we have written in the past. Particularly, there are many from late 2014 and early 2015 that are of such poor quality we will be removing them. If any of those articles had been submitted to our editorial process today, they would have not been published.

Frankly, many of the articles from a few years ago are embarrassing to be associated with. It’s not necessarily the values they espouse or beliefs they argue for but the quality of writing and choice of topic. We strayed from the path of just talking about games and have no intentions of doing it again. Nobody that has stuck with TechRaptor, or has been hired since, writes here for the intentions of arguing their political beliefs, and we have made a conscious effort to ensure that does not happen again.

For that reason and more we don’t think some articles reflect TechRaptor accurately. The quality is abysmal and something we’d prefer people not stumble on to get the wrong impression. Many of the articles we are removing associate us with something we, as an outlet, never really wanted to be a part of, except to report on it. Certain writers went beyond that, and they should never have been allowed to.

January 1st of 2015 I took over as Editor in Chief. Not only had I not had any sort of editing experience, outside of what I did in college, I’d never really had to manage people before. I was, however, willing to put in the work to learn and to try to create a process editorially that made sense. That process has changed more times than I can count as we continue to learn and grow.

With our prior Editor in Chief, there was no editorial process to be heard of. Articles not only did not receive critique or editing, they likely saw no review at all. New hires on the site during what was a turbulent time in gaming—to put it mildly—had a lot of leniency in their content. Aside from completely obvious topics or ideas that were vetoed, likely on title alone, there was no review, no arguments challenged, no critique given.

As I’ve said, that has completely changed. Then there was one sole editor to look at, critique, and schedule articles. Now we have a whole team, each of which I find incredibly valuable. We all regularly speak about articles and ask for one another’s opinion. The editorial review has improved immensely and will only grow the more we learn.

We’re not falling back on the excuse of “we didn’t know” or “give us a break we’re learning.” We welcome any and all criticism that is valuable to us. Those that want to just spew their dislike for us instead of showing us why they think we are in the wrong in some way aren’t all that useful to us. We’re glad to take in criticism to grow. We’ve set a high bar for ourselves and good criticism can help us reach and exceed it.

All I ask is to compare the TechRaptor then and the now. It’s telling to me that those who want to attack us can only bring up articles from years ago written by those no longer on staff.

Those concerned that TechRaptor has changed radically or has changed its core values, don’t worry. The same principles and guidelines we created for ourselves guide our every action as we think of ways to better inform our readership and grow TechRaptor in the future. We've only changed the higher standards we now hold our writers to and we aren't allowing them to use TechRaptor to preach their politics. The only time we'll get political is when we feel an issue is demonstrably false and damaging to the gaming community, like the video games cause violence nonsense. We’ll continue to call out bogus claims that harm the community, to expose and discuss harmful practices by the industry, and of course, we will continue to cover the games we love.

So to those that haven’t read TechRaptor in a while, please look around. If you weren’t a fan in the past, or just outright disliked us, I think you’ll see a great change, and those that were a part of our audience long ago will be pleasantly surprised as well. We’re here to talk about something we all deeply love and want to continue sharing it with you all as best we can.

And to close, if you think I have been avoiding saying “GamerGate,” I’m not, and I want to make something explicitly clear. TechRaptor has never supported GamerGate. We have never participated in GamerGate. We reported on, talked to, and were interested in the movement years ago when it began and for a decent while after it continued. We have had staff that were unequivocally supporters of GamerGate as well as involved in the various things the group has done. We have also had staff against GamerGate’s actions thinking they did more harm than good, as well as those that didn’t care, and those that saw it as a funny or sad joke. As an outlet, we have not and will not choose “sides.” We are not interested in being known as “that GamerGate site” or involving ourselves as either for or against it, whatever that may mean these days. We just want to continue to cover games as best we can and remove the political nonsense surrounding the outlet. We’ve moved on and grown into something we think is much better: celebrating gaming in all its forms.

Update 1: I wanted to add a bit of clarity here, as I think some people are misunderstanding what I meant in the above paragraph. TechRaptor has not and has no plans to remove all content related to GamerGate. This is about removing poorly written and poorly argued content that covered topics we really had no business talking about in the first place. It inserted us into a debate we did not want, but we are still proud of our GamerGate coverage and for offering a voice to those that otherwise would not have spoken at all during that time. There are still plenty of GamerGate related articles on the site that do meet our editorial standards.

If you have any questions at all, please ask them in the comments below. You can also send an email to [email protected] or [email protected] if you would like to speak that way.

Thanks for reading.