Permaban

It's 2007. You're an unpaid moderator on a dying internet forum.

Inspired by Papers, Please, Permaban is a forum moderation game about interpreting rules, making judgment calls, and dealing with people who hate your decisions.

A user posts leaked game files and calls it "preservation." Someone writes slurs with numbers to dodge the filter. A donor picks a fight with three veterans. The spam bot might actually be a real person.

Every punishment needs a rule citation, and every tool has its own price. Moderate too hard and the community dies. Moderate too soft and the forum drowns in raids, scams and flame wars.

Nothing in a shift is on a clock. No timer, no post that rots if you leave it. The queue waits while you decide.

Between shifts, the people you banned come back to argue, the other mods ask for favours and remember your answer, and the admins rewrite the rulebook under you.

And the forum is only one window. The machine boots cold, POST beep and all, into a desktop you can actually use: a browser, a media player with a real playlist, a paint program, an archiver that will not stop asking you to buy it. Almost none of it is required. Almost all of it is hiding something: numbers the calculator was never meant to take, archives nobody asked you to open, a Flash game portal that one night becomes the only way back to work. The forum is the job. The desktop is where the game keeps its secrets.

Features

• Moderate forum posts
• Ban, warn, censor, investigate, thread lock, IP ban, or nuke
• Cite the correct rule for every punishment
• Every tool has its own price, and skipping straight to the ban button is not free
• No shift timer. The queue waits while you decide
• Answer ban appeals between shifts, with the original post as your only evidence
• A break room where the other mods ask for favours, and remember your answer
• Deal with contradictory moderation policies
• Track ban evaders and sockpuppets
• A spam filter that barely knows what spam is
• Keep your job: one bad shift and the admins notice
• Read DMs, forum drama, and user complaints
• A whole 2007 desktop to hide in: browser, media player, paint, archiver, messenger
• Endless mode with escalating chaos, and a break every twenty posts to spend what you earned
• Auto-save, so a shift survives you closing the game

Includes

• 700+ handmade forum posts
• 28 achievements
• A soundtrack you queue up yourself in a period media player
• Multiple board themes inspired by classic forums
• Playable desktop games, and one night where beating one is the job
• Recurring users and moderator drama
• Retro desktop sounds, boot screen included
• And way too many easter eggs...

Before you buy

This is a reading game, and it is all in English: 2007 forum English, typos and slang included. The answer is in the text, so skimming, or fighting the language, turns the whole thing into noise.

It is also a period piece. One specific corner of the internet, rendered from memory: if you were on a forum in 2007, half of this will feel like a room you used to live in. If you were not, it still works, but the game never leaves that year.

A campaign runs about 60-100 minutes. Endless mode is where the rest of the hours are. Nothing here is a forty hour game.

The posts include harassment, slurs written to dodge a word filter, and users being cruel to each other, because that is the material the job is made of.