Bring Back Misses

The **Bring Back Misses** movement (also known as **BBM**) was an early TF2Tags faction that acted as a short pseudo-strike/riot after the Mobile-Friendly Update's infamous removal of the Miss Button on the 16th of August 2015, acting as a means for taggers to try and convince Dr. Dos to, well, bring back misses to the site, by any means necessary. It was founded by Ulysses, Sensible Haircut, and Legownz. It disbanded shortly after misses returned, but was eventually revived in 2017 when the Miss Button was removed again.

## Founding

> "Look! It'll never get misses! It's the next "OH GOD WHAT IS THIS! I'M NOT DOING MY JOB VERY WELL" HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAH! SO FUNNY! HEY GUYS! LET'S POST KURT COBAIN JOKES! THEY'LL NEVER GET MISSES! LOLOLOLOLOL! JUST POST MORE PENIS JOKES AND I'LL BE RELK 2.0! I'M A COMEDY GENIUS! I SHOULD DO STAND UP! YEA THAT'S A GREAT IDEA! HARDY HAR HAR! NEXT IT'LL BE POINT AND CLICKS, MLP, LUCKSMANS, AND RACISM EVERYWHERE! BUT IT'S OK! WE CANT HURT ANYONES FEELINGS CAUSE WE'RE ALL WINNERS! YAAAAAAAA!"
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> ~ Legownz, making a sincere point amidst the rampant all-caps.
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Bring Back Misses was founded shortly after the Mobile-Friendly Update of August 16th, 2016, where among the many new features Dr. Dos instituted, the Miss Button and all misses ever given were erased from the site entirely. This was an extremely unpopular move that went on start a conversation between Ulysses and Sensible Haircut, where the latter complained that there was no reason not to spam submissions without misses, and to demonstrate this point he spammed a bunch of purposefully bad submissions, which ended in his 24-hour banning. Ulysses then attempted to go to Dr. Dos himself and attempted to change his mind, though this was unsuccessful as Dos waved off Sensible's criticism due to A Fucking Idiot not being deterred by misses, despite AFI being a special case of wanting to attain a specific goal of Negative Hale's Own. Undeterred, Ulysses went around the community and asked several members whether they agreed with Sensible, with everyone he asked agreeing. Ulysses then compiled his chat with Sensible, his chat with Dos, and the support from the taggers into a single set, as well as a practical solution to Dos's problems and criticisms of Dos. This shortly led to Legownz naming the Bring Back Misses hashtag, and the three soon formed an actual faction to protest the removal of misses. Bring Back Misses was short-lived, yet powerful, as their efforts would eventually go on to make Dos concede that he had made a mistake and return all the misses to the site just two days later. Following this, Bring Back Misses largely disbanded, but the substance of their arguments lived on in a few cases.

## Arguments

In both iterations of BBM, taggers argued the following for why misses should not be removed from TF2Tags:

* Without a downvote option, all submissions will be positive-rated, meaning no matter how bad a submission or tagger is, 'everyone is still a winner', even when "winning" is completely undeserved. This also opened the door for those who abuse VPNs to just critbomb themselves with no repercussions.
* The downvote option was a good way to receive feedback on whether certain jokes were viewed by the community as good, bad, or *verboten*. Without it, it would be impossible to distinguish jokes which were terrible from jokes that people simply didn't understand, as the latter would normally receive few or zero crits but rarely negative scores. Consequently, new taggers would not know what is considered acceptable and unacceptable in the tagger community, inevitably leading to negative tension and hatred. For example, without misses a mediocre tag (perhaps a reference people did not get) would be put on par with, say, a tag that spams racial slurs over and over. With misses, the former would still have 0 crits, but the latter would have a greatly negative score.
* Dos's reasons for removing misses are purely selfish and out of his own laziness. Dos's reasons for removing misses consisted of not wanting to deal with missbombers, wanting people to actually report rule-breaking tags rather than just missing them, and ending tags that were just complaints about receiving misses or tags deliberately trying to get misses. All of these issues could be solved, they argued, if Dos simply hired people to moderate the site for him, that way he could focus purely on development while the moderators took care of that stuff. In both instances, Dos said he would look into moderators, but it wasn't until the 2017 revival that he would finally add a single moderator to TF2Tags: Fancytag.
* The update directly obstructed the popular tagger A Fucking Idiot. AFI's clear-cut goal to reach a Negative Hale's Own was seemingly cut short, with the update completely wiping his negative points to 300 positive ones. Just before the update, AFI was Negative Rage-Inducing, meaning he had over 1500 negative points. Many taggers supported BBM specifically in defense of AFI. This argument was used much more during the first iteration of BBM, as by the time of the second BBM AFI had long since achieved his goal.

## Participants and Structure

### Original BBM

The vast majority of taggers during the Mobile Friendly Update were either a part of Bring Back Misses or supported their efforts. Due to their overwhelming numbers and the limited amount of things that could be done, the original BBM was split into three different branches.

#### Negotiators

The Negotiators were those who went out of their way to contact Dr. Dos and attempt to change his mind and restore Misses to the site.

* Ulysses - Branch head
* Relk\_Cehi

#### Awareness Spreaders

The Awareness Spreaders were those who spread BBM's arguments throughout the site in an attempt to win people over or display the evidence of their arguments. The majority of taggers fell into this branch.

* Legownz - Branch head
* Makin' Bacon
* A Fucking Idiot

#### Militants

The Militants were those so angered by the removal of misses they wanted to prove their point by showing just how much the lack of misses could be abused. Namely, spamming shitposts that could not be remanded for being bad. Militants were hit with 24-hour bans in response to their spamming.

* Sensible Haircut - Branch head.
* CP

## Trivia

* Members of the original BBM came up with different names to call the Mobile-Friendly Update, including "The Night of The Broken Miss Button" and The Taggergate Scandal".