Topic: Swapnote Spotpass Service Discontinued

On one side, this could herald the long overdue arrival of Miiverse on 3DS and perhaps even a unified account system (a guy can dream), but on the other, albeit less likely, side it could instead mean Nintendo shutting down the likes of Miiverse in the future.

^I don't think the Miiverse will be shut down because it involves no personal messaging, that is, it can be moderated and controlled something SwapNote couldn't.

I wonder what's a bigger headache for Nintendo, to try and be everyone's parents and monitor everything we do or to work on putting together a unified account system to eliminate the issue entirely. I can't imagine they're happy with either scenario, so I have to think that they're trying to get an account system in place, but just don't know how to go about doing it.

^actually account system doesn't make it much more safe anyone can make fake mails and lots of accounts to mess up....

So then they can just ban those accounts too whenever they do something offensive. At least then they wouldn't be punishing everyone.

This does seem a good idea on paper but It will just cause too much hassle for Nintendo.

This is just wayyy too weird... Back when Swapnote was amazing, I would turn on my 3DS and I would look forward to seeing that blue LED light flashing because that indicated that I recieved a note.
But now...its just weird. WAYYY too weird. No notes at all.

They can ban people from Miiverse. They don't need universal accounts for this.

Also, from what I gather from sites, inappropriate images of children were being distributed across these networks. If Nintendo did nothing about this (but were aware), they CAN be liable for damages and be pressed for charges. Since this was the only solution to stop this (granted it's most likely desperate), I don't blame Nintendo for doing it.

Imagine Nintendo working as an Internet Provider :
"Our email service is misused, we're shutting it down !
Sorry for all of our customers including companies, you'll have hard time to continue your business ! Good luck !"

It's nice to see someone using their head.

All of this because of people including their friend code in their signature !

im so pissed about this and my friends are upset about this news

OK, it looks to me that not everybody knows all the stuff that caused this to happen.
Right now, I'm set the whole record straight with all the information that I've compiled from my research.
For one thing, pedos were actually a surprisingly small cause as not many of them actually did anything that often. The 3 major things that caused this we're actually...

1. People who would draw porn and quite literally send it to everybody (hence the Friend Code issue)
2. Trolls, just trolls.
3. Kids drawing penises everywhere and sometimes sexting.

The funny thing is that cause #1 was the most vocal group to complain about this, when they specifically knew that what they were doing was wrong. Cause #3 is just gonna go ahead and keep doing what they were doing, just somewhere else. And cause #2 doesn't really care.

So overall, Nintendo made the right call. They need to fix Swapnote because plenty of people admit that it had issues that desperately needed to be fixed (i.e. moderation) and the fact that there really wasn't a way to know the age of the sender/recipient without actually knowing them beforehand.

@gurtifus: the friend codes were actually being posted on anonymous sites (i.e. 4chan, Reddit) just for the hell of it.

The one thing that bothered me about Swapnote is the parental controls totally block it so you can't even use your password to be able to use it when you want like for other things you enable parental controls for, so it's all or nothing, which means people who did set up parental controls on their systems that actually wanted to use swapnote had to leave parental controls off for Swapnote. Then when some kid picked up an adult's system that had parental controls set up on it, one of the few things they could access was Swapnote, and they'd send random scribbles or vulgar things to everyone. I just wish the 3DS had a proper password system that you had to enter every time you woke the system from sleep or powered it on, as it would be so much easier than finagling with the parental controls to try to secure your system from unauthorized use and then having to enter your password to launch every little streetpass DLC game or anything you might want to launch in one play session.

Oh well, there goes a semi-cool app from the list, and for a very stupid reason.

Unfortunately, Miiverse does nothng to solve the ability to message anything you want to your friends in private since it's moderated publicly. There still needs to be a system in place that separates the adults from the kids, so that adults can make their own decisions when it comes to sharing content between themselves. I mean, they already have parental controls, but it's obviously not full proof enough. A simple password system would probably fix that though.

Same here.

Whenever I wasn't playing a game on my 3DS, it was kind of cool to pull out the system from its casing and see the blue light on. I had some good friends there. And enjoyed their notes quite a lot.

RIP Swapnote.

I guess there is nothing we can do about it. Lets just sit on our hands and forget about it.

Not that it'll do anything, but I sent an email to Nintendo to let them know how disappointed I am with their decision. Maybe others should too. Why not just disable the photo sharing option? For the love of Mario, JUST GIVE US TEXT AND DRAWINGS. I for one will be boycotting Nintendo products until they can resolve my disappointment.

There are probably other ways to have dealt with this problem. For instance, they could have updated Swapote so that it would be text based and not handwritten so that it could be sent through filtering before being sent to look for bad words. As for images, they could have disabled this feature... Or kept it game images only.

There are quite a few possible ways of fixing fixing the issue. However, companies are liable for damages if they allow sexting or pornographic material to be sent through their services... On the other hand, literally every social media site has one or both of these things, only difference is that they can control and delete it. This just shows that Nintendo is far behind everybody else when it comes to the internet.

yup, but I bet most people complaining how Nintendo can't control this are probably the same that complain how social networks have no real privacy because it's "wrong to have you personal messages checked by someone else and stored in their database"
of course I'm not blaming everyone. the people that are to blame know who they are since not even I know exactly. no direct accusations will come from me this time.