AllOut.org Community Manager, Tile Wolfe, told me yesterday that the site has had no contact with EA whatsoever during the course of the petition. "We are not arguing that Electronic Arts is a perfect company," Wolfe added, "but we know that today, on this issue, they are taking an important stand that should be celebrated and supported. Anti-gay groups are the dark-side here, and we’re glad to see so many consumers and citizens joining forces to pressure companies like EA and beyond to promote fair and balanced portrayals of gay, lesbian, bi and trans characters wherever they pop up." That has no relation to the game or to future changes proposed for it. We want to assure you that we've never worked or been in contact with EA. AllOut.org has shut down the campaign page temporarily, stating: 
 
 "AllOut.org has temporarily disabled the campaign page of its website due to a cyber attack by hackers. In short, the FFA's values certainly are drawn from a long time ago, but the reality they inhabit doesn't seem to be in this galaxy, or even in one far, far away. With that said, a lot of people are missing the real story here - the Family Research Council, a notorious anti-gay group, is telling this company, and many others, that gay people have no place in our games, in our media and in our lives. This isn't the first temper tantrum that supposedly pro-family groups have thrown over The Old Republic, just the most recent. Regarding the 3000 - 5000 spam comments, do these include earlier duplicate comments (such as identical comments left by two or three separate people from two or three different countries) or are you counting only the flood of obvious spam comments received toward the end of the fund-raising drive? They targeted EA for the visibility and inclusion that comes with LGBT characters and romances in games like Mass Effect 3 and The Old Republic. Follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Read my Forbes blog here.
– Electronic Arts is launching a brave new world of gay relationships in online role-playing games, and that's sparking an Internet armageddon. EA has been lambasted by religious right-wingers who fear the dangerous influences of an imagined transgendered "Darth VaPaula" in a Star Wars game, and have begun a boycott against the company. They're being slammed in turn by gay rights activists. Now AllOut.org has yanked its anti-boycott petition off the Web because the petition itself had become a target of an army of spambots apparently launched by anti-gay forces. Complicating matters are suspected PR stunts by EA itself to apparently inflate the war. But that's not the case now, an AllOut spokesman tells Forbes. “We are not arguing that Electronic Arts is a perfect company,” he explained. "But we know that today, on this issue, they are taking an important stand that should be supported. Anti-gay groups are the dark-side here. The Family Research Council is telling this company, and many others, that gay people have no place in our games, in our media and in our lives. That is unacceptable." Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3 will allow role-playing participants to not only choose what kind of character they'll play, but for the first time they'll also have an option to engage in a same sex romance.