Godvine
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Godvine.com is a primarily Protestant Christian website featuring both faith themed videos and myriad "cute" animal videos showing the Great Glory of Almighty God's Creation, or something. It also features prayer request and "Christian Answers" sections as well as an online Bible available in many different renditions ranging from King James to more contemporary translations.
Christian Answers[edit]
The website offers a "Christian Answers" section where users can post questions and other users can respond. A disturbingly large portion of these involve women asking if they should stay with their abusive husbands and other users telling them they should. Very few questions deal with deeper meanings and usually involve such things as "I just want to know if Christians can play video games." "How do u know if gods talking to u?" and "How do people feel about dancing?" or are simplistic questions that can be answered with a light skimming of related chapters.
Video section[edit]
The overwhelming majority of the videos posted are stolen from others for ad revenue and feature cute animal videos or people singing various spiritual or Christian songs, with Amazing Grace being the most common. The next runner up category is "inspiring" videos about people overcoming adversity, poverty, and at least one video about an aborted fetus who survived. There are only a few videos dealing directly with Christian teachings and very few dealing with Atheism or conversions. The few Atheism related videos are the place where any serious discussion or debate is allowed.
Each video functions similar to a YouTube video with comment an rankings from one to five stars. There is also a Facebook "like" function on each video. The comments themselves can be rated with a simple "thumbs up, thumbs down" system. Most comments end up being praises to Jebus and get almost entirely thumbs ups. Any comment even smelling of criticism can be expected to receive dozens of thumbs down and removal by a moderator. Bans for criticisms of the videos themselves, even without criticizing Christianity, are not uncommon.
Prayer requests[edit]
The prayer request section is relatively simple and seems to form the basis for the "Christian Answers" section. It consists of a button that allows a user to write out and post a prayer request, a list of requests and descriptions, and a button on each request that allows a user to "Pray for this Person." This adds to a count on the requests description. Users can also post comments on the prayers. The only visible difference between this section and the "Christian Answers" section is a lack of the "Pray for this Person" button and a different title.
Policies[edit]
They offer no warning for bans and rather than stating that a user is banned, they inform them that "Comments are down for maintenance." Any comment that has the slightest scent of debating Christianity will likely get you banned without warning. The site is relatively new and features are often broken or have issues, though they have fixed several. The only thing they have in the way of a terms and services agreement is a pair of lines on the account creation page that reads: "Note: GodVine is not a site to debate Christianity or belittle the Christian faith. Anyone doing so will be removed. Thank you." There is no way to contact a moderator short of emailing their unlisted email address (you have to find it on their Facebook page). They often fail to respond to emails, though it is not evident whether this is intentional or a symptom of an unknown staffing issue.
Their only other policies deal with mundane legal copyright and privacy information.