I've done it plenty of times, have had it acted upon maybe one time. Funny thing is, I don't think I've ever doctored one, people are just extremely suspicious of what I claim is exact wording.

Yeah, I do that often, not in every game, but in most. Usually it gets people to react. And I've never taken the time to doctor one. Now that you mention it though.....

This one time, I was France, and Russia and I made an agreement to swap a center in Germany. The situation was such that he would get my center first instead of simultaneously, and it happened with my blessing.

But I realized that it looked like a stab, and since the game was headed to a three-way draw (only other player was Italy), I figured I would try to paint it as a stab.

So I did -- Russia c/pes the message, I blast it as being a terrible editing job. Luckily, obi was Italy, and agreed that it wasn't elegantly done and attacked Russia. Game ended in a French solo, 18-16 centers.

Haha, sounds like it's better to accuse something of being edited than actually edit it.

depending on how good you doctor it will be very convincing. when i was very new to the site i played an annonymous press game on ancient med where i was greece and allied with rome. we kept up the alliance beautifully and took out persia and carthage in the first 5 years then egypt was the only one left and saw we were going to squish him between us.

he doctored a message to both of us that looked almost identical to an actual message that would be copy pasted and it ended up causing us to form stalemate lines between his units and our own and then stab each other simultaniously. after 2 or 3 years of trading sc's back and forth we ended up drawing and egypt admitted to making the fake messages to save his ass...brilliantly done but it wouldnt have worked if i wasnt new when it happened.

i cant stand when someone fakes a pasted message, its a pet peeve of mine, it will launch me into a suicide on the person that did it

Use PGP ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Good_Privacy

You could always write in an extremely different "voice" to each person, so that any message copy+pasted looks bizarre to anyone else. I have nothing against faked messages. I feel it's legitimate. One time a while back we set up a black press game (think open press only you don't know which country is saying what) and I'd say the majority of messages were faked.

i would be interested in trying a black press game like that, sounds like it would be pretty entertaining.

That does sound fun, haha, the first thing that comes to mind is annoying spam in the "voice" of another player to try and get people to turn on them out of sheer annoyance.

I also played in that black press game. Disappointingly the game resulted in a kind of gunboat. Nobody trusted all the messages. So everybody slowly started ignoring them. But at the beginning it was fun.

yes. i agree

Well someone had a good code worked out, so you could actually authenticate his messages, until enough time progressed that his code became understandable.

If anyone else is interested in a Black Press Game, the way we did it was:
1) Set up a gunboat anonymous game
2) Set up a blog or (what might be easier) a twitter account
3) Give everyone the password

Actually, if anyone wants to, I'd be up for setting up another black press game, and I'm gonna go make a thread right now.

Is that the right terminology? I thought that it was called "grey press"