# Swapnote/Letterbox Shutdown!



## marshmallowXO (Nov 1, 2013)

Is anyone else a bit gutted that they shut down the spotpass capabilities for Swapnote/Letterbox?

I think it sucks that a few people sending inappropriate content has shut down something that had helped me get to know & speak to my friends.


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## Dr J (Nov 1, 2013)

Once again, the losers of the world ruin something for everyone else.


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## marshmallowXO (Nov 1, 2013)

Jinjiro said:


> Once again, the losers of the world ruin something for everyone else.



Definitely. I don't see why they didn't just work on a patch to put more privacy on there if needed.


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## Senor Mexicano (Nov 1, 2013)

it's so sad, now I can't send notes to my friend that lives in Nevada!


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## LeAckerman (Nov 1, 2013)

I heard Flipnote service shutdown as well.  I loved getting Swapnotes


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## marshmallowXO (Nov 1, 2013)

I loved the fact that I could communicate with people from literally everywhere without having to add them on facebook or whatever. 
Hopefully they reinstate it but for the time being I'm going to sulk, haha.


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## Stevey Queen (Nov 1, 2013)

Nintendo should grow up and realize we can say whatever we want. I didn't use it that much but it was fun to send random funny things to people occasionally.


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## Nymeri (Nov 1, 2013)

I think it's really sad. I had a lot of fun with it


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## Zeiro (Nov 1, 2013)

What? Awh. That sucks. I enjoyed sharing drawings and pictures with my friends that live far away.


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## chillv (Nov 1, 2013)

I never knew anyone who had a 3DS so I never used this service. Thus, I am not so bummed about it as you guys are. However, I do have to say that I will miss the notes that Nintendo sent out to you. Also, I now have developed an even stronger dislike for trolls because of this. Thanks guys, you ruined a wonderful service on 3DS.


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## Heir (Nov 2, 2013)

I never really used SwapNote but...I did have a friend who was doing a 150 day pokemon challenge (granted he started it in 2011 and still hasn't finished), so I enjoyed seeing his pokemon drawings every now and then. :<

Oh well... :<


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## radical6 (Nov 2, 2013)

now people wont send me 20 notes everyday of their screenshots

but i did enjoy using it with my friends. we sent the best stuff to each other tbh. i never included a photo in my notes so...and who the hell sends nudes with a 3ds. like ur in the bathroom with ur 3ds trying to take a nude im laughing so hard imaging it bye

but rip swapnote thanks u sick freaks........
i love u nikki i ll never forget you...


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## Midoriya (Nov 2, 2013)

tsundere said:


> now people wont send me 20 notes everyday of their screenshots
> 
> but i did enjoy using it with my friends. we sent the best stuff to each other tbh. i never included a photo in my notes so...and who the hell sends nudes with a 3ds. like ur in the bathroom with ur 3ds trying to take a nude im laughing so hard imaging it bye
> 
> but rip swapnote thanks u sick freaks




I never really used it, but I'm sad to see it go.  I don't understand why someone would do that with their 3DS.  It's just gross and un-called for.


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## marshmallowXO (Nov 2, 2013)

I'm just gonna miss having a way of communicating with people to be honest.


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## JimmyJacobAC (Nov 2, 2013)

Honestly, Nintendo needs to re-vamp Swapnote and make it part of the 3DS's operating system, just like the Internet browser. I want to send messages to friends while in-game and I don't want to wait the ridiculous load times. I'd like more than 5 seconds of audio, though. I did love playing piano and sending those audio clips to friends.


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## Micah (Nov 3, 2013)

Why bother even shutting this down? I mean, people are gonna do what they want regardless of the service. Snapchat, anyone?


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## NanoStar (Nov 3, 2013)

Swapnote was the only way I could talk to faraway friends other then using AC. Nintendo needs to man up and figure out an alternative solution to this problem rather then just shuting the whole service down.


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## oath2order (Nov 3, 2013)

JimmyJacobAC said:


> Honestly, Nintendo needs to re-vamp Swapnote and make it part of the 3DS's operating system, just like the Internet browser. I want to send messages to friends while in-game and I don't want to wait the ridiculous load times. I'd like more than 5 seconds of audio, though. I did love playing piano and sending those audio clips to friends.



That would be awesome if they did that.

They need to stop being the moral guardians of the gaming world it's ridiculous.


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## Justin (Nov 3, 2013)

News headlines tomorrow:

Iwata turns on his Wii U for the first time since December, horrified when he discovers the Internet Browser exists and shuts it down worldwide


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## coolycatty123 (Nov 3, 2013)

^
This.

There's lots of inappropriate things on the internet, and although Nintendo is a family friendly company and I can understand their concern, I do not think it is acceptable. I doubt that children would be signing onto websites and forums to send their noodles to strangers. Nintendo wasn't considering the people who enjoyed the application and used it correctly. It's just not fair. And yeah, you're bound to see one or two people post things like this, but I'm sure there's millions of people who used it for it's proper function. Come on, guys, you can see it on the internet browser on your 3DS too, so why not shut that down? 

These people sending their bits and bobs on a message ruined it for everyone.

Nintendo didn't ban the photo service though, no... no way... They had to shut down the whole of it. They could of just made it so you don't send photos or made a function that could censor it.
Come on, nintendo. I know it's the nude sender's stupidity, but it's your fault too for shutting EVERYTHING off.


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## kittenrobotarmy (Nov 3, 2013)

I never used SN so I'm not bummed out, but Nintendo shouldn't have shut down the whole service.


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## Officer Berri (Nov 3, 2013)

Honestly after reading the notification about it, it's giving me the impression that graphic or sexual pictures were being sent over the program. Sure, kids are probably exposed to that kind of thing all the time, but it was also probably some minors doing the sending. Which, regardless of intent, having sexual images of minors can get you into trouble as a sex offender. (At least that's what the media led me to believe the last time I heard anything about it.)

And since parents don't seem to ever want to make their kids responsible for their actions, if they were to find such content on their children's video game system, you know they'd raise hell about it and bombard Nintendo with hate mail and threats of suing them/boycotting all their stuff. Not to mention the media hellfire that would come up because Nintendo, with it's squeaky clean child-friendly image, has a program that can be used to send graphic and mature content to minors. It's always the fault of the program designers, never the fault of the people abusing it, of course. 9_9

Nintendo pretty much HAD to shut it down. Because the only other solution I could think of to prevent the problems they had would have been a system where every single picture submitted to them would have to go through heavy screening to make sure it wasn't inappropriate, and can you imagine how annoying that would be? Send picture, wait for picture to get through the que in the screening process, much later, picture is sent! Or returned to you and telling you the picture you sent was too graphic and that if you do it again your usage of the feature would be revoked. That sounds pretty obnoxious to me.

I'm not defending the fact that Nintendo shut it down because they couldn't find a reasonable solution. I'm defending Nintendo's feelings that they had no choice BUT to shut it down because they couldn't find a reasonable solution. If they hadn't shut it down, they risked their business and image for allowing the behavior to continue. Because parents can't do their job and monitor what their kids do with their video game devices, and when they suddenly discover little Jimmy and Sarah have inappropriate content sent to them or sent out to others, it must be the fault of Nintendo, it couldn't be their fault for not keeping an eye on their precious, infallible angles. And most certainly it couldn't be their little angels' faults!


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## Stalfos (Nov 3, 2013)

You will be missed Letterbox/Swapnote. 

But I?m sure Nintendo is working on a solution. At least i hope they are.


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## BellGreen (Nov 3, 2013)

Didn't use it so much because I couldn't really send notes back then due to SpotPass but it was fun just drawing


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## kittenrobotarmy (Nov 3, 2013)

They could've just taken away the function to add pictures, which would be a lot easier than not having the service at all.


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## Mary (Nov 3, 2013)

My swap note isn't working. I always "receive notes that have already been recieved" and am told "this note has been deleted."


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## Unidentified Floor Orange (Nov 3, 2013)

oath2order said:


> They need to stop being the moral guardians of the gaming world it's ridiculous.


They aren't trying to be moral guardians of gaming. They are trying to protect their brand of kid and family-friendly gaming. 

That said, I don't think they handled it as well as they could have. I'd just have Swapnote be something that, like the Internet Browser, can be blocked by Parental Controls for any parents who are worried that their children might give out personal info or be exposed to inappropriate pictures.


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## taylalatbh (Nov 3, 2013)

Nintendo clearly need to work on their parental controls. Or the parents do. No need to make the rest of us suffer. It's such an innocent piece of software.


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## Ichigo Senpai (Nov 3, 2013)

I think it's a shame. I would love receiving cute swapnotes from a friend in France and a friend in Japan! Unfortunately, i have no other means to contact them by.


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## marshmallowXO (Nov 3, 2013)

taylalatbh said:


> Nintendo clearly need to work on their parental controls. Or the parents do. No need to make the rest of us suffer. It's such an innocent piece of software.



Was there not a parental privacy setting to stop kids using swap note/letterbox? :/ 

Ah well. Seems we won't be having it for a while, if not indefinitely.


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## Midoriya (Nov 3, 2013)

Officer Berri said:


> Honestly after reading the notification about it, it's giving me the impression that graphic or sexual pictures were being sent over the program. Sure, kids are probably exposed to that kind of thing all the time, but it was also probably some minors doing the sending. Which, regardless of intent, having sexual images of minors can get you into trouble as a sex offender. (At least that's what the media led me to believe the last time I heard anything about it.)
> 
> And since parents don't seem to ever want to make their kids responsible for their actions, if they were to find such content on their children's video game system, you know they'd raise hell about it and bombard Nintendo with hate mail and threats of suing them/boycotting all their stuff. Not to mention the media hellfire that would come up because Nintendo, with it's squeaky clean child-friendly image, has a program that can be used to send graphic and mature content to minors. It's always the fault of the program designers, never the fault of the people abusing it, of course. 9_9
> 
> ...





While I think your point is clear, I would like to point a couple things out:


1. Never just agree with the media unless you have another source that confirms it.  Sometimes the 'media' doesn't tell the whole truth about something, which can change people who watches its' thinking.

2. Nintendo did not, in fact, have to shut it down.  They could have easily taken off the ability to send pictures, and kept the ability to send words and stuff.  If I've heard this correctly, the people were sending inappropriate graphics, not inappropriate messages.

3. The problem I have when people blame one side of it is that they never look at the whole side of the coin.  Could it be the people's fault who abused it?  Yes.  But more importantly did you know, for example, that kids go online to get away from their parents?  While this may give a break to the kids, and shouldn't seem to have anything wrong with, this causes problems and, imo, parents need to spend more time with their kids rather than let them go online and do whatever they want.  I'm not saying exchanging notes with friends is bad, I do it all the time in fact.  I'm just saying it's both the responsibility of Nintendo, the parent, and the person exchanging notes to make sure everything is in order.

4. Here's an example if my point is kind of confusing to you: A large company, like Chocobars (not an actual company), has a manager office (the parents being the managers) somewhere nearby.  A new store is opened far away from the manager, and employees (kids) are hired there.  Overtime the business does well, but since the new store is so far away from the nearest manager office a couple employees decide to goof off and not do their work.  The manager office can't control this, and it takes them awhile to go to the store and confront the problem in person.  Since the whole company, not the manager offices, or the new store, thinks this is a bad display of their service, instead of just firing the employees that goofed off, they don't want to break the bad news and shut the whole company down.  The product is that this was not the best decision they could have made.

I think a lot of what you said has sense to a point, but I just wanted to share my views as well.


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## CandyClouds (Nov 3, 2013)

I'm pretty sad about it. I had just started using it a week before they shut it down  I was using it to exchange messages with my friends and my boyfriend back home since I'm staying in another country for nine months. It was nice to see a little drawing waiting for me to remind me of home or a lovely note to cheer me up if I was feeling down. Gutted it's gone.


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## Alcor (Nov 3, 2013)

Officer Berri said:


> And since parents don't seem to ever want to make their kids responsible for their actions, if they were to find such content on their children's video game system, you know they'd raise hell about it and bombard Nintendo with hate mail and threats of suing them/boycotting all their stuff. Not to mention the media hellfire that would come up because Nintendo, with it's squeaky clean child-friendly image, has a program that can be used to send graphic and mature content to minors. It's always the fault of the program designers, never the fault of the people abusing it, of course. 9_9


It's usually the most vocal groups who gets their points across, though they might not be always right. Instead of talking amongst ourselves of the disgusting poor decision Nintendo made to discontinue the service, we should contact Nintendo themselves.



> Nintendo pretty much HAD to shut it down. Because the only other solution I could think...


Let me stop you there. The moment they, as a company, decide they should play big brother, is the moment they have lost. They can't possibility 'child-proof' a device or game that provides any sort of social interaction. What is stopping someone from making a lewd picture using the patterns in ACNL? What is stopping someone from harassing people with in-game chat? Or inappropriate pokemon names? What Nintendo can do instead is offer the option to child-proof by using parental controls, which is already there.



> I'm not defending the fact that Nintendo shut it down because they couldn't find a reasonable solution. I'm defending Nintendo's feelings that they had no choice BUT to shut it down because they couldn't find a reasonable solution. If they hadn't shut it down, they risked their business and image for allowing the behavior to continue. Because parents can't do their job and monitor what their kids do with their video game devices, and when they suddenly discover little Jimmy and Sarah have inappropriate content sent to them or sent out to others, it must be the fault of Nintendo, it couldn't be their fault for not keeping an eye on their precious, infallible angles. And most certainly it couldn't be their little angels' faults!


It's no doubt they are trying to appease a certain group of people who purchase their product and games. Though if they are making more people upset by blocking such content, only then would they reconsider their decision. As of now I don't think there has been any update on this shutdown.

Only fault that could have been placed on Nintendo, would have been parental controls. I'm not sure how the parental controls affected SwapNotes if at all, but there is already prevention to lock internet browser, software ratings, online interactions, sharing images/audio/video/long text data, etc.

Again, we should voice our disapproval of such actions towards Nintendo.
Nintendo Consumer Webform Link


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## Croconaw (Nov 3, 2013)

It doesn't bother me. I don't like swapnote.


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## Stevey Queen (Nov 6, 2013)

Disgusting.

At the same time, they should bring swapnote back. It's not the applications fault, it's certain users.

Here's a link since the pic is too small

http://gonintendo.com/?mode=viewstory&id=216348


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## oath2order (Nov 6, 2013)

> What's more likely at play here is Nintendo's conservatism, focus on children at the expense of everyone else, and fear.



I like this quote.


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## 3DSfan134 (Nov 6, 2013)

LoveMcQueen said:


> View attachment 16798
> 
> Disgusting.
> 
> ...


Also,here's the full article about that.
http://kotaku.com/child-predators-were-using-nintendos-swapnote-service-1459304126/@lukeplunkett


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## keybug55 (Nov 7, 2013)

3DSfan134 said:


> Also,here's the full article about that.
> http://kotaku.com/child-predators-were-using-nintendos-swapnote-service-1459304126/@lukeplunkett



All of that is truly disgusting ._. do you think they would ever bring it back?

If it was because of people sending crudely drawn...ermm..._things_, that was happening since the first DS where people would draw those _things_ back and fourth to each other using picto-chat. I don't have a Wii-U, but I'm pretty sure they're still doing that.


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## Touko (Nov 7, 2013)

I stopped using it since I got so many spams of letters each day (making me lazier and lazier to read it).
But I really enjoyed some artist's drawings since they kind of inspired me to draw too ~

I hope it'll one day come back x)


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## marshmallowXO (Nov 7, 2013)

keybug55 said:


> All of that is truly disgusting ._. do you think they would ever bring it back?
> 
> If it was because of people sending crudely drawn...ermm..._things_, that was happening since the first DS where people would draw those _things_ back and fourth to each other using picto-chat. I don't have a Wii-U, but I'm pretty sure they're still doing that.



It is absolutely disgusting but I'm sure in some way they'll launch a different version of it.


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## LeAckerman (Nov 7, 2013)

My mouth just dropped when I read that article.. I have no words.. Like that's, ew..  o.o


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## MDofDarkheart (Nov 9, 2013)

I had all my friends on my 3DS chatting with me via Swapnote. *sighs* Why must a few idiots ruin everything for the rest of us?


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## petrichr (Nov 9, 2013)

I hadn't had the chance to use it yet, but I was looking forward to it.


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## MDofDarkheart (Nov 9, 2013)

Well thanks to a few perverts... now no one can ever use it again.


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## WeiMoote (Nov 9, 2013)

Should we just delete Swapnote from our libraries?


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## SecondSider (Nov 9, 2013)

My reaction to this:


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## locker (Nov 10, 2013)

I used swapnote a lot to exchange photos with people around the country,it was neat to see places in 3d that I cant see,since the shut it down I really haven't used my 3ds other than for animal crossing :|


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## Swiftstream (Nov 10, 2013)

I'm still really angry and sad!
My friends would always send me new stationary and new pics of their villagers and town.
Now some pervs have ruined this awesome messaging system for everybody!!!
:'( R. I. P. 
Swap note <\3


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