I know full well that the TOS prohibits asking for updates about games in progress. I fully understand why it is, and I support that that’s the default rule. However, I was wondering if I could specifically allow people to nag me for updates for my games. I feel like I’d work a lot better and actually get stuff done that way.
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It doesn’t really make sense for the site to have a special leniency just for one individual. There’s also no guarantee you are gonna have individuals ask/often enough to motivate you as necessary to work on a project.
If it’s something you feel you need though. Why not make a discord for your games, where people who want status updates on any game your making, can just do it there.
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I mean it wouldn’t necessarily have to be specific to me. The rule could just be “No asking for updates unless the creator specifically allows it” or something. I don’t think there’ll be enough interest in my games to justify a whole discord server but even if every week or two someone was like “Yo how much time until the next update” or “Any progress updates?” that’d really help me
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I would not recommend doing this, because it creates a special burden on the moderators of the forum to track down whether there’s now an exception to the rule instead of just enforcing it equally.
@Zabi - if you want to try and coerce yourself to be productive, you might want to try making it so YOU update your threads or projects once per designated period (every week, every two weeks, or whatever) with what you’ve done. Set yourself a calendar reminder and post each time about “here’s what I’ve done.” The Patreon creators I follow who don’t have monthly releases do that every week or month to prove accountability to their patrons and talk about what they’ve added to the project which will be in the next major release.
If you know you’ve already set the expectation that you’re going to be posting in five days about what you’ve accomplished, and you haven’t accomplished much, it may provide you the outside motivation you’re looking for.
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That’s a pretty good idea, and I might well do it. I do still think that my original proposal would be possible though. Most creators wouldn’t explicitly allow it, so it could be presumed not to be ok apart from the rare exception. Plus if I did miss an update and nobody was like “where’s the update” it may take away my motivation to keep doing updates
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My main concern if it’s allowed is that it will encourage non-creators to start bugging creators to allow asking for updates, or create social pressure among creators to allow asking for updates. Which is bad, because for some creators that external pressure can create a sense of expectation/judgment that kills the desire to continue participating despite having dormant projects. It also creates extra burden on moderation to now review each creator being asked for “did they give permission” instead of just nuking the request on sight. Both false-positive errors and false-negatives would suck.
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Hmmm, that’s a good point. I don’t think the pressure on mods would be too high since they could just click up to the first post, see if it’s explicitly allowed and if not nuke it. However, I wouldn’t want to put pressure on creators to allow update requests. I guess I didn’t see it that way because no matter how much nagging I got on here I could just ignore it but I fully understand that many people aren’t like that. Thanks for sharing your reasons and consider me convinced.
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@TheWell-Being hits the nail on the head for the most part. While we understand where you are coming from (and also considered this already in the past) there are two major issues that prevent us from doing so.
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Additional Moderation Burden - While on paper it may sound like its not a huge additional burden there are logistical issues like how the dev notifies us it is ok to ask for updates, how will this be handled for projects, how will it be handled for curated projects that have entire sections, ect and is not as simple as saying put X at the top of your post when it comes down to it. Also, you have to keep in mind that we are a small team of mainly volunteers and that there is also a fair bit that happens in the background that is not visible to all users we have to deal with on a daily basis as well.
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User Confusion - The more important issue though is this can be more confusing to users since the rules would not look like they are being applied consistently. This would lead to users asking more update questions to devs who do not want it and further increase moderation burden as we would be challenged more often due to the view that we are not applying the rules consistently.
All in all we feel it is better to have a clear set of universally applied rules then allow for special exceptions.
That being said, we have been considering relaxing these rules mainly in the context of the main site as once we allow for games to be sold users have a right to ask when updates are being released.
We could be convinced to throw them out all together but we would have to see good evidence that the majority of devs would be on board with such a change before we do so.
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