Note - Request was declined due to potential legal issues in identifying pirates. Piracy is not allowed to be directly shared on this website.
Currently, the guidelines simply stops people from posting other people’s content on this website. However, the guidelines do nothing to deter or punish users who can be confirmed as attempting to steal content from developers.
The current reason stated for not punishing confirmed pirates on this website is stated from the moderator team as:
While I understand the frustrations with pirating and the hot topic issue it is, we handle situations that fall within our community guidelines and take place within our site. We cannot police any users for activities they do outside of our website in their free time.
Ultimately what this leads to is known pirates utilizing this website to find more content to attempt to steal from developers.
A simple update to this would simply be changing the Community Guidelines to include a Zero Tolerance Policy Against Piracy - and any confirmed individuals within Weight Gaming who have proven to take action against a developer in the terms of piracy will be removed from this forum in order to protect the content of other developers and honor those who actively and lawfully support the developers (the community).
The level of proof required prior to action being taken against a user can even be quite high! But at the moment, there is no support provided to deter pirates from rampaging through these forums, finding new games to pirate. This website has taken a hands-off approach to deterring piracy.
Let’s right the wrongs of the past - let the honorable community, developers, and staff at Weight Gaming stand together against piracy not simply in voice but in action.
I think that this idea doesn’t make sense. Why? Because being a known pirate is not a thing.
There are things that could be done though. Things that happen entirely within the bounds and control of this forum. People constantly come to this forum to get troubleshooting feedback for bugs found in out of date pirate copies of games they got. Wasting the developer’s patience and time and spamming the forums with pointless posts.
Those posts should probably be changed to be against the rules 100%. Somehow right now they’re not.
I would disagree with you about being a known pirate is not a thing. I keep records as proof of the people attempting to access pirated copies of my visual novel (which provides me with their information). I’ve banned over 275 people (40 of which were former-patrons) for attempting to access links which only appear on pirate sharing websites & on scraper websites. Those folks are known pirates.
Even when those people have come here to the forums before utilizing the same account names on both, there is currently no repercussion for those users. Instead, they freely continue to engage in the forum and presumably find new content here that they then target.
If staff and developers could work together to clean those types of users from this website it would build upon the trust in this community.
We thank you for your feedback but we will have to decline your request.
What you are requesting is simply not feasible for us to do and the burden of proof that would be required for us to confirm the user is tied to a know pirate account would be absurdly high and may require questionable means to obtain in some if not most cases. Not to mention I feel there may be some legal issues there that I would rather not risk touching (in terms of identifying known pirates)
If you see any content being posted on our site that violates your IP you are welcome contact us directly and we will do everything in our power to rectify the issue.