Let Us Know! Community Outreach Hub for New Rules/Site Changes

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With the New Rules having been introduced and not being met with outright rejection, the Projects Section being opened up again, and the Wiki settling into a stable/usable state, we are moving forward with that as the foundation to build off of moving forward.

I’m hoping to be able to be able to continue to get feedback, critiques, and suggestions from the community moving forwards to get the site to what the community needs it to be and to have a readily accessible means of publicly responding and updating folks on what’s happening and a way to give your voices a place to be heard and shared. I apologize for the somewhat unorganized means of delivering this information so far, the previous topics were my attempts at a quick stop gap measure to get things out in the open sooner while we figure out a better long term way to go about it. This thread being what we came up with.

With that out of the way, the primary focus for this topic is that we are currently operating under the New Rules and abandoning the old ones the site has previously been using. However since there are likely things we’ve missed, or that some rules might need fine tuning and the like, we are using what I personally refer to as a “Soft Implementation” for the rules. For the month of April, we will be operating under the current new rules but also will be listening to feedback to allow for the rules to be discussed and actively refined by the community and the site staff together. Then at the end of the month the hope is that enough time and discussion has happened for the rules to be “Good Enough” to set them as the ‘officially agreed upon rules’ by everyone and we can “Finalize” them.

The secondary goal of this topic is to hear feedback and discussion for non rule related things that can be done for the site. Since we are in the process of a massive restructuring of how the site works, it seems like a good opportunity to give the site an update to address some of the legacy aspects that might be outdated or need fine tuning, hear suggestions or feedback on potential alternate ways of handling certain features, finding odd edge cases for interactions, addressing potential things that might get overlooked by the staff for being too close to the system backend to notice properly, and things like that as some examples.

We are bound by technical limitations and volunteer manpower however, so do keep that in mind with things you bring up. I do not say that to stifle creativity or feedback, but simply to establish that we can only do so much. But with that said, even if an idea might not be feasible, it could potentially lead to inspiration for something else that might be, so please don’t be shy with sharing your thoughts.

And since I know a lot of people tend to be ‘lurkers’ who tend to prefer to avoid engaging with stuff, here’s an anonymous poll to get a bit of a ‘vibe check’ to help us get a simple gauge for where we’re at. This is mostly me just trying to get an initial feel for what we’re doing more so than any ‘official voting/popularity poll’ type nonsense.

  • This sounds like a good idea
  • This sounds like a bad idea
  • I don’t know/I don’t care
0 voters
3 Likes
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This is small potatoes, but I have a question about the merging of the Game Design Discussion and Dev Advice subforums

A few months back, I made a thread about a design problem and a list of games and how they addressed that problem. I asked about other approaches to this design problem, but in a broad way, not in a way looking for a specific solution. Game Design Discussion felt like the right place to make that thread

Dev Advice has a very StackOverflow design, which encourages a specific question + best answer format that would not fit the style of my thread. If I wanted to make another broad, free-flowing design discussion thread like my earlier one, will the new merged category still be the best place for it? If not, where should something like it go?

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I hope the penalty for new rules is lenient – it’s so big and comprehensive, I couldn’t remember it all. (◞‸◟)

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This discussion might get into some ‘squeamish’ territory for some folks as this is in regards to Pregnancy and not Weight Gain content, so fair warning for those who do not wish to interact with such things.

This is a bit of an odd one to post but it’s a topic that’s been brought up a couple times as of late that I figured should be shared/addressed regarding pregnancy content in games recently. In and of itself, pregnancy is not against the rules, we even mention it in them. It’s a lot of the things that pregnancy deals with that become problematic. Namely the legal issues of ‘Adult and/or Fetish Content involving minors’.

Our general consensus we’ve come to is that pregnancy is generally fine as long aspects involving minors is not involved. Main instances potentially being graphic birthing scenes and ‘Xray’ or similar type interactions where the fetus or child can be seen and/or showcased. These are obvious cases of where the 'fetish content’ is directly involved with the ‘presence of an underage character’ and since this is primarily a Weight Gain community and not a generalized NSFW one, and since this is a rather precarious legal stance to take to even think about allowing that sort of thing, we’re making the choice to have such content be in violation of our rules. A side note however is that ‘Xray’ type interactions that are somewhat common in other Adult media don’t violate that rule and would simply be classified as NSFW as appropriate, assuming no other rule is being violated in the process. It’s the underage aspect that causes the issue in this particular case.

With that clear, pregnancy is still allowed like I said. As long as births either, do not take place in the game, or if they do, are handled in some sort of ‘fade to black’ or other similarly ‘off screen’ way, then it should likely be in agreement with our rules.

A bit of an odd ‘gray area’ however, is how a game/narrative handles children after that point. Children are allowed to be in a project as a background character to provide a bit of set dressing for the world and such generally as long as they are not involved with fetish style content. But pregnancy being a fetish makes that a troublesome line to determine what counts as ‘fetish’ and what counts as ‘narrative set dressing’. Overall though, it’s a really fine line to walk having any children in any project.

We will ultimately deal with instances like this on a case by case basis but the general rule of thumb is to just not involve children with these sorts of things in projects to avoid any of these issues from needing to be resolved in the first place.

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I have a suggestion and also an issue report of sorts.

First, my suggestion:

I suggest that only the AI art/VA tags be blocked by default (leave the code out of it).

Why I think this is reasonable:

  • Nobody was really complaining about AI code (at least from what I saw, it was mostly complaints about art)
  • AI code (help me write this function/how do I make a function do this/ can you convert this scenario into renpy compatible format, etc…) is fundamentally different than AI art. I mean this in the sense that with AI, the art is the end result (it’s direct output of AI), whereas with code, you are using AI to help you implement your vision/make your software do what you want it to.
  • (this one is a doosie) It’s essentially impossible to prove that code is AI, so dishonest people will have an advantage over honest folks… If nobody really cares, why not remove this incentive structuret?

Ultimately whatever the site decides is fine, it’s not like this is my livelihood or anything. Just wanted to make my case, since I saw at least one other person express that their project had AI code and they were disappointed that they had to nerf its visibility.

Next, my issue/bug report.

I have tried opening the site in incognito (without logging in) and it appears that all of the AI tagged games are hidden for me. As I understand it, this is not supposed to be the case.

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Dropping my reply to the above thread here since we reached the 10 reply limit.

As it stands right now, a quick look at the topics posted in projects within the last month shows a clear viewership bias to non-ai posts.

This indicates to me that your scenario of people feeling cheated by “preferential treatment” is already looming.

Maybe most of the devs just aren’t aware of it, but it feels bad to know that I’m getting like 40% of my potential audience because of some UI quirk.

Don’t want to start AI war 2.0 over here… but it does seem that some good games are being made invisible to about 1/2 of their potential player base.