Hey folks, as someone who pretty frequently scrolls though the Projects board I have to say it’s kind of a forking mess and I really think it needs a slightly heavier hand when it comes to moderation.
The most important in my humble onion is a version number and last-updated timestamp (for the project itself, not the topic) in the topic title, so it’s easy to identify at a glance if there’s a new version of something. Most serious projects do this already and it’s not a big ask.
There’s already a “project discussion” board for more open-ended topics and I feel there should be a degree of responsibility and prestige that comes with posting in Projects. A middle ground of sorts between the curated projects and the more open realm of general discussion boards.
My proposal for a mandatory policy would be this:
The topic title contains the project’s name and/or a curt description.
The topic title contains a timestamp of the last time it was updated, ideally with some kind of version number.
The project is playable.
The first post of the topic contains a link to the latest version of the project.
I feel like this wouldn’t be too much of a moderation workload as these 4 rules can be quickly assessed by reading the topic title and the first post. Anything that doesn’t meet these mandates could simply be moved to Project Discussion or whatever is deemed an suitable holding space.
I hate to be a killjoy but I feel that Projects in its current state is bit of a slog to browse that ends up burying a lot of the interesting stuff that is happening there.
Most of these changes would make browsing the projects a lot easier, but there’s a couple of issues. Firstly, I don’t agree with the project needing to be playable. Posting in the other categories invariably leads to significantly less views so if you’re working on a game and want to generate interest while you share development updates, Projects really is the best place for that, especially since you’re intending to release the game in the future anyways. Maybe there could be a Not Yet Released in the title as a compromise.
Secondly, that is a ton of admin work. Currently there are 1,050 topics in Projects, that would likely take weeks to get through and properly re-title. Sure, you could argue that the sooner a change is made the easier it is, but that’s still loads of work for the admins to retroactively go through.
Ya, you make some fair points and the project board is quite a bit of a mess when it comes to trying to search for projects. The root of the issue though has always been wrong tool for the wrong job.The projects category is supposed to be mainly for discussion but since there is no better alternative atm it tends to be co-opted for sharing/distributing games as well.
Back to your suggestion though the main issue we would have with implementing it is enforcement. We have very limited moderation/admin resources and it would be very difficult to enforce these rules on devs. We might be able to enforce it for the first post but it would be very difficult for us to keep tabs on all the projects to make sure they stay updated.
While it could be argued its the devs responsibility to keep them updated after the initial post, if only say 10% of the projects do this (which some do currently do) most users will just ignore it since it becomes very likely the information in the title is stale and thus not useful.
We do have tags to try to help users identify the state games are in but as with the above concerns it depends on devs to use them and use them properly and it is unfortunately not feasible for us to keep track of every single project to ensure the tags are being used correctly. If you look under our tags we have tags for wip, alpha, beta, and full but only a total of 17 projects have made use of these.
Another concern would be UX and title limits. Titles can only be 255 characters max and (especially on mobile) trying to add that much information into the title would quickly become difficult to read. Also, there is no standard versioning system. While we try to encourage using semantic versioning there are no rules on how a dev chooses to version their game (or any other software end of the day).
I think there is a good argument that we should add a not-yet-released tag to our tags, but unfortunately end of the day I don’t think this would be enough to address your concerns just due to their lack of use.
Now, I know I have been a bit of a downer here, but we are trying to address the issue in other ways.
I am currently working with @Krodmandoon on our wiki and we are hoping to open it up to the community soon™. Wiki pages could be ideal for this as devs can update them if they feel like it but the community themselves can contribute with keeping them up to date.
The other option is the “main site” that I have been working on for quite some time. Its just been very slow going since I have to balance it with my day job that helps pay the bills, but once I get it finished it will address most of your concerns.
I agree with all of these except that the projects need to be playable. I believe this is not necessary but should be apparent in the title.
Really it should just be mandatory for a version/date in the title and the first post should have the most recent link.
One way that you can probably work with this, and not ruffle too many feathers.
1 - Remove the ability to make a new thread in the Projects board
2 - Make a separate board category called “Project proposals”, and then have a mod designated for it to just put the ones that fit the requirements into the actual projects board
3 - ???
4 - Profit
I’m not sure I agree with half of this and the other half that i do agree with would be a lot of work for moderators.
Honestly a lot of the games on here that have some of the issues stated, may not have been shared or posted at all if you made the probably relatively new aurthor/dev deal with versioning, tags, title, and overall professional project management being suggested. When they did this a hobby, and were just trying to share something cool. If all of the projects were paid games, i probably would expect this level of polish being suggesting, however most titles in the paid group already posted also happen to not be the issue here, outside of nitpicks for how each of us may want to see this polish manifested.
I think a simpler first step may be having some detailed guidance for where and how to post what, when you join the forum(or maybe a pinned post about this type of guidance), in an effort to improve post quality, such that less moderation may be needed in the first place. Notice i did not call it a rule, and if someone doesn’t follow guidance i don’t expect moderators to do anything, and i dont think posters should be pressured into having to deal with this, necessarily. My observation is that many projects start in the op’s problem category and migrate over time as the author/dev learns and improves, and as the project gains traction.
My bottom line is I personally don’t wanna deter seeing projects from all different levels of experience and expertise by putting stringent requirements on posting.
I mean I feel like you would handle this like any policy transition. You announce “On this date, this policy takes effect.” Legacy posts have X months to conform, after which they will be subject to moderation. Which again, I don’t think has to be any harsher than just moving them elsewhere.
The bulk of the workload is on the poster, which makes sense, because we aren’t asking for much and they are way more of them than moderators. All they do is check compliance for new posts, with the exception of the one-time transition.
I also don’t think this has to be all or nothing, even if moderation is handled in a “lazy” way (for example, by basically just ignoring any topic that hasn’t updated for a year or two) it would still be a massive improvement.
If that’s the case I struggle to understand the need for Project Discussion and Ideas board then. It’s existence feels like a pretty straightforward acknowledgement that Projects is best used for people showing off their cool shit.
Even if this wasn’t the original intent I feel that’s clearly what it does best.
This is exactly what I argue. I’m not asking for any moderation effort after that initial post because I’m pretty confident just that will cut out the most egregious noise.
Having that timestamp in the title itself is a big loud reminder to keep it up to date, and even if they fail to do so, that’s their problem at that point. This policy is specifically for benefiting the people who actually put in the (extremely minor) effort.
Personally I think the problem is that this is a misuse of tags. Tags (at least from the perspective of a reader) are useful for discovery. As in, let’s see what new VN’s are out. No one is looking for a game in alpha/beta etc. It’s useful information to have sure, but too abtract to be useful on it’s own.
Anything more than “in development” or “final release” is useless as a tag IMO.
A date (01-01-2024) adds 10 characters if you are being complete about it. A concise name/description is already what the topic title should be, so really all my policy is adding to it is a date and optionally a version number. I’m not looking to have the moderators babysit the success of someone’s project, just make the list vaguely consistent.
Happy to see a semantic versions ment. but yeah that’s a fools errand. It’s not really important though cause we aren’t developing libraries or API’s here. Yes it would be nice to know by looking at a version number if my saves would break but I’ve come to peace with version numbers just kind of being too complicated/abstract of a concept for most people to waste their time on.
“Version numbers don’t mean anything” is out of scope for this discussion IMO.
This is why I worded the policy (or at least tried to, could use clarity) to put an emphasis on a date over a version number, cause a date is way more intuitive and if you are posting here you probably understand the Gregorian calendar.
That’d be great, can’t wait to see what comes out of this. Though I have to say the wiki format seems even more ill-suited than a forum topic for what I’m talking about here.
Regardless of intent, the way Projects is predominantly used (and should be it’s sole function in my opinion) is for people to show off their cool shit, keep people updated on it’s development, and answer questions/report bugs/otherwise discuss said project.
The reason I think that Projects should be for actually playable projects is that anyone can have an idea. And there is already a board that literally has “Ideas” in the title. Actually making something? That’s hard. That’s a lot of work! If you are discouraged by putting a date in a topic title you aren’t going to get very far with game development.
To me, it feels silly to pad out all the people who have actually built something with “I have a cool idea” posts. Especially, again, because there is already a board dedicated to this. It feels low-key insulting to people who have put dozens of hours into making something.
I don’t want to make Projects some kind of elitist club, just a board that has an actual purpose.
The main things I’m suggesting is a date in the topic title and that projects actually be projects. That’s professional project management in the same way not throwing your garbage on the ground is professional waste management.
It’s a common courtsey to the people you are sharing the space with.
I really feel anyone posting on a forum isn’t going to struggle too much with the concept of a date. That’s not going to filter anyone who’s put in the effort of actually making something.
In an ideal world having a formal approval process like this would definitely lead to a better organized board, but this would absolutely be a heavier moderator workload IMO which is why I suggested something more open ended.
With the above system, literally nothing can get created without moderator approval, and I don’t think this needs that heavy of a hand.
My proposal is quite simple and I suspect most people would follow willingly without much prodding once the precedent for actually moderating the Projects board is set.
I would argue that the majority of projects are likely dead or finished. It’s also very very unlikely that everyone will read the announcement, even if sent by email. As someone with experience in managing a social media community, I can personally confirm that only around 2% of total accounts (vast majority being dead) actually read the announcements, though it is closer to 25% for occasional posters and 75% for people who regularly participate in the community.
Realistically, let’s say around 65% of the projects are dead or from dead accounts, which is already likely less than the real number. Then let’s be rather generous once again and say 50% read the announcement. Assuming there are 1,050 topics still, that is already 866 topics left to either be deleted (“they will be subject to moderation”) or manually re-titled by moderators, both of which are a big pain to deal with and equally bad.
In my opinion, this forum isn’t the right format to be searching for games. A forum is a place to discuss. We would need a separate site (perhaps the “main site” mentioned earlier) that is optimized to be a project finding site similar to a simplified “weight gain itch.io.” A wiki format would be good for game information but for finding games it pales in comparison to a simple purpose-made website where you can sort through all the different games by rating or most recent as well as filter by last updated, protagonist gender, fetishes in the game, etc.
I am very explicitly suggesting that the most extreme possible action taken is being moved to the more discussion-oriented board. This destroys nothing, does nothing to impede further conversion in the thread, it just keeps the Projects board more focused.
We don’t care about dead accounts? Sorry if I’m misunderstanding but people who don’t use the site are in fact unlikely to see an announcement. They also won’t be affected by a forum they don’t use.
If you don’t have any user metrics for this site specifically these numbers are kind of just asspulls.
Maybe I’m old but “READ THIS FIRST” pinned posts are a classic in forums and seem to work just fine. Yes you have people who will do their best to avoid reading anything in front of them but that’s just the nature of online communities and would hopefully be less common in an environment where everyone should be an adult.
You’re never going to have an announcement that literally everyone sees, but that’s true of any time you try to communicate anything and any large group of people, and isn’t a convincing argument to never make any policy changes to me.
In my version of the Projects board, the only people making new posts there are those with a project to show off, which is a very small subset of the userbase, who are being asking something quite simple.
I agree, a forum is a sub-optimal medium for something like this. Nonetheless, there are still several projects that basically only exist here (and often on patreon). In my ideal world everything of note would have a nice itch page and be properly tagged and easy to find, but people clearly see some kind of value of posting here (sometimes exclusively) so having some very mild rules about how they do so it not unreasonable.
In fact, itch specifically kind of has the same problem because there’s no one there who’s going to moderate a niche fetish category so you end with with lots of broken/incoherent results clogging up your searchs.
The fact of the matter is that people do post their stuff here, so I think it’s worth the bit of effort keeping it a little orderly. Considering the name of the forum, it’s sensible to elevate and curate the people actually making the games.
I really like the idea, but still think there’s a bit of an issue. For the change to first be implemented, the author of each post would need to be active and apply the change to follow the new rule. That is fine for new post and posts that are currently under develop, but I feel like the Projects board is used for more than just that. For example, there’s projects that are already finished, projects that are paused, projects where the author isn’t actively engaging and only shows themselves ever so often, projects where the author went missing, etc. But that doesn’t mean the project is DEAD, and people can still interact, report bugs, make suggestions, share opinions, ask questions, joke about and share gameplay tips or achievements. Just because the author isn’t around to update the title I don’t think it would be fair to kick the post out of the board, it could be confusing and even make some people feel bad.
That said, it would be nice if there was a very clear guideline for the recommended title format, so that the more active members of the community and anyone new could easily opt in, but without any penalty against not using it.
Also, for the reader side of it, it would be nice if we could filter and order posts by the most recent author post. Not sure if there’s already an option for it, sorry if there is, I’m more of a lurker that only keeps tabs on a few couple of posts and doesn’t regularly browse the whole page looking for new things.
First let me start simply with theres no need to add a date when every post is automatically timestamped including the edits. FYI just click the age of post in minutes, hours, months, years in the top right of the post and it will show you the exact time stamp of the original of that post. For edits timestamp have to click the pencil in top right
Yes yes it is, i will directly admit it here, my game Project Bobs development went private because of the sort of bullshit nitpicks like version numbers and when the next update will come out, or when the last one did. The users always demanding more from me than i can deal with. So i decide not to share progress as I develop the game, its a simple fix to the problem of needy users. Honestly if you want me to date my topic title every time i update or get my post deleted, i probably would not considered posting in the first place. I’m sharing a labor of love free to playgame, Excusing the following language but i don’t know how else to put it f*** that sh** is my honest feeling about that. If you wanna put requriments on posting my free to play game that i dont care for then i’ll just not post it, or go post it on some other site were i don’t haveto deal with this! I’m sure i’m not the only dev with this sediment.
I’m going to second @zdeerzzz here - I remember last month there was a thread asking basically “is this site dead” due to (the poster’s) opinion that nothing of significance was being made anymore. While that isn’t the case, any additional hurdles you put in front of content being posted is going to result in less content being posted. As it currently stands, creators currently have to:
Create an account.
Go through verification/tutorial to get posting privileges.
Make a thread about their game.
Probably get told “hey, you need to do X” regarding their original post and need to edit it - look at the first few comments on each new project, it’s almost invariably “show us some images” or “post an APK” or “put it somewhere other than [download link you used]”.
And that’s without counting the jitters that come with putting your thoughts and creations up for public review and criticism. Lots of people don’t make it through those hurdles, because each additional step is a chance for them to give in to the anxieties about “this isn’t good enough/far enough along/going to get a good reception” and either delete the thread/project or abandon the attempt before it’s made.
I’m going to say right now that yeah, “keeping your thread title updated” is not a particularly hard ask of people. But it’s going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for some people who might otherwise post their creations, as is clearly evidenced by someone saying just that here, and you won’t hear from most of them. They just… won’t post. And that means even less content in a place where people are already asking “is there anybody actively making stuff anymore?”
I myself am actively not posting anything about the stuff I’m making because I don’t want to add “dealing with progress threads and comments on them” to my mental workload. Especially since I’ve already scrapped and reworked several times now and I know there would be people upset about it. So I just… don’t really talk about it, don’t make threads about it, and if I ever get it done I’ll drop the thing fully-formed onto the board. But that means if I don’t ever complete it, if I lose interest or life gets in the way more than it already does? Nobody even gets a draft. It’ll never exist for anyone other than me. And in the meantime, nobody sees that there is somebody working on something that may in turn inspire them to do something.
There’s a balance you have to strike between “ease of use for end users” and “ease of use for creators” - because at the end of the day, the users are coming here for what the creators make. The more load you put on them, when most already aren’t making any money off of this, the fewer there are going to be posting the stuff you come here for.
That’s a fair point I think, but something pretty easy to handle with an exception, such as “any post created before the transition period is exempt.” I would personally want something slightly more defined than that but what would be practical in that regard is mostly dependent on the quality of the moderation tools (and the mods skills at using them) so I don’t really want to speculate about that much more.
I very much envision this as a “strictly defined, loosely enforced” kind of policy because literally anything is better than simply “Projects go here” IMO. The original post is my ideal version but the bare minimum if i had to give up all but one rule is that project posts should have a link to (or host directly) an actual thing (be that game/art/mixtape or whatever is deemed (an) appropriate medium(s).
I still feel like this is overstating the impact of moving a post from one board to another, but again I think even a super permissive policy for legacy posts would be a large improvement.
The timestamp of the post itself is not a reliable indication of anything. If it were that simple I wouldn’t be here. The only temporal information given in the topic list is last activity. The ENTIRE point of this policy is quickly getting important information at a glance. Hence the information being in the title.
Even if you could somehow show the date that the first post was last updated in the topic list (something very odd and not useful in 99% of cases) that is no indication on whether or not the project itself was updated.
A post that simply links to their project’s itch page is 100% compliant with this policy as long as they follow the titling stipulations, and this does not necessitate any updates (and thus an incremented timestamp) to the original post. Maintaining a change log is still in the author’s best interest in most cases but that’s up to them.
And again, TO BE CLEAR, it is no one’s obligation to even check or enforce that the date is accurate because it is already in the poster’s self-interest to keep it updated.
This is far more about “leading by example.” I’m not looking to crucify anyone who forgets to update the date, just have basic rules about a board that should have a particular purpose.
Whatever people are posting in your thread has nothing to do with what I’m talking about here. This really feels like you are misdirecting unrelated frustrations of feeling overwhelmed towards the subject matter of 10 keystrokes.
“Don’t ask for updates” is already a rule in every forum ever including this one IIRC because yeah, it is annoying. The problem you are having is not being weighed down by too much red tape but rather a lack of moderation.
“THING is dead” discourse is interminable on the internet and almost always, in my experience, poorly masked resentment.
I feel like this is rather insulting to people with creative ambitions. The act of creation takes HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS. Reading and complying with a few simple rules takes a takes maybe a few minutes, if you’re two weeks in since your last coffee.
Yes, making stuff is hard. I don’t buy the assertion that “lots of people” are being gate-kept by basic formatting policy. As someone with honest-to-dog social anxiety rules about basic interaction in a space make me feel more comfortable posting, but I’m willing to accept that as a me thing.
Yeah, people want to… learn about and play the project. You’re also complaining about the behavior of other users, not the impact of the policy I’m proposing.
I’d agree that “you should port this to X platform” posts should be heavily discouraged if not forbidden, but again, that’s out of scope of this topic.
Barring like, a site-wide poll on the matter one post isn’t evidence of anything. I’m perfectly fine hearing arguments against my proposal but don’t invoke imaginary people.
Again, this sounds like social anxiety. Yeah, it sucks. If listening to people talk about a thing you made feels like more work than actually making it, that’s the insecurity literally everyone who has ever made something has felt at one point.
Showing something you made to the world makes you vulnerable, and being vulnerable is hard.
I hope you can get over that and feel the joy of creation, but it’s not the fault of simple post formatting guidelines. I don’t want to presume, but as someone with ADHD, it wouldn’t hurt looking into that either.
I’m not going to make any more responses to replies that aren’t about the practicalities of implementing/enforcing the policy itself. At a certain point all that’s left is bike-shedding and venting about failed creative ambitions and I got other things to do.