Policy Proposal for the "Projects" Board

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Now that a week has passed and I’m no longer giving a knee-jerk response, I can see a lot of merit in this. Ideally, yes, a version number and date in every title would make everything easier to browse, but as everyone has pointed out the moderation required for that would be impossible.

Instead this could just be a set of guidelines that someone has to read when posting to Projects, but written in such a way where it’s clear that these are not mandatory and merely suggestions. Whether that’s possible in Discourse I don’t know, but it would hopefully prompt some people to include this info in their title, then maintain that practice as they continue to develop.

In any case, I think the best solution for this is just to wait for the main site to be finished. This has probably already been considered, but dedicated slots to (optionally) include your game’s version number and/or update date when creating posts would solve this instantly.

Oh boy, quoting time. I have no idea if it’s possible to play devil’s advocate on both sides at the same time but I’ll give it a damn good try.

Hard disagree. At the risk of sounding incredibly insensitive, I cannot imagine someone with such intense social anxiety that after days/weeks/months of working on their game, they back out at the suggestion of maybe adding a version number/date to the title of their post.

Yes, it is absolutely scary to share something you’ve spent ages working on and pouring your love into to a group of strangers on the internet. But the suggestion of a date being what tips you over the edge into not sharing? I honestly can’t see that happening.

I find this to be a massive overreaction. If the suggestion were to mean that everyone had to follow the same strict upload structure with a bullet point list of features, a minimum word count description and a bunch of images, then yeah I would understand this sort of backlash. But version numbers in the title? Not at all.

With the occasional exception of #2, name me any website where this isn’t the case. Even Discord can have verification checks when new users join a server, this isn’t a new or unusual set of requirements. Sure, those user comments suck (with the exception of images, they are a huge source of interest), and I do get tired of seeing them everywhere, but as CuddleFiend said that’s outside the scope of this proposal.

And now, the other side.

Posts do occasionally get moved to different categories, but when someone states that they’re working on a game, working release or not, we have to assume they’re actually doing that and leave it in Projects. Basically, if the mods moved all of those posts out of Projects, they’d be breaking their own “don’t declare a project dead” rule. Not a great look imo.

Still not convinced on the required link. I see Project Ideas & Discussion more as a place to talk about ideas for potential games, not ones you’re actively making. If you have a cool idea for a game but aren’t currently developing it for whatever reason, absolutely put that in Project Ideas & Discussion, but I still stand by my original point about discoverability in Projects being way higher for games currently in development.

I have other counter-points, but they’d largely just be re-wording what other have already said. And besides, this reply is already way too long. Well done to anyone who actually got through all of this rambling haha, I’m sure I’ll wake up in the morning and spot a dozen mistakes in it.

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Hey, that’s my point. You’re putting additional barriers up when it’s already hard to do the thing.

I note, specifically, that you haven’t created or posted anything. Only comments. Your only posted topic is this one.

A “has already posted actual content” creator has posted to say “this is burdensome and would cause me to lose interest in posting.” Your counter-argument is “sounds like that’s a you problem.” That’s not exactly convincing, since you’re not speaking from experience. All you’re doing is saying “this is inconvenient for me, a consumer of free content, and so I want to pass the burden of checking the post/edit dates on the thread onto the people who are already doing everything else I come here for.”

I’m going to put your own words back on you here - if you want it done, do it. Go ahead. You already said it’s worthwhile to create things, and the work is its own reward. Don’t insist everybody else do it, don’t demand someone else make it happen for you. The forum is built on Discourse, which is an open-source JavaScript framework. It has plugins already, and there’s a GitHub code repository. You can TamperMonkey a shell over it to access the functions and information already there and create your own solution to your issue. Heck, you can even share it once you get it done for other people who have the same complaint!

Making stuff is hard. Demanding things from other people is easy.

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Is this policy not directly asking creators of projects if the project is up to date?

Back to your original post here, is that not what your asking moderators to do, go through the posts and make moderators ask topic posteres in the project category update their titile, or get thier topic deleted or moved. See again in original post.

Having a requirement to the status of a project put in the topic title is in effect asking for an update to that piece of information. If by what you said in reply,

then you should understand why i find it a annoying rule that is not necessarily in line with the type of culture the forum is going for.

But, lets go back to my original post where first I agreed with you that it would be helpful if topic titles contained more information, and suggested a compromise of sorts of a pinned post suggesting how to structure the title.

My only disagreement was with it being, that the suggestions be a hard rule, making it an effective demand of the forum useres in essence that topic creators provide this information.

What? How, is it not? Main post are rarely edited weeks months or years after, for anything other than a update to the game. The other cases are usually the exception not the norm for anything longer than a week. Same day or next day edits, sure they usually don’t contain an update but rather typo corrections, or something else.

The problem is time and effort is a two way street, you keep implying its not a big ask of topic creators and or moderators to do all this work, yet using my own project as an example, users repeatedly don’t notice or read the information even if its given to them, even if a topic creator does provide it.

My topics main post has the links to the latest posted version of the game along with the date of the release, the edit timespam is Aug 11, 2020 3:18 PM

Idk how many asking for updates posts to my topic i have flagged which at the time @grotlover2 dealt with, i even have a pm from him asking me not to be snarky in response to them, when i posted a funny image in response to one. Here is one that was not removed, and is an example of what @TheWell-Being is talking about here:

along with is asking for updates, its time stamp Dec 28, 2021 7:01 AM

Thats a whole year after the last update. The information is clearly there in my original post, clearly i had put in the effort to have a versioning system even if its not what @Legaciquiet agrees with, clearly i had put in the efffort to date the download llinks and what version was posted so you know if its new or not. You can take this a couple of ways,

  1. The user honestly does not understand
  2. The user does understand and just want me to spoon feed them the information in the way they want to see it
  3. their trolling me and are being disruptive

1 is honestly the least offensive case to consider, and the most unlikely and would still be against forum rules; 3 i think we can agree is just being rude, and still against form rules; however i think 2 is the most likely, but still is against forum rules.

Sorry to say it but demanding topic creators date their titles is another case of two, and honestly saying its just a date, how big of a deal can it be, seems like a small ask, untlill you get to the #Karen’s going but you need to date it DD-MM-YYYY and not MM-DD-YYYY, or someone wanting the long form August 27th, 2024. Now this is becoming like the versioning above. Or what about the person who comes along and demands the date leads the title not follows it, or the opposite. That’s not a big ask is it to put the date first?

Lets look at this, from another topic on the game forks where moderator @Krodmandoon is responding to a post that has been removed, probably because it was asking for an update:

If you look at the edits history of the original topic for the edit of when the 014d January 7th 2021 demo was posted here is the title and top of the post:

Forks: A Weight Gain Visual Novel (Bugfix Update 1/3/2021)

Current release: 014d (January 3, 2021)

After all this time, it’s finally out! The new, new demo is here and ready for download!

Only because i was following developnet Forks i know there was as many asks for it that have been since been removed as there was on my own topic, despite it having the information posted clearly.

It all is honestly fluff, the cherry on top so to speak. When i can get the date and time of any post or edit of a post using the built in tools of the forum as a user.

I don’t know how else to say that this ask to have more information in the topic just comes off as you the user is just being lazy, and self centered. If you have not posted a game yet and dealt with the enormous volume of asks of users regardless of if you already answered their ask in your main post or title, then i don’t think you have any frame of reference for how this ask is coming off.

You want a way to be able to filter out your fellow users interactions with a topic from getting in your way to finding and playing games(by asking topic creators and moderators for more work). And you have labeled all this as:

This does not seem like you want to engage with the community on the forum in a positive way or contribute to the topics, your only demanding more from topic posters and moderators, it feels like your here only to take from the community without giving back.

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Really, I chosse not to make a itch.io account and post there because of https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines, and knew my game and I were not ready, for that. I felt that weightgaming was more my speed with its topic posting guide lines. It may be a crude agressive way of putting it, to get people thinking, but i don’t think that invalidates the logic. This logic directly applied to my choice to only post on weight gaming, using MEGA file sharing to host the files. I think while your implying that the only way to apply this is to the extreme, however it applies at any and every level.

Hmm, I feel like you may be, seriously underestimating how many people deal with this, on some level. I think this perception is probably colored by how you only see posts from people who can handle the different pressures put on a dev/creator by the forums users, as evidenced by myself and @TheWell-Being see his post:

While i know he intendeds to possibly post at some point, and its not “not posting over the date”, i still feel this is evidence of not sharing over pressure of some kind regardless of size be it date or otherwise. I think you basically assuming the internet comparable of stage fright doesn’t exist for internet related posting, or maybe assuming it affects a much smaller percentage of people, than actual. Also if a tree falls and no one heard or saw it did the tree fall? Or better why did it fall was it old age, a lightning strike, or something else? This same logic applies here how can you know why someone doesn’t post if they don’t tell you they didn’t post and never posted anything. And you did not see/hear/perceive them not posting.

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To be completely honest, I never knew those itch quality guidelines were a thing, and having your game removed from the discoverability index for failing to meet any one of those criteria is definitely something I can see causing doubt and anxiety. Especially if your project is in its early stages and you just want initial feedback before forging ahead. I had assumed you were simply talking about Weight Gaming, where it’s essentially “post what you want” and the introduction of suggesting but not enforcing a version number is a relatively minor change.

I know I’m lucky to be able to just think “idgaf” when coming across most weird comments online, or in this case suggestions on formatting a post in a way that might feel foreign or unusual. It’s why I don’t often try to place myself in the position of someone who does suffer from this, because I have very little to base it on and don’t want to appear mocking or patronising when assuming what people are feeling. Which it appears I have done, right here. Fuck.
(And in a strange way I guess that’s my own mild form of anxiety? The human brain is weird ¯_(ツ)_/¯ ).

Quite the opposite, you even quoted the part where I acknowledged that. It took me well over an hour to post that huge chunk of text, and very little of that time was spent actually typing. So for something as large as a whole game I’m well aware that hesitation and deliberation increases tenfold.

As cliché as the “I know someone who ___” argument is, I do know people who suffer from anxiety far worse than I do, and I’ve seen the seemingly small things they’ve got caught up over. That’s why I wouldn’t want this to be a hard rule or even seen as an unspoken rule, just a simple suggestion that people can choose to include or ignore as they please. At present, that suggestion isn’t seen anywhere, not in a pinned comment, not in the FAQ, nowhere.

Ultimately though, this will likely never be brought in precisely because of this debate we’ve found ourselves in. No matter how it would be implemented, there’d always be some faction of people upset by it. I still think the main site could solve this, whether it be through my suggestion or some other method, but on this forum I can’t see this changing now.

I don’t see anything to gain by continuing this, so I’m going to back out now. I just hope I’ve made it clear that I wasn’t trying to be malicious or dismissive when it comes to people’s fears when posting online.

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There’s already been far too much said on both sides for me to have much to add, but one particular thing from this whole debate is bothering me enough that I feel the need to say something.

While I appreciate the concerns about potential barriers for creators, you can’t simply dismiss the complaints of forum readers solely because they’re not creators themselves. After all, the whole point of posting something here is to share it with potential players. A posting policy that’s too strict or zealously enforced can drive away creators, but a disorganized forum can bury those very same creators’ efforts and possibly even drive readers away to other sites. Leaning too far in either direction can end up hurting the community, including creators like you.

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While i do appreciate your point here your taking the order of posts out of context to make them, see my original post:

I even in fact agree that user experience can be improved and only want a small compromise that its not a hard rule rather a guideline. And my ending bottom line is about making sure to be inclusive.

Then my fairly aggreable comment is met with this!

  1. Lets start with the end which is a straight dismissal of my concerns of being inclusive of everybody.
  2. Anyones post who doesn’t conform to his idea of correct is garbage, that needs to be picked up by moderators, hold on double take is that correct.

Lets analyze this and apply it.
If i don’t date my topic then it would by his standards my post would be garbage i threw on the gournd. So therefore my post is garbage and i threw on the gournd littering.

Excuse the melodrama i left out of my following post which is the first responding to this comment. Where in my post above did my merit such a vehement response that not dating your topic makes you the scourge of the earth. Do you agree with this sediment?

I then respond with:

I think my next response can be summed up as being fairly diplomatic trying to reason with his flat dismissal of my concerns, and saying saying in probably a less diplomatic way “if user feel devs work is not worth their time then i can just post elsewhere”

All in all while it is somewhat inflammatory compared to calling peoples work garbage it can hardly be called offensive by comparison.

My last two responses were pretty harsh on the users side of things but, to be fair its not untrue.
If users want nice things, they have to be inclusive and work with devs. Badgering is not working with. Putting rules in place that makes work for devs that is a nitpick, is not working with.

and to the last comment of my second to last post,

If you think this is an unfair characterization of not being positive or helping contribute, then i don’t know how were going to come to a common understanding of whats happened.

To be clear as a dev in my first post i was extending an olive branch till i had my hand bitten. And i still stand by that olive branch, however i will not take abuse lying down, and if you want to support this type of behavior then i may not interact here in the future personaly.

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I do think that it’s unfair to characterize CuddleFiend’s request as selfish, because like I said, a well-organized forum benefits everyone, including the very creators who would be contributing to that organization. And again, while I do acknowledge that even relatively small posting requirements can add to a creator’s workload and discourage them from posting, the fact is, such requirements are small when compared to the challenges of actually bringing a project to life. So while I don’t necessarily agree with every detail of the suggested guidelines, I don’t think it was an unreasonable request.

(Oh, and by the way, as long as we’re talking about CuddleFiend in the third person, according to CuddleFiend’s profile, they would prefer to be referred to as “they”.)

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Oh, greetings, trolling and annoyance I did not intend to do or show. It was just a comment that no one needed, I was interested because I really liked your creation.(although I can’t support it with money)

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I dont mind if rules 1 and 2 were instated, keeping things clean and easy to read would give a breath of fresh air to browsing games in progress or released which im all for.

Rules 3 and 4 i find a little less appealing, for me since I have a spot where i update my game progress and that would mean I’d have to delete that one and move it somewhere else, i think if theres released games they abide by these rules in a category for Games or Released Games or something along those lines since i consider projects as things that arent released or are very early in development, and project discussion to me feels more like its where you discuss a project more than where progress on a project should be.

Sorry if this makes no sense lol, im a tad sleep deprived so i might have went in circles but hopefully you know what i mean.

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At the very least I think we should show “how to post a project” guide when creating a new topic. I think Discourse has this ability.

Far too many project there’s are some variation of “here is my game ” without so much as a picture or a description of what’s it’s about.

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Umm, some not all, the no picture is due to privileges. You have to have direct upload privileges before you can easily post the picture.