This will be my last post on the subject, so let me be blunt: this does not work. This cannot work. If this amount of planning or foresight is the best you’re capable of, there is no future for Weight Gaming, either as a forum or a storefront.
It’s been three and a half months since the announcement about removing or changing the Projects section. 14-15 weeks, and you’re admitting that you still haven’t worked out the rules or changes that you plan to enact. You haven’t asked for user input about them. And yet, somehow, you’ve decided it’s okay to start enforcing this nebulous and unwritten set of changes without even notifying users of what they need to do to comply. That’s functionally insane, not to mention a massive extra burden on the moderation team.
You want Weight Gaming to be a storefront. Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if you started hiding or removing product pages based on policies you haven’t even written yet? Itch is still recovering from self-inflicted wounds eight months later, despite having their clarified policy in place within hours of their sweeping changes. Do you really expect that Weight Gaming could retain any level of trust if you did the same where peoples livelihoods were involved? You can’t write this off by saying something like “the forum is the forum, and the store is the store”; you’re in charge of both, and your leadership informs the level of trust from the community both ways.
Now let’s take a look at what happened after these changes started being implemented without any clarification. Someone asking very relevant questions on the scope of this change was muted until the next day, with the claim that their attempts to get clarification had “no constructive purpose” beyond “creating dissent within the community”. Trying to figure out the unwritten rules currently being enforced is suddenly a community offense!
And then people start having their posts deleted for questioning where topics that were archived because their creator was banned fit into all of this. Not only does this kick off a second shitstorm where you have to clarify that the people were banned after your $2400/month fundraiser ended for conduct that happened before it started, it doesn’t answer any of the questions that were raised, doesn’t list any specific reason that the users were banned, doesn’t even state which users were banned despite the mere mention of those users now being grounds for removal. The case of a particular user who appears to have been recently banned or silenced (Were they one of the three mentioned in the “clarification” post? Is it forbidden to speak their name? Who fucking knows!) is particularly concerning because you assured them, weeks before the fundraising period began, that you were “hurt” by the idea that you’d take action against them for simply expressing their views. But from looking at any posts they’ve made after, it sure as hell didn’t hurt enough to stop you from going after them anyways!
Again, you want Weight Gaming to be a storefront. If you start removing products or vendors for perceived misconduct, but can’t even articulate when or what that misconduct was, your trust and support vanishes overnight. In fact, by refusing to openly address the situation, you’re giving complete narrative control to the people who have been ousted, because you control speech on your own platform and nowhere else. If the people who have been tossed out make detailed statements and bring receipts while all you can do is hem and haw and try to obfuscate your reasoning while insisting it’s somehow ‘clarity’, you can be damn sure the community is more likely to side with them, unless their behavior here was truly noxious - and if that were the case, why the fuck would you be waiting months before banning them?
Even after voicing my dissent about shutting down the Projects forum, and a number of other moderation choices before that, I bit my tongue and donated to the fundraiser; I had hoped that if you were willing to rely on the community more for financial support, you might actually start taking community feedback into account more heavily. I didn’t kick up a fuss when I realized that the Fetish Master subforum - by far the largest repository of information for and mods of the game on the internet - had been scrubbed completely from the site without statement, comment, or question shortly before the fundraiser began; by the time I noticed that it had happened, the fundraiser was nearing its end, and I’d have felt like an ass for throwing sand in the gears then. But the events of the last week have quite thoroughly dashed any sliver of hope I still had that you might eventually discover either the temperament or skillset to be trusted with managing a forum or storefront.
I don’t know if my request from the other day was written off as a knee-jerk reaction or just flatly ignored, but as I was entirely serious about it, I’ll reiterate it now: go ahead and archive Magical Viking Erika. I won’t be around to monitor or update the topic, and following the precedent of They Who Must Not Be Named, it seems that’s more than enough reason to lock down any discussion of the game at all.