the simple point is neither have any real merit to stand on yet, someone paid a lawyer tto anyway. Whats the saying “Can’t blame a guy for trying?”, its nott about weather or not they can win or it has merrit, its about lawyers being willing to take money to attempt to prove anything to win a clients case, regardless of merit in some cases, like afromans or your hypothetical. Not saying itss smart to be that client or even smart to be that lawyer, just saying shit happens
Not sure where to start so I’m just gonna jump in feet first and deal with things as they come at me. For those who don’t know, I am Hefty Totem and I’ve been accepted into the mod/admin team for WGF. I’ve been going over some of the problems, concerns, future directions and such with the team and I’ve been given the green light to take on the role of, for lack of a proper term, ‘the face’ for communication and transparency.
There’s a big fat mess I’ve been handed and I’d like to start cleaning it up by reaching out to you guys and attempt to:
- Give a direct means of communication to the people running the site that doesn’t bog them down while they currently try to migrate the site.
- Convey the intent/direction/plans/reasoning for things moving forward, back to the community and genuinely listen to the feedback and input given.
- Act as a voice of feedback while things are happening to point out problems for decisions before they are made.
- Help build and explain a structure of rules and procedures that the community and staff can point to rather than the current ‘vibe based rules’ that are currently in place.
- Create a situation where everyone is on the same page, ideally through public posts to inform the user base of what is happening and why, so that the majority of all the fears of uncertainty can be addressed and prevented from arising again.
- Become a reliable source of trust and transparency by being held publicly accountable for the actions I take.
- And help deal with all the ‘small things’ that pop up that get lost when only looking at ‘the bigger picture’.
There’s obviously more but those are the broad strokes of what I’m trying to focus on. I ask that you give me some time to find my bearings as there is a lot of information and systems I still am not up to speed on, but I will be as available as I can for you guys while I sort this out. Reach out to me, DM me, point me to what you need and I will do what I can to resolve things and keep you as informed as I can while I do it.
For the moment, I don’t really have much to offer as I kinda just got here. But I’m looking at starting a clean new thread to use as a public record to keep you guys informed of things as we go and allow proper communication and discussion through it. More for organizational aspects than anything since starting a ‘Hey we’re doin XYZ stuff now’ post at the bottom of long thread is a bit messy of a solution and having a main post I can edit to link to the ‘patch notes’ as they arise I’d assume would be nicer for everyone involved. With the intent for it to be a reliable and reusable source of information of some sort rather than through randomly commenting on individual posts in other threads.
I’ll aim at starting a new thread to have things organized with in the next few days, but in the meantime I’ll practice what I preach and try to answer questions you guys might have for me. I can’t promise I’ll have an answer, but I’ll do what I can. I’d ask for you to go easy on me, but I signed up for this so I’m gonna have to just trial by fire this shit.
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Judges can throw suits out if they are deemed totally frivolous, lack standing, whatever. As is the case with Afroman’s attempt to sue the Adams County Sheriff’s Department.
Apropos of nothing: the warrant WAS bullshit.
Guess I’ll start with the legal topic currently being discussed.
The likelihood of the series of events required for a legal suit to happen because someone was banned and not be dismissed immediately, while not ever zero, are mathematically absurd. So, that particular hypothetical isn’t a primary concern.
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In the US, you can sue for any old reason. You may not win, you may not even get very far in the case, but if part of your goal is to be vindictive and cost the other party money, you don’t need to win - you just have to drag them into court.
That’s what I meant about ‘being petty’.
Yes, I know what a slapp suit is. They’re only started by people or groups with a boatload of money because the intent is to out-spend the defendant in terms of legal fees and force them to either settle or go bankrupt. There are in fact checks in place to stop the “anyone can sue anyone for any dumb reason" situation you’re talking about, and it takes immense amounts of wealth and/or power to overcome them because courts also don’t want their time wasted. If you’re going to talk about this with such confidence you should at least have a basic understanding of how the US legal system actually works.
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Since this is starting to turn into a Q&A thread, are there any other forum mods that have been brought on or is it still just Grot, Krod, and you?
Unless there are other mods-to-be in the background while all this is getting sorted, the list of mods is publicly available: https://forum.weightgaming.com/g/moderators. As of right now, HeftyTotem is the only new mod.
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I am currently the only new mod, but there are around 4 or so that are in the works for joining the team. I was granted access a little earlier and allowed this PR sort of role as I saw that it was desperately needed because of recent events and talked with them a bit about what was happening from a user’s perspective and long story short I was allowed on early to do this. I was originally just gonna be a regular mod helping with the generic workload.
I originally reached out during the fundraiser campaign to offer general assistance as a mod. The general gameplan was that if the funding got secured, and the site was no longer in immediate danger, they would reach back out and start adding a couple potentials they were aware of that reached out to help as moderators with things so they could focus on the site migration stuff. Rather than say train up a bunch of people for moderation, only to have the funding fall through and then have the site need to be moved/reworked/abandoned in some form and the moderation team would either be no longer needed, or that what they were expected to do would have been changed as they were getting onboard.
(edit: typo)
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Yup. There were, if I remember right around 3 or 4 mod prospects mentioned to me at some point that are planned to be onboarded sometime soon. I can’t remember ever being given an exact date, but it shouldn’t be too long before you see that start happening.
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I never knew about the group feature on discourse, that’s a nice tidbit of information!
Fair that this should probably also have been explained. Someone on the Discord just asked about it and Grot answered them.
Apparently, some user (unnamed, obviously) reported a whole slew of games for allegedly containing underage content and threatening to go to the DOJ about it. On review, only two of the reported titles actually contained underage content, Fetish Master being one of them. It appears that the game code was written with Age of Majority being 16, not 18, which is probably the legal age where the developer lives, but not in the US, where the site is hosted and as such by which federal legal statutes apply. So everything about it had to go for legal reasons.
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I’m wanting to keep the community up to date on things so I’m letting you guys know here early. For now I’m just piggy backing off of this pre-established thread for simplicity sake and to not make more of a mess than I need to.
I’m aiming to get a new thread up around Wednesday(3/25) or Thursday(3/26) that will showcase the new rules and procedures that are being planned to get incorporated by the main site and the forums. They are currently in a state that still needs some work and I’m hoping to be able to get some feedback and discussion on them through that thread. I’m not expecting the more common sense aspects of them to need changing, but I do want you to know that it’s not meant to be a ‘these are the rules now, deal with it’ sort of thing, and why I’m working at getting feedback on them. So that we can adjust and agree on things together.
The original plan was for the rules to be released at the end of the month (3/31). I’ve been in talks with Grot and the new plan is to release them earlier so people can have time to absorb what’s in them and have time to discuss while we’re still developing them. At the end of the month (3/31) we’re looking to have what we end up with during that time as a set of working rules to run off of. Then lookin at like roughly for a month or so possibly, we work at refining what we have into something more solidified which will then become just the official rules we’ll be using moving forward. I will be repeating all of this when I make the new thread.
A goal I’m hoping to run with is being able to keep that “New Rules” forum thread as a hub for that sort of discussion so we don’t have to search for 'that one post the dude said in that other thread’. And also, I plan to do similar topical threads for future site decisions or topics that might need attention or for me to be able to let you all know what’s happening behind the scenes and other such things as they crop up in the future. Another idea is for me to just have a singular thread people can navigate to that I just use as a perpetual bulletin board for things I got to update you on and only make new threads in addition to that for the big discussion topics as needed. I’m still figurin that part out, suggestions are appreciated.
I’m hoping to be able to keep you all informed and on the same page for the things we do as, I know that is one of the site’s current largest issues that I’m able to help with.
(edit: minor rephrasing)
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This is partially correct, but still a misrepresentation. And it’s certainly not an unsolvable issue.
By default, the game shouldn’t generate characters under 18, unless a player character gives birth. Each character’s genetic profile includes an age at which they’re considered to be an ‘adult’ and not a ‘child’, and unfortunately most of the default DNA templates set this to 140160 hours, or 16 years; after such a time they can be treated like any other ‘adult’ character. It’s important to note, though, that any such character would be under the control of the player; a child character does nothing until the player assigns them actions or uses them as the active character, which is blocked for non-‘adult’ characters. That’s hardly a justification, but it’s also a refutation of the idea that the game ‘forces’ underage characters into any 18+ content.
And again, this is not a difficult issue to resolve. It requires modifying as little as two files (though it would certainly be ideal to go and adjust those genetic templates for 18 years instead of 16 regardless), both user-editable rather than part of the core Java classes, to patch around - one file that gives out detailed body descriptions and one file that checks if the character is of age when trying to use them as a playable character. It’s not complex, it’s just changing two lines of code to ensure that the character is both 18 AND (for custom races that may age more slowly than standard humans) have reached ‘genetic’ adulthood, rather than only looking at the latter. Two files, two lines of code, and simply requiring that any version of the game linked to from WG had that patch applied.
If grot had concerns about the legality of the game, he could have reached out to any of the community experts, explained the issue, asked if or how the problem could be resolved. He almost certainly did not do this, because I was the closest thing the core game had to a developer or maintainer for years, and I heard nothing. I guess I can’t rule out the idea that he messaged h.coder, the original dev, but considering he logged in here a total of three times and hasn’t been seen since early 2019 it wouldn’t have amounted to much more than a make-believe justification at ‘attempting’ to resolve the issue. If I had known about the problem at hand, I certainly would have pulled my builds and issued updates within a day or two at worst (hell, if my git host comes back online, I’ll go ahead and get it done tonight just for the sake of saying I did, even if I can’t link to anything). But instead, he went for the nuclear option without involving or notifying the wider community, which speaks to the wider pattern of two-way trust issues at the core of his management issues and which ended with the loss of a bunch of content and knowledge that didn’t involve any of the offending code.
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Yeah, well, when the minimum sentence for Distribution is 10 years, I don’t blame him for taking the Nuclear Option and getting that shit the fuck off the site ASAP. I’d have done it, too.
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That would have been a partially ideal solution. There are other factors to take into account as well that complicate things. For reference, I believe Grot was hit with a list of around 30 or so ‘potential’ projects with underage characters and after going through them whittled it down to just 2 or so I believe. Fetish Master being one of them. And since this matter is a legal one that we are required to address that is dangerous to leave open for a potential work around, the nuclear option tends to unfortunately be the safer option to take. And this is all on top of all the other things that need addressing on the site as well.
I’m not entirely up to speed on all the history of things, and I’ve only been a mod for about a week so forgive me if I’m uninformed on the details. But with that said, there’s a couple problems with your solution from a moderation perspective. One, you say
Working on the assumption that h.coder was the main dev and/or creator of the project thread, they would naturally be the first one to try and contact. And considering he hasn’t been on since apparently 2019, it’s safe to assume that he’s not reliably contactable to sort out the issue. In order for a mod to know to contact you specifically about the issue, they would have to be aware of the entire history of the game’s development and be up to date on how it’s handled. This is not feasible to do at the scale this site operates on considering the amount of projects it deals with.
The second issue is, yes, you could go and edit the code and fix the main issue. But if there is any link to a previous build in the thread, or people give instructions on how to access that build. Those would be us still providing the illegal content. So we would have to manually scrape and verify every possible link to make sure that it didn’t lead to a problematic build and then remove them. This is also not realistically feasible to do. Especially considering how long the project has been up.
And the longer we keep access to any of that up, the more we open ourselves up to danger. It’s a real no win scenario.
With that said, if you are able to do what you say you are able to (This is me not being personally familiar with all the details) and you are the current lead dev of the project, then once the Projects section opens back up again, I see no real reason to prevent you from making a new thread and continuing on. As long as it meets the legal requirements, we don’t actually want to have to remove games and projects.
And I am sorry that the issue was handled poorly. I genuinely am. That sort of thing is one of the reasons I took on this position. To try and help point out issues like this before they happen from the moderation side of things, and to be a means for people to reach out to and sort out problems from a user side of things.
We are currently in the process of getting the new rules and procedures sorted and able to be presented. I will be working to hear feedback and such to try and prevent situations like this from happening in the first place. Either by devs knowing all the information before starting a project, or by presenting an actionable means of discussing with the moderation when issues pop up, or whatever else might be needed.
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Forgive me if this was stated somewhere and Im blind to it but when is the eta for when the projects reopening? or more accurately for my situation, when can I request my project moved out of archives so I can start posting updates again?
Thank you for your time
Fish
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We are aiming for the 31st atm.
The rules rework is largely finished and we plan on making a post about it soon, and I am going to begin working on bringing on the new mods starting this weekend.
It will be no later then the 31st though.