EDIT: And on the topic of moderation: forum posts can only be edited by the moderators and original posters. But who can edit a wiki page? If it’s only the creator of the game, that risks the loss of information that players might find beneficial but the creator hasn’t considered. If you open it up to all users, even “trusted” ones, you run the risk of pages being overrun by trolls, hijackers, people with bones to pick over development choices, etc. That’s going to require far more moderation than the forums ever did, and can very quickly destroy trust from developers.
This was my immediate thought upon hearing that a community run wiki was the proposed solution. Popular wikis only survive in this format because of the efforts of what would be entire moderation teams for forums. The static nature and ability to roll back changes to pages can help, but only does so much in the face of determined attacks.
And if these aren’t open for community editing? Who’s putting in the time to help with this? I can’t see devs keeping this wiki up over time themselves when they likely have other sites, storefronts, etc to manage that drive revenue or real engagement, and especially with limited community feedback over wiki content because… it’s a wiki. They do not lend themselves well to that purpose by design. And will anything even be discoverable to begin with?
So to make sure I have this straight, You were worried about the community atomizing and splintering into their own separate discord groups, so the plan is to divide the current Weight Gaming forums into separate sites? You are worried about putting out the flame wars between pro and anti AI users and so thusly will shut down the ability for either side to comment and also for devs to receive comments on their games from the community more directly, leaving the only people with a mic being other communities like BBWchan who already have their own problems with Weight Gaming, legitimate or not? You are worried about bad actors in the community who might scam people so your solution is to close the amount of people who can post on a completely new site more tightly under your control?
While in terms of keeping the site running, I can see why alot of these points seem like good ideas but I think alot of these are throwing the baby out with the bathwater at best and going to exacerbate the issues Weight Gaming is dealing with at worst. I get the site needs a change to stop the A.I flame wars and to keep it from succumbing to puritan lawmakers and payment processors, but trying to keep Weight Gaming a community by fracturing the site in two will make it harder not easier.
As one of the most prominent devs on this forum, who will probably survive the changes though suffer from them anyway, I’d like to provide something apart from criticism in hopes of finding another way to keep the ship going.
Moderation
Make the topic creators the mods of their topics. This will lessen the strain on the regular mods and allow them to watch over new topics with questionable content. Wikis still require a lot of moderation, and making only the page author able to change the page’s contents will only lead to the same results as my initial proposal — with the addition of all the downsides of wikis in comparison to forums.
Also, yes, do try to find new mods. I can’t imagine this being an impossible endeavor; members of the fetish community are notorious for being nearly fanatical about their kinks, and there are plenty of people who will be willing to help you out — especially if the alternative is the site shutting down.
Monetization
Absolutely, ABSOLUTELY make a call for the community to finance you and this forum. People here can afford to support my lifestyle; they can certainly support yours too, if it means keeping the forums alive. I’ll throw in my $50–100, and other devs will do the same, as the WG forum’s exposure will bring in much more money than these modest donations.
If there are any other concerns or if you disagree with me on this, I’m willing to discuss these points and find alternatives. All I know is, migrating to wikis is definitely a very risky move, and much less reliable than just trying to fix the oversights we have right now.
I’m kinda confused right now, will i (as average person who is not dev and only enjoys wg games) be able to easily use wiki to chat with people and download new projects?
My primary concern with this is simple - you are correct, people on this forum basically only post on the Project threads now. It’s a storefront more than it is a place for discussion or games development, and it’s not exactly properly set up to do that in any reasonable way.
But the people posting in general development topics is such a low percentage of average users right now that I think, if you remove the one active remaining element in the Project threads, you’re just going to have silence. The people who’ve stopped posting general game-dev topics aren’t going to suddenly come back and resume posting tutorials or questions on their own accord, because to basically everybody at this point this site is where weight-gain games are sold more than anything else. All other conversation is such a limited percentage of the total usage of the site that it will be a “dead forum” once the Project posts are gone, and that will further discourage usage.
Basically, if you don’t want a sudden death spiral in active users you’re going to need to do something before 2026 to bring back people posting more in the subjects you want people posting on. You need to do something to encourage the content you want to see, beyond simply pruning that which is proving too much for you, or there won’t be any content on here at all.
So i like the idea of the wiki being the place to browse games!
Although i fear as anyone can edit the wiki your going to have editing wars over the details in the wiki between devs and users with strong opinions. Not sure what the solution is here to prevent trolling of a nature.
However does this mean no discussion of those games on the forums?
The issue is more then just moderation though that is a large contributing factor. The biggest issue is cost and the fact my job is not as stable as it used to be. If I got into work tomorrow and found out I was fired I was not joking that I would have to shut everything down. The wiki is so light weight that in a worse case I am confident I can at least keep that running if worse comes to worse.
I hope one day if things stabilize I can consider reopening things up.
Yes, anyone with an account is able to create and edit pages, deletion is restricted.
Wikijs doesn’t currently support something like this out of the box since it tries to be as DB light as possible (which is why its so inexpensive to operate). That being said, I may be able to make use of its API to maybe setup at least a rough news feed as a stopgap.
Unfortunately, this is one of things we will loose with the wiki. While general discussion of games will be ok we will be loosing some of that with the project posts being moved to the wiki.
Currently I am setting it up where any user can upload an asset pack they create. This will be done through their profile page on the site. When they create an asset pack we will be notified about it for review and once reviewed the page will be posted to the main site.
This is a really good point. Being honest I forgot to take into consider mods for other community games. That being said, edge cases like that is why I am considering about created a dedicated modding category. Moving them to General Games is more of a stop gap to help with cleaning up the projects category, but I may need to consider just making a dedicated category instead.
Once again moderation is a concern but costs is currently the larger concern. That being said, there is a risk of that but since the wiki keeps versioned information its easy to reverse damage and we know who changed what which will make it easier for us to take more decisive action then with the forums where we have to weigh the rules, context, and conversation.
Sorry, I could have worded that better. That was more directed to @Flateur concern about feedback and comments. @Pork_Soda’s view on it is what my actual intent is.
This is kind of what I am trying to aim for. I want the forum to become exclusively for discussion where right now a lot of people are more using it to try to keep track of games. Its going to take a bit to get the forums where I want to get them though and as stated above this is the first step to the refactor I want to do.
No, these are considerations but not worries. My primary concern is more financial. As it currently stands my job is not in the most stable position, due to some irl things my savings are drained, and if I was to loose my job as it currently stands I would be forced to shutdown the site.
The wiki though can run with just what we are making on Patreon alone so if the worse comes to pass I can shutdown the forums but keep the wiki up. I hope it doesn’t come down to that, but we have had 3 rounds of layoffs over the last year and I don’t know how long I will stay lucky.
The issue is more finding mods that won’t abuse their position. Its not impossible but just time consuming, The main issue is with the rise of AIGC we are having a much harder issue finding mods that will be impartial so it has forced us to be much more selective.
I’m mostly a lurker and enjoyer here but I also own and run a SaaS company.
I have to say that, as a business owner, that organic users, enthusiasm, and activity are something to be very grateful for. I have run tones of product launches where we design something really clever and no one uses it. Our “hard lessons” have always been that what practically works is amplifying what users are already doing, rather than trying to invent a different usage pattern.
Getting rid of the most active part of the site seems shortsighted at best, and intentionally suicidal at worst.
Are forums ideal for browsing/searching? No. Are forums prone to people complaining? Yes. Does that complaining include moderation? Yes. Are there some hosting costs associated with forum software? There are some.
These are all “costs of doing business.”
To be honest, most internet statups would feel in heaven if they were to have the usage statistics w/r/t monthly views and user engagement – the views that are driving the hosting costs.
It is abundantly clear that there needs to be a better business model to make the site sustainable. You may or may not get helpful ideas from armchair posts on this thread.
But I guarantee that deleting the forum out of the forum site will detract, not ensure, a sustainable project.
What is the monthly cost that is required to keep the forum going? I’m sure if we know the exact numbers it will be easier for the community to decide if they are able to fund the site.
Wow, you made a tough decision! I do think it’s the right one, after reading your open letter and this post.
Weight gaming cannot continue as it is. if the options are to have it change (be wiki based) or have it potentially not exist at all (or be effectively defunct), it’s obviously better for it to change. May be pure optimism but I’ve always looked forward to the future in seeing what people create and put on this site, and I’ll still be doing that with the new setup.
I just hope that this change won’t scare developers away. I don’t mind downloading projects from sections on different site, i will learn to bear that i can’t talk about specific project anymore, but i feel like many people willing to develop their game will be scared of moving to other place and there are devs who want honest opinions from people playing their games, not everyone just wants to push their games without asking for opinion/review.
As it currently stands monthly costs are around $800-$900USD a month. This doesn’t account for yearly fees that happen through the year. Our income with patreon and ads is usually between $400-500USD a month. All in all yearly costs are usually around $10000 with about $5000 out of pocket in total.
I used to be very diligent about posting our financial statements, but they took so long to setup and so few people really looked at them I went down to doing them yearly. I did mean to post 2024 but these 5 posts took most of my time so I just didn’t do it. If you would like to see them all they are here:
You know, it’s funny to know that you’re going to kill the reason why so many of us came to this site in the first place
I don’t really see how new people can join if they won’t even be able to talk about the game that caught their attention, like I don’t see how any community can grow if you can’t even talk to each other about the game, in a forum about games!!!
If you feel like you are just done for the site, have you considered selling it? Someone in the community may be willing to pay something and take the responsibility off your plate – it sounds like, more than anything, you are burnt out and tired.
Grot, this is a pretty modest sum and I can pay you these 500USD a month singlehandedly. I can also mobilize other devs and ask them to contribute a little too - I’m sure they are smart enough to understand it’s better for them to keep the forum alive. Not to mention ordinary users who can also help, we just need 50 of them who are willing to spend 10 dollars a month.
Please, consider my offer. This forum means a lot to me and my friends from the fetish community. They are aspiring devs and are yet to release their projects, but honestly I can barely see them getting any traction anythere else besides Weight Gaming. I appreciate all your work and believe in your vision, and I’m willing to help you in any capacity that is needed.
I agree with Keyfarer, I’m not sure to understand why no call for financial support nor moderation help was made (as far as I’m aware). When you compare these two problem to the size of the community, it doesn’t feel like the ressources were lacking to fill the gaps.
Although I assume it’s mostly because of lack of time, which I can understand. So it rather feels like you would need more admins or a trusted community manager with more free time to help you (?) - at least that’s my interpretation of what happened.
I really appreciate it when someone is willing to put their money where their mouth is and since one of the larger motivating factors for this is financial it would be wrong for me to not consider your offer. My only concern would be how sustainable it would be in the long term as one reason we are where we are financially is due to the over reliance on a few generous donors who could no longer afford to continue keeping up such support.
Give me a day or so to think on it and consider the other factors at play as well as consult with @Krodmandoon the moderation concerns.
Thank you so much grot. Talking to Krod is a good idea, he can provide you with information on my reliability. I’m more than willing to fund most if not all the forum’s expenses, when you are ready I suggest discussing this in private.
