Effective in one week, to further reduce fraud and simplify BYOND's financial system, hub entries that are not accepted to the approved BYOND channels will no longer be able to accept dimes for subscriptions.
And now, our feature presentation: Hub Cleaning and You.
Some of you may have started to wonder what's happening to your hub entries and why they've started disappearing. There's a simple answer: Many have been deleted! The hub cleanup we talked about is well underway, and slowly but surely a lot of detritus is being cleared off of BYOND.
Before I go into that further, on behalf of all the hub moderators I would like to thank those of you who read and responded to Deadron's announcement a while ago by cleaning up problem entries of your own. You've saved us a lot of effort there, which is appreciated because there is so much more to go. We know that not everyone was aware of the things that could or could not be done in hub entries before that.
A few of course didn't go quite far enough. We ran across quite a few people who'd been selling stolen code but, as a result of the announcement, decided to give it away free instead. That approach would work for semi-public-domain icons and other "fan foo" (as some of us call it), but a person's code or homemade icons for their own game weren't meant to be distributed and shouldn't be handed out except by the author themselves.
In cleaning up the hub entries there've been 4 rules broken the most:
- Don't sell or give away another author's stuff.
- Don't charge money or ask donations for fan foo.
- Don't upload gigantic files to the hub.
- Don't scam other users. (Duh!)
You can of course still charge money or ask donations for your original creations, provided they don't include fan foo.
The money rule about fan foo includes selling GM privileges or items in a fan game. You just can't do it. A lot of people didn't know that, but that's basically the stance of anyone who owns rights to that sort of thing. Funimation, who own the rights to Dragonball Z in the US, have said they have no problem with fan games that don't take in any money. This rule of thumb should be kept for all fan games and related works like icons.
Unregrettably, a few of the very worst offenders of these and other more obvious hub rules (like gratuitous bad language, posting entries to badmouth other players, etc.) had to be banned. Bans were mostly handed out to people who had huge portfolios of unacceptable entries, particularly those that were selling other people's code or running outright scams. A few users were very bad about uploading large files to the hub, and some even recently used it as their own personal backup storage, which it is not. Remember, this is Dantom's space, shared among many many users, and we want to keep it free for games, libraries, and the forums.
Here's the worst of what was up for sale, that couldn't be sold:
- Scams--often for code the seller clearly didn't have
- Stolen code (including Zeta, Zeta 2, DBZ:NN, FFO...)
- Icon packs (often large ones) including fan foo
- MIDI packs including fan foo
- Subscription-access fan games
Again, this is not an exhaustive list. Something that's ethically an obvious no-no but not shown here should still be avoided. One person for example had a gambling game posted using BYONDimes. That ought to raise red flags for everyone mature enough to use the hub in the first place. Likewise there have been hub entries put up just to badmouth other users, or with crass language that can't be justified for the purposes of promoting the game.
Meanwhile we cannot stress enough that if your game vanishes from the hub, it's probably for a reason. Many authors whose games were deleted didn't take the appropriate step and try to contact somebody; they simply posted the game again. Some actually did so after receiving an e-mail warning or two telling them their game was in violation.
Concerning rips: So far most rips that didn't charge anything have not been touched. A lot of rip-based games have become "established" somewhat, but newer ripping--especially of newer games--is going to be more strongly frowned upon. Existing rips are strongly encouraged to removed ripped material; many authors have already done this, to their credit.
As a community, here are a few things we can do to improve the situation all around:
- Refuse to buy other people's code or icons taken from their game. Some authors sell their icons, but very few sell their code. (Neither can be sold if it's a fan game!) Don't assume a seller has the rights to whatever they're peddling, and don't settle for making a rip-based game.
- Turn in rippers--to the original author if possible, where they can in turn take it to Dantom via e-mail. We don't mean people who have rip-based games, but those who sell the code that made it possible. If you see someone charging for stolen code in a hub entry, let someone know, and tell them which hub entry it is (such as GokuBlahBlah.DBZcodeonly1dime). A lot of this has happened off the forums, in games hub moderators have tended not to frequent, so we don't always see it.
- Don't play rips, or at least avoid them, and encourage the authors of ripped games to "go legit".
- Never ever pay for anything in a fan game. The author doesn't have the right to ask for money for it. But regular games are fine, and we encourage everyone to support their authors with your donations and subscriptions. Paypal is (somewhat) available for this as well as what's left of the BYONDime system.
- Please avoid posting any hub/game abuse problems to the forums. The pager, e-mail, and BYOND support (http://www.byond.com/support) are the best ways to deal with this.
- Don't forget, BYOND staff and even Dantom will never ask for your password. Anyone who does, and claims to be BYOND staff or Dantom, is a fraud. Most of these scams are done via AIM or other services where screen names can't be controlled, so these usually aren't worth reporting unless the person reveals their true key. However if someone tries to scam you this way over the BYOND pager or in a game, using an official-looking key, please do report this so we can ban them right away.
- Remember the BYOND staff are limited in number and can only deal with so many problems at once. If you can, try to deal with any problems you have privately. (And we beg of you, please don't post pager logs to the forums. They prove very little and usually people forget to edit out all the language.) If private action fails, try to work with the game's author and have them contact BYOND staff (http://www.byond.com/support) if necessary. And if that doesn't work, you can contact BYOND staff yourself.
Thank you all for your attention and your participation in the BYOND community. With your help it can be a better place for everyone.
Lummox JR