Developers can delete posts from news? WTH? Thread

Why do you let developers delete other peoples' posts from the news?
Not letting developers delete pots is especially important in the latest scamstarter age...
I was asking the new road rash kickstarter developers when they are going to show an in game gameplay videos? Not realizing the video they posted was claimed as gameplay video.
I can see the video they posted is not gameplay video since everything is synched to perfection which would be really hard for a player to do so in real gameplay.
The fact that when he shot the shot gun the car window past in a split second and it's window got shattered is just a hint for that. There were other things.
It is ok to post scriptted video as concept of gameplay, but they pretend this is real gameplay.
Maybe I am wrong, but then they could have replied instead of deleting my post.

But anyway, the whole indie industry is mostly hype and scam based, just like the industry. The very thing indies claim is wrong about AAA titles is being done by most other indies.
You can still rate comments and hide them if they are low, but why give developer censorship power? It doesn't make sense...

I agree with this. If developers can censor their news, what are we left with?

Say a member or guest spams your news post with something irrelevant or a fight breaks out and you want the comments to be about the post. Being able to control the comments is what makes our site different. Do most people abuse it? No. One example is unfortunate sure but not worth changing a fundamental feature of the site.

Also what post in particular are you talking about?

Henley wrote: Say a member or guest spams your news post with something irrelevant or a fight breaks out and you want the comments to be about the post.

Flagging and moderation; this is what the karma system was for.

Well yea, if someone spam then the readers can downrate and hide his comment.
The post that was deleted was on the road redemption road rash remake latest news.
To be honest, even if the road redemption are super talented super experienced team as they claim in the video, they havn't done much to show their talent. Their entire content they created(not show other games from other companies they "worked" on) is a single cut scene video and a few 3D models.
You would think a team of such immense talent could have produced a little more content for their kickstarter.

What bothers me is all you need is a nice video that could also be done in 3DSMax and pretend this is from your prototype and get thousands of dollars in kickstarter.
Maybe I should call it... kicksucker.

ambershee wrote:

Henley wrote: Say a member or guest spams your news post with something irrelevant or a fight breaks out and you want the comments to be about the post.

Flagging and moderation; this is what the karma system was for.

I have about 2 people I can reliably impose any sort of moderation too, simply because people who get admin permissions normally go bonkers with it after a while. This is why developers need to moderate their own pages, I will tell them this if they complain about someone posting things on their pages.

PompiPompi wrote: Well yea, if someone spam then the readers can downrate and hide his comment.
The post that was deleted was on the road redemption road rash remake latest news.
To be honest, even if the road redemption are super talented super experienced team as they claim in the video, they havn't done much to show their talent. Their entire content they created(not show other games from other companies they "worked" on) is a single cut scene video and a few 3D models.
You would think a team of such immense talent could have produced a little more content for their kickstarter.

What bothers me is all you need is a nice video that could also be done in 3DSMax and pretend this is from your prototype and get thousands of dollars in kickstarter.
Maybe I should call it... kicksucker.

That is gaming in general, why would it be any different for people looking for funding? The idea being that they want the game to look and feel like this, if they need to do it that is what they need to do.

Let your money speak for itself, you do not like the practice then do not pay for the product. Simple.

Some Developers tend to need slightly higher speck computers , frame rates you would not have with two programs running are NOT the same as framerates they may enjoy with significantly better PC specifications.
(thats mainly as most developers dont wish to wait hours between rendering.)
Also please note some people take critics differently then others..Maybe it seems strange they merely delete posts that offend ... but then your not the one visiting it every week/day to update the page or check for comments.

Henley,
But they said that it is actual gameplay, not concept.
They also claim they are super talented and experienced team but show very little to support this claim.

The issue with this is that the people who invest more time on a video that doesn't necessarily show their talents as game developers or how the game could actually be are the ones who are more likely to get funding.
And just because everyone do it doesn't make it ok.

If there is no difference in this sense of fooling people with hype like AAA games do, why is this site called indieDB? You should called it GamesDB.

Also, you didn't reply to me why hiding low rated comments is not enough and you need to give moderation power to the developers.

The_splat, good computers don't cost $150k

Edited by: PompiPompi

Henley wrote:

ambershee wrote:

Henley wrote: Say a member or guest spams your news post with something irrelevant or a fight breaks out and you want the comments to be about the post.

Flagging and moderation; this is what the karma system was for.

I have about 2 people I can reliably impose any sort of moderation too, simply because people who get admin permissions normally go bonkers with it after a while. This is why developers need to moderate their own pages, I will tell them this if they complain about someone posting things on their pages.

Desura isn't the community website it was five years ago; it's a business now - and as such a suitable number of reliable moderation staff (and respective guidelines to assist them) is something that is expected of the business in order to adequately maintain and administrate the front-end content.

If Game companies feel the need to delete comments they don't like, and others have a similar opinion, aka warz
Well no matter how many comments you delete off one website, they will appear on another and thats worse PR than addressing peoples issues.

Game companies that delete their customers opinions won't be around very long and the only person to blame will be themselves.

That's not really acceptable. Desura is effectively a product vendor, and in allowing a product holder to remove comments and similar from the website, you're allowing them to bypass accountability, both yours and theirs. It's like Amazon without a product review section, or E-bay without a feedback system.

Edited by: ambershee

devs cant delete ratings and reviews afaik, only comments on their pages

Oh how wonderful...
Who is afraid of some bad comments and spam? It's not like this is the first time it happens on the internet...

Some people just can't handle negative comments. I've seen it happen. Heck, I've done it myself once or twice (not proud of it, but...). You get a negative comment on your project/picture/thread about your favorite game and you delete it or mark as spam to make it go away so it seems like people only have good things to say. It's part ego, part fan dumb, part advertising (you'll notice they never show people who don't like product X in X's commercials).

Henley, are you going to address this issue or are you basically saying this website is one big promotion\marketing website disguised as community website?

PompiPompi wrote: Henley, are you going to address this issue or are you basically saying this website is one big promotion\marketing website disguised as community website?

Its always been a bit of both, pimping and community, if we remove one core aspect from the site it becomes nothing more than a marketing site, by allowing comments its more of a community, separate to that, if people have complaints against a game and are unhappy with the devs deleting their posts, go make a complaint about THEM on the public forums were they can not remove posts. The TOS are the same for everyone.

TOS wrote: ModDB is intended as a fun and informational venue where you may promote, share, and discuss subject matter pertinent to game engine addon design. This is not a "Free Speech Forum or Venue"; these are privately owned and operated dynamic content pages that are intended to serve the interests of the addon development community, it is not a pulpit for individual expression of destructive wont, rage and abuse at the expense of others.

If you was to pay to use these services then i would agree with you.

Don't you know the best ad is the one you don't know is an ad? This is basically IndieDB, a pure promotion place disguised as a community.
Abusing the forums and comments, posting spam\porn\whatever is not right and does not contribute to a discussion. But if you let developers delete comments then you might as well remove comments all together.
Maybe you can have a random compliment generator so people could write a compliment to the game with a click of a button.

There is a comment rating system which given enough low rating hides the comment. A person that sees the comment is hidden will usually realize this is a negative rant or spam. Give him the choice to read this comment or not.

Also Henely, if you admit people going bonkers given mod powers, doesn't that mean that you are saying developers will go bonkers with their mod options?

If your not happy with the site, no one is forcing you to use it.

TKAzA wrote: If your not happy with the site, no one is forcing you to use it.

While, perhaps, a bad way to put it, this is essentially the gist of things. This family of websites, IndieDB/ModDB/Desura, is primarily intended for developers, as a place to get together to cooperate, talk shop, recruit, and pimp their products. If a developer wants to shoot themselves in the foot through dishonest practices, there's not much Desura can do beyond making sure said developer isn't breaking any laws or any of Desura's rules.

A game's profile is as much the domain (you can almost read that as "property") of a developer as your profile is yours, and Desura can't just step in and take control just because a developer is, say, deleting negative comments, any more than they could if you did.

And they can't have moderators who go around, say, deleting pages just because they don't agree with how the developer in charge of that page behaves, which is at least part of what Henley was talking about when he mentioned mods going bonkers with their powers. It's as much for the protection of developers as it is Desura.

Basically, Desura has no control over what a developer does as long as no laws are broken and the Terms of Use are adhered to.

You may or may not like that, but it is what it is.

PompiPompi wrote: Also Henely, if you admit people going bonkers given mod powers, doesn't that mean that you are saying developers will go bonkers with their mod options?

I tend to find developers get lazy and mostly forget to moderate their own profiles. They do not have the powers that admins have, they can only remove comments. I do not see why it is an issue to allow developers to do such a thing, we do not have the staff required for 100% moderation so the simple step is allow people to do it themselves.

PompiPompi wrote: Henley, are you going to address this issue or are you basically saying this website is one big promotion\marketing website disguised as community website?

ModDB and IndieDB are promotional tools for developers yes, it allows people to create a profile then create a community around it. Saying we are anything else is not really noticing what the site is. We do not disguise the fact at all, I mean the homepage is all developer created news, if that is not promotional materials I do not know what is.

ambershee wrote: That's not really acceptable. Desura is effectively a product vendor, and in allowing a product holder to remove comments and similar from the website, you're allowing them to bypass accountability, both yours and theirs. It's like Amazon without a product review section, or E-bay without a feedback system.

Comments are just comments. Reviews cannot be removed by developers. It is no different than them being able to control their own forums.

PompiPompi wrote: Also, you didn't reply to me why hiding low rated comments is not enough and you need to give moderation power to the developers.

If someone drew an ascii penis on your profile then created multiple accounts to rate it up (its happened before) would you not like to be able to remove said ascii penis? Just being able to adjust karma by one is not enough in a lot of cases, the amount of times people have used this for evil vs actual moderation is very very VERY low. Even when you say it is being abused a lot of the time it is one opinion over another so who can say what is good.

ambershee wrote: Desura isn't the community website it was five years ago; it's a business now - and as such a suitable number of reliable moderation staff (and respective guidelines to assist them) is something that is expected of the business in order to adequately maintain and administrate the front-end content.

All the other sites work the same way, I used to run all the development sites, now I run Desura full time. It takes me all day just to maintain the site. Moderating individual pages is not what we do, we have never done it like that, developers have ALWAYS been able to remove comments, since the very first time comments were implemented.

How about you give developers the option to hide a comment instead of removing it?

Edit: How about you make a poll asking:
"In the comments section of a news post. Would you rather developer to be able to:
1) delete user comment.
2) hide user comment.
3) Neither hide nor delete user comment."

And developers are not lazy to delete comments, they just don't care to have negative comments. It's better to give people the option to express themselves and vent out rather than delete their comment. Of course is long as they don't link porn\spam\malware.

Edited by: PompiPompi

Suppose for a moment that the ability to delete comments is taken away. How are the other 99% of developers who were behaving honestly going to deal with things like ascii penises, or porn, or spam, warez, or anything like that? As Henley said, the karma system may not be enough to deal with them. Even in the event it is, such things are better removed to get rid of clutter that would get in the way of things like, say, constructive criticism.

You're advocating the removal of a tool that has numerous uses for both developers and Desura staff because a small number are shooting themselves in the foot. You need to at least consider the ramifications of doing so.

You seem to ignore what I was suggesting, but I will say it again.
Instead of a delete ability, just make a hide ability. I don't talk about hiding due to low rating, just that the developer will have the option to hide the comment with a click of a button. But if someone wish to see the comment he can do so on his own risk.
Links can be disabled for the comments, how many times does a commenter need to post a link?

Again, all well and good for dealing with someone saying your product sucks. But even hidden, the ascii penises are still going to be there, they're still going to be cluttering the profile, they're still going to be annoying the developer. A hide feature is still going to leave them there and anyone trying to read the comments is going to have to slog through however many "hidden" comments just to find something worthwhile.

You seem to ignore what me and Henley say, but I will say it again.
A game's profile is the personal property of the developer(s) that created it. It's up to them to manage it, and they have the right to deal with it however they want. It is as good as being a separate website that just so happens to connect to the IndieDB/ModDB homepage.

Oh, the hidden Penis. That is what is holding us back? A hidden Penis?
If someone is too sensitive to ASCII penises, he can choose to not look at any hidden comment.
I don't think there are going to be thousands of hidden penises cluttering the comments. A developer cannot delete penises that fast anyway.
What if someone will spam your comments like faster than you can delete them?
Better disable comments altogether.

To be honest, if the developer can delete comments I would prefer comments will be disabled all together. I am more annoyed by fanboy comments posting false promotion and lies than ASCII penises.

Your game profile is not your private property, Henley can delete whatever you do on a whim.