From the Admin's Desk news

Here I am again with yet more stuff from the staff. Today's lesson is on our mod authing, banning and archiving process. I apologise for the length of this post, but it's a complicated bit of how the site works.

As you may know, all mods need to be approved by one of our moderation team before they show up on the site. Many mods make it through this process without trouble, but sadly there are many which simply don't meet our criteria for listing. Or, to put it more accurately, they do something which is against our 'do not do' list.

The most common problem is not having a website, or having a website which comprises only of forums. To clarify this point once and for all: Your mod must have a working website which is more than just a set of forums. If a mod doesn't meet our criteria (Which are all listed when you register one), then it's banned and hence doesn't appear in the database. You have a chance to get your mod unbanned and thus listed alongside everything else by simply fixing the problems and letting us know.

The next big thing I want to talk about is dealing with dead mods. I know many of you complain about this quite frequently, so I'm going to tell you what we do about them. A dead mod is one which hasn't been updated, and has no development taking place. Here's how we manage them:

After 6 months of inactivity (Defined as no profile updates, news posts, image additions, basically anything which shows up on modWatch) a mod is automatically flagged up for review by the staff. We then look through the profile and the mod's website in order to determine if the mod is actually dead, or if they are simply ignoring their Mod DB profile. The decision is then made to either leave the mod, in which case we click a button and it's left alone for another 6 months; or to archive the mod.

Dead mods are archived, which makes them effectively vanish from the site unless you are looking specifically for them. They don't show up in searches or any random rotations, and are only accessible by visiting the mod's profile directly. Once archived. a mod stays archived until something happens to it. This way somebody resurrecting a mod can do so without needing to re-register it. We never archive fully released mods for any reason (And they don't show up in our automatic review process), however if there is a mod which is set as released but is nothing more than an alpha then it will be archived.

Finally, deleting mods. We delete mods if they are still pending authorisation and haven't got back to us within a few weeks. If a mod has been authed, it will ony be deleted at the request of the mod leader and if we believe it makes sense to delete it.

I hope this has clarified some points for you. If you have any questions about this, leave a comment in this news post and I'll answer as many as I can.