We’ve been having unstructured conversation in General about the possibility of opening t/suki to the public. I’ve been pretty undecided on whether or not t/suki should be invite-only forever.
The benefits of being open to the public mean that we have several more possibilities open to us that we could provide as a benefit to streamers and game developers, like:
We could add categories and channels for developers and streamers.
Categories would be like having a mini-forum. Forums are usually otherwise difficult and costly to set up as a developer, if you want to use something other than what’s provided by your platform (like itch.io or Steam). We could share the costs of running the instance, including not just software but also human work like moderation (if that’s desired).
Channels would be like having an alternative to a Discord server, increasing our ability to be a compelling alternative to Discord.
It would be much easier to grow membership, increase activity, and reach more people.
But it also means:
Git hosting would either be accessible to everyone (and I would no longer feel comfortable with the current soft quota limits) or there would need to be some kind of automated or manual application process to gain access.
We have to do a lot more work to deal with bots, spammers, scammers, etc.
in general it's a bit of a catch 22 because it would make sense to host dev-adjacent communities of devs and streamers once tsuki is already big, not prone to being dominated by streamer-specific stuff, and can deal with the moderation workload of having many unvetted users join, but also, dev/streamer communities could help tsuki get to that point
I also like the invite-only culture, and would like to have it for longer, or at least see how far it can go.
I think it can also make it more appealing for some folks to join and become active. It’s a point of honour (even if a small one) to be invited, and the positive effect it has on the community, in terms of friendliness and quality of discussion, is attractive as well.
It may be a good idea to eventually open tsuki to registration, and I’ll support your decision to do it when you do, but in my opinion it would make sense to get there rather gradually. I presume we wouldn’t want a small community to become overshadowed by one or two streamers’ following, or disruptive users.
Another way I could see to start getting the benefits you mentioned is to have streamers with smaller, known good communities post invite links with shorter lifetimes (not 90 days but maybe 3-5 days?) in their twitch chat and such. That way folks we generally know to be friendly could join at TL1, and the potential numbers of disruptive users would remain manageable.
The streamers could get their own chat channels and possibly categories - though I’d be cautious to not flood the list of categories (and category view on the homepage) with streamer-specific stuff. Are subcategories a thing?
I dunno about the specifics, but yeah. This currently feels to me like this wonderful, idealized world, like every time I go to this forum it’s like a time machine where I get to use the internet during an era when people weren’t crazy. I used to go on the Mario World Central forums when I was far too young, and gained an appreciation fast for the kind of amazing work people could do from around the world, when united on a manageable scale.
The AI scraping and DDoSing going on, along with just the training of data, scares the living daylights of me. I know they’re reading and using these words for it, probably, which stinks!! In some ways, I almost wish the forum were even more private, like it couldn’t even be publically read by the robo-goons.
Being here has already paid dividends, and I hope I can repay some of the rewards I’ve reaped just by being a good community member.
But my reservations about the forum being public come from the following, which may not be assumed as true and I gladly ask that you challenge me on, as necessary:
Good culture online these days is hard to find; harder to maintain. The way everything scales means bad actors can work their way in pretty easy without notice. That is a way harder issue to solve as site-runners compared to slow growth, which I contend isn’t really an issue.
I like the idea of being invite-only mainly because right now, the forum is still pretty new, and I think it’ll be better to try and fix up and improve the forum before releasing it to the public. Plus, it’s easier to manage the community right now, mainly because the people here are supporting each other positively, and I think that maybe down the line, when you have more time, you can have some form of management and security measures to prevent griefing.
I’m torn. The big argument for making it public is how good that’s gone with the discord being pubic, but even then this space has felt more cozy to me than that one.
It woud mean an increased workload, which I’m not sure how that’d work, but forums have obvious handled in the past. I’m kinda growth-agnostic, both small and big communities can be great.
I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days, and I want to say I think I agree that right now doesn’t feel like the right time to open t/suki to the public. I don’t think I want to rule it out indefinitely, but we can revisit that conversation later.
On the topic of actually going the other direction, however…
…I surprisingly found myself open to the idea of making the forum only accessible if you were logged in as I thought about it more. However, I don’t really want to do it because it goes against one of the reasons I wanted to make a forum in the first place. I’ve found that as Discord has expanded its reach, when you’re looking for information or help on something you now sometimes run into a “join our discord” call to action instead. So much information gets locked behind closed doors.
I don’t want t/suki to become another place like that, where knowledge, wisdom, and advice is only available to those willing to make their presence known in a chat room and then trudge through disorganized chat logs. Being able to explore and learn freely by reading forums I wasn’t a part of was one of the things I loved about the internet growing up. It let me decide which forums I wanted to be a part of too, because I only needed to make an account if I wanted to post.
I think there’s a balance we can achieve here though. We could install Anubis to require a proof of work before the site is accessed, to make it costly for scrapers to read our website but still keep the forum available for everyone to view. Proof-of-work also comes with its downsides, as it could become an impediment to people with computers that aren’t very powerful. However, I believe Anubis handles this situation well, at least as far as the current arms race is concerned.
I wouldn’t mind Anubis (or similar) to keep the darned scrapers away. But if it hampers people from being able to use the forum… that probably isn’t worth the trade
I made a topic to discuss Anubis more, since it’s a bit too off-topic for this one. I’ve provided some information about who exactly it would affect there.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about another way to open the community to more people that is somewhere between public registration and invite-only.
In addition to describing t/suki on the homepage (which right now only has t/suki’s logo), I’m thinking that we could add a public application for people to apply to join. In the application, we could ask users to:
Provide one of:
A public link to a game they were involved in making.
A public link to a piece of media (blog post, video, etc) they made about games.
A public link to a streaming channel where they play or make games.
Some kind of proof that they are who they claim to be.
Applicants would then be accepted based on our ability to verify their identity and whether or not the content of the link they provided is acceptable based on our community moderation standards.
I want to attract more people who not only make games, but also those who write or talk about them. I think the barrier to entry is low enough to not be a serious impediment (we’re not asking the applicant to do some special one-off thing for us) while being high enough to avoid most malicious users.
Think it’s good! There’s a risk that people (or bots) will use LLMs to fil out the form, but I don’t know how big it is and they’d stand out eventually.
I think that’s a nice idea, if we can also invite users, so that those without publications or broadcasts (especially gamedev beginners) still have a chance to join if we can vet them.
What’s an example of a proof of identity you can think of?
Yes, joining the forum through invites would still be allowed. The application would be an additional way to gain access to the forum.
When I say “proof of identity” I mean some way to verify that the person making the application is the same as the person who made the work in the link that was provided in the application. I’m not interested in verifying government identity; I just want to make sure they are not impersonating someone.
I’m not sure how this would work, but something like a file hosted at a specific endpoint on their website that says they applied to join t/suki would work. Or maybe we can reach out to them after the application has been made and ask them to post a special verification secret in some place that we deem acceptable. Maybe there’s a better way? It would be nice to let users do this upfront upon applying instead of us manually reaching out to do identity verification.
For me, I think the main point of contention is that I’d like a balance to be struck to be open to people eager to participate while also keeping the community very tight. I do think this proof-of-identity stuff is in the right direction. However, I personally know a lot of game devs who like to remain anonymous beyond their handle for their own reasons. The endpoint idea might work but at the same time a lot of people don’t have the means to manage their own websites. This might be silly but it could even be as simple as secret phrase on a well-known account.
I wonder if there are some positive, working examples of this we can take inspiration from?
Funnily enough, the only thing that comes to mind for me are certain private trackers. The “better” ones require several soft criteria to be met such as:
Be vetted by a well established member
Require commitment of some value to the community
Usually content that is not available to them or proof of a good reputation in other communities
Score an interview with the moderators (honestly not that common)
Generally, I think it would be better to have a wide range of soft criteria over a smaller range of hard criteria.
Well, to elaborate more on what I mentioned in my previous post, I think a verification secret posted in some acceptable place (Twitch channel description, GitHub description, etc) would be fine too. The only problem with such an arrangement is that it would require us to have a four step process (applicant applies, we screen the application, we send out email stating the secret, applicant tells us when/where secret is posted) instead of two steps (applicant applies, we screen the application) so that we know the applicant didn’t just use some text that was already posted by the person they are impersonating.
Maybe we can have instructions that tell the user how to make their own verification code that is very unlikely to have been written by someone already?
@generalred, as for “Require commitment of some value to the community”, could you elaborate on what you mean? Are you suggesting that applicants make some kind of content specifically and only for t/suki? I’m not sure if I like that. One of the reasons I suggested a link to some existing content that the applicant has already created is that I don’t want the application burden to be high; if someone gets rejected, that’s a lot of time that someone may have spent and I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.
I would be happy to conduct “score an interview with the moderators”, but this seems time consuming, especially for a single person (me!). I would be interested in organizing some kind of “intake committee” to evaluate applications and conduct interviews. Although, admittedly, this does not seem feasible until the membership base is larger or more active.
I guess it’s contingent on what the proof ultimately ends up being and how its done. You’re right that it’s a lengthy process. At the end of the day, I think my main constraints were that it had to be both accessible, as in not needing a large amount of technical literacy or money, and easily verifiable. Maybe it can be as simple as a phrase used in the application and that must also be included in something shared >24 hours (to beat timezone spoofing) afterwards. I’m not sure, I guess it’s a really cryptic and odd thing to ask for.
I didn’t mean to imply “Require commitment of some value to the community” was something that could apply here. I mentioned it only for completeness of the private tracker example. I agree that it’s a lot to ask for, especially if the request is ultimately rejected. Maybe something similar could be used though, but only as a question in the application. Literally, “what are you interested in sharing in t/suki”? It doesn’t need more commitment beyond that.
As for interviews, yeah it’s probably not realistic. I’m not so sure about an intake community either. I think that could potentially make people targets of harassment.
