The thing is, I doubt we really want someone in this community who is too lazy to learn how to program and rather take someone else’s hard work. If the creator made the game open source, fine, go learn off of it. But don’t go and change the map, name, and then call it your work. Another thing is most games have bad programming practices in which we wouldn’t want the newer members to learn from.

Releasing an original game’s source code won’t help stop ripping. It will just promote it more as people will come hear knowing they won’t need to learn how to program, but instead take a game’s source code. If you are too lazy to learn how to program then don’t become a programmer. There is plenty of software for the lazy non programmers such as Realty Factory and Game Maker, just to name a few.

Recently we've been mulling over these very issues ourselves, because we'd like to shortly embark on an advertising effort to bring in more good players and developers. The primary deterrent to that is, as many of you have noted, the poor impression the (more vocal) community leaves upon new, potentially great, users.

We've had a lot of discussion over this in the past, and basically it boils down to promoting quality over popularity. I would love to adhere to that ideal. The problem, in a nutshell, is that BYOND is a business as well as a community, and unfortunately we don't have the luxury of thinking purely for the long-term benefits (and profits therein). There are two of us working full-time on this and we are just scraping by on what the memberships and the ads bring, and for better or worse (mostly worse), that income is almost purely due to the masses of the Anime community.

My hope was that by segregating the community into guilds, we could provide a bit of a barrier between the different types of users here. I really have nothing against the Anime crowd here and I hope they might be able to learn a thing or two-- but I think it's just a recipe for disaster to have them interacting with the more mainstream gamers & developers. And vice-versa. But so far this plan hasn't really worked out too well.

The problem, as many have noticed, is that we have such a dominant majority of Anime fans here that they have saturated BYOND. Our userbase gives the illusion of size but the fact is that aside from the Anime we haven't grown much in six or seven years. I do think we have just as many good developers lurking in the wings as we did back in the "heyday" so many fondly remember; it's just that they have a more difficult time being noticed.

We have a few ideas in mind to prep the site for other kinds of users (who we can target through advertising). For instance, I think we could benefit from cleaning up the developer forums quite a bit-- although they don't affect the majority of the community, they've historically been the means of communication for our best users, and we want those guys and gals to feel welcome and stick around. My thinking is that if we went to one of the aforementioned outside sites and posted a link not to BYOND, but to the development site/forums, if at least that were in a state that looked professional (and I think DreamMakers does a good job), that might be enough to give the system a fair shake.

As far as users and games go, absolutely we should be encouraging original (and more importantly, good) games. We've attempted to do this with the banners (which give a much broader selection of games than the popular vote reflects), but that's not working too well. It really boils down to not having the audience for the games we want played, and that is a catch-22 as we need gamers to bring in more gamers. We may be able to alleviate this somewhat through more regular contests and merit-badges for playing different games.

Please continue posting your thoughts on all of this. Given our financial and technical constraints, this is an exceedingly difficult problem.

Those posts that involved programming that is obviously not their own should be deleted on first site. Then again, we are all working on volunteers here and they can only do so much.

Perhaps we could find a volunteer for that section of the forum, just to clear out those type of posts.

A third party website for that kinda thing has already been started. Anyone who does will be referred there; I dare say.

Isolation sounds fine to me if the goal is to get it off of the main forums. Its either refer and isolate, or delete on the spot.

Its not like its excessively demanding to expect people who don't want to be isolated to create their own games.

Perhaps a form to fill out, like in Bug Reports and such? Any posts that don't follow the format get zapped.

BYAND(Build Your Anime Net Dream)? RAYAND(Rip your Anime Net Dream)

I have read a lot of these comments, I mean Isolation I don't think would work out. But like posts inside the Classified ads do get very annoying. "Plase code game? 1 n33d h@lp. I d0 1c0n$?"

Possibly good English language? And a good decent request.
Not like, (plenty of examples in earlier comments. :p) "Ned code 2 complte," or "i need icnr," like stated before, but like, "Looking for a map artist." Although most people are too lazy to type out in proper speech anyways. D;

It's pretty hard to define what a "good" Classified Ads post should be, but I picked a random post from a community I visit which has such a similar forum. I guess this could be an example of what a "semi-good" request could look like.

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/ topic.asp?topic_id=489049

I skimmed these "guide lines" and believe these should be applied to the Classified Ads forum. But not without some editing first to fit the BYOND community.

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/ topic.asp?topic_id=485134

Mechanios: Just because a post may have correct English doesn't make it credible.