This page used to be the page for the entire ROMHacking subforum which allowed me to navigate to any of the subforums within ROMHacking painlessly and without having to scroll past the useless parts of PC to get to it. Now it is blank and I have to go to the homepage and scroll to find the ROMHacking stuff which is now buried in with Fangames. Please restore it.
Fangames and ROMHacking will appear to be similar to people not involved in either activity, but they are so different that it is frankly stupid to group them together. The resources, tutorials, knowledge, etc. for putting together a fangame are completely irrelevant to ROMHacking and vice versa. The forums are not about high level game design concepts that would apply to both disciplines (like map design, pacing, etc.) and are much more technical and "zoomed in" and thus there is no benefit to putting the two together. Much of the time, technical limits prevent even the use of fangame tilesets/graphics from being used as-is in a ROMHack, as they often have way more colors than they should or are otherwise not formatted correctly. Likewise, ROMHacking tilesets/graphics are put together in a way that are inconvenient for a Fangame to use, as tilesets are often cut up to make space and have to play around technical limits that are simply not present for a Fangame.
Furthermore (and perhaps most importantly), I believe putting the two communities under the same header will confuse newcomers and make it more difficult for the uninitiated to discern the two. I know that when I first rolled into the community all those years ago
I was initially a bit confused, and the two communities were under a separate header then!
Also, sort of related, but how many times are we going to reshuffle the ROMHacking sections? We're obviously not going to find an ideal if we haven't found one in this many iterations. What is the actual endgame goal with messing with it? Where was the input from the community on both merging us with Fangames and changing the Scrapbox/Beginner's Lounge/Launchpad again? At this point, you might as well just scatter the various ROMHacking subforums around randomly and abolish the rules in each of them, as much of the original intent of the individual subforums has been whittled away or bastardized over the years diminishing their overall usefulness and usability greatly.
I hate to say this, but while our mods (in the ROMHacking subforum) are great people and fun to have around, they make for poor mods. Sorry guys, you know I love you all, but enough is enough. I've gotta criticize how the ROMHacking section has been run for the past few years. It's just a ton of unnecessary and demonstrably disruptive reshuffles, an easing of the rules which contributes to the low-quality of posts, and a disregard for community feedback (when asking for feedback before making changes even occurs to the modteam). The fact that our mods seem to be all in Europe also hurts the ROMHacking section, as we have no one moderating during primetime in the Americas, leaving trolling and poor etiquette (or simply misplaced posts) to sit for hours before being noticed and dealt with. RichterSnipes' Firered Throwback thread is a testament to this. Those troll posts sat for hours, and were frequent enough and disruptive enough that he requested the thread be closed for a time. I'm not saying instant action by the mods is expected in these situations, but the distribution of the modteam leaves much to be desired. Even one mod in the Americas would've been able to deal with that much more quickly and perhaps RichterSnipes wouldn't've felt that his only recourse was to take matters in his own hands and have the thread closed when the modteam repeatedly failed him.
But seriously, what good has the current modteam done other than
sometimes running the events that we've
always had? I can't think of one change that they've made that has made a positive impact on me or on the community at large, or one original/unique event that they've started that has had any staying power. You
might be able to count the Community Hack, but that literally took years to materialize and it remains to be seen if it will be successful. They don't even keep the subforum rules updated, so nobody knows when they suddenly decide that double-posting is okay, or loosen the requirements for posting certain things in certain forums, or even who to contact for help. I mean, the Research and Development subforum still has a link to Christos in its rules (which is dead, by the way). I don't even know if Christos is still around, since a bunch of the mods around the community abuse their name change privileges and it's impossible to keep tabs on who's who after multiple, multiple name changes unless you go back through their post history and remember a different name posting that.
And I don't want this post to sit and not make the mods aware that I have made these criticisms, so I'm going to ping them in this spoiler. Again, love you guys as people, and I regret that it's come to the point where I have to air these grievances with the jobs you've done, but it's gotta come out.
Also, I had no idea who Gust or colors was at first glance. Name changes should be more restrictive for mods than regular/supporter users. They need name recognition and a sense of continuity within the subforums they moderate.
