Er, the current rules only went up today because we are slow. Before then there was a category for ROM Hacking and everything so there was really nothing saying "no groups related to this". :/ Besides, reading the rules or not, debating its need is a perfectly legitimate thing to do.
That said! I made a longer post in reply and then my browser froze and I lost it so I'll do this point form. :(
→ If we could give notice and a reason every time we deleted a social group, we would. Honestly, I really wish it would give us the option to add a reason that would show to at least the maintainer of each group. But alas it must be done manually and PMing every single maintainer whose group ends up deleted would add 30 minutes onto the time it'd take overall. x_x; vBulletin's social groups system is really primitive and awkward.
→ The first thing we noticed when social groups were cleaned out and retried was that the general quality of the ROM Hacking groups were... ridiculously lower than other groups. The only reason we could tell some of them were ROM Hacking related at all was because they'd been put in that category. That's not to say all were like this but the intelligible ones seemed few and far between.
→ Only a handful were active groups. Most had maybe two members and about 3 discussion threads, none of which had any posts. :/ These are the ones that could *easily* be part of a general ROM Hacking group. Most acted simply as adverts for their games and sigs and actual threads on the forums are more than enough.
→ For the few that DID use their groups as a recruitment centre, a place to organize jobs, etc., that's more legitimate but... still, don't you guys (at least in ROM Hacking) have threads for that? If it's really a LOT easier to do it in a dedicated social group, we'll look into it again but I know I'll at least need some convincing. :(
→ I honestly have no answer on the Game Dev aspect. v_v I will admit to not being the most knowledgeable. If there's really no place you guys can have a thread on the forums to recruit and discuss things with your team, that sounds more like a fault of the forums than lack of social groups. If there's demand for something like that in Game Dev, by all means let the mods know so they decide exactly how they'd want it to work and can pass up the suggestion to the higher staff.
→ The reason the rules changed so abruptly? There's two reasons. First is that the new rules were supposed to go live at the same time as when we wiped the social groups clean. But because "democratically" voting on rules and whatnot takes absolutely forever during the summer when the higher staff is pretty busy with RL stuff, it just didn't happen in a timely fashion and I finally noticed they hadn't been posted yet and went ahead to do that today.
→ Buuuut even if they had been posted before, we'd still have changed the rules and pulled the ROM/Game Dev category for some of the reasons highlighted above. :( Honestly, the place looked more like a spampit than anything but if we can figure out a way to filter out the legitimate groups from the ones that just look like spam, we'll probably look into bringing it back in some capacity.
I... think that's everything I wanted to cover.
