Hi and thanks for your concern.My email might have seemed dismissive and condescending. I apologise, this was not the intent. (I’m not particularly known for my politeness and eloquence)You/someone you know emailed me about a disruptive user in the SFMLab comments section. While I did not immediately take action, I certainly do not appreciate some of the comments said user made. However, this is a daily occurrence on SFMLab, as it is on the internet at large. While your email did not necessarily prompt this, I did receive multiple emails about this user, culminating in a site wide ban. Let me stress this also: I do not feel it’s right to ban someone “because someone else says they’ve been a meany head”. It’s acceptable when there’s more objective evidence he’s a fucking unreasonable motherfucker.
The SFMLab comments section
This is not new information. Give people an online receptacle for their opinion, and they’ll shit in it before you can say “I’d like to interject for a moment…” - Some people would argue I made the wrong decision of adding a comments section to SFMLab. And there’s enough evidence to prove that it might not have been the best call I’ve made. It’s part of the reason why I chose not to include one for Smutbase. Nobody complaining about that comments section, because there isn’t any. But there’s actually enough people who are dissatisfied with that because they can’t contact uploaders directly, or provide meaningful feedback. Their messages end up in our Discord (shoutout to all the wonderful people helping eachother out in there), or worse, they get sent to my inbox, where they are then told to post to Discord or go away.
As a software developer, I feel strongly about two things. First thing is: any code or project should be self documenting. If any of you are programmers, you’ll know this is not always (rarely) the case. And that’s why the second thing I believe in, namely: failing any documentation from the operator, any project should allow for public discourse, in order to let the people who care/community document the project. Every upload on SFMLab is essentially a project. Which is why SFMLab has a comments section, if you get my meaning.
The SFMLab/Smutbase Discord
It’s why I discourage people solving problems through private messages or chats. Knowledge shared in private is lost knowledge, unless those who are “in the know” choose to share this information unprompted. People search the internet through a variety of search engines to find specific solutions that might be obvious. But this only works if the information were publicly available. You can’t find information that wasn’t discussed in a public forum/space. The SFMLab comments section has tremendous value when people point out known issues with uploads or point out which rigs work on a specific model.
It’s also why the Discord is an imperfect way of helping people out. People come in, get condescending comments from some more veteran users, get directed towards the actual support channels and then ask their question. Then, maybe, get their answer. And once that answer is there, it scrolls up in the chat history, never to be seen again. Not searchable. Remaining undocumented.
There is one major downside to public comments, and it’s that a lot of people don’t know how other people work. This I can understand, because I’m often a difficult person to deal with in personal/work life as I was reminded last friday. (don’t fucking ask) People are weird, strange and scary. Especially those you don’t know and who have opinions that don’t match with your own. Some of them may be furries. I fucking hate furry shit, I hate what it represents, but let’s be reasonable; These people are just weird, and they’re trying their best in life. Which is a sentence you can use to describe me just in the same way, which is why I don’t use it as a measurement of someone’s value.
Over the internet, you don’t see who someone is, you’re not involved in a person’s life, and it’s much easier to disregard another human being’s personal circumstances. Personally, I try to put in the time and size people up. Daily occurence: people join our Discord; they don’t fit in, conversation seems hostile, they send messages that don’t match the tone of the channels in general. Other regulars seem to reject them. What’s happening? Are they underage, trying to fit in? Do they have a social deficiency, or do they need more time to read the channels and get used to our pace? And that’s just the people who don’t necessarily come in to just stir shit. Those get banned as soon as someone notices.
And there comes a point where public forums just don’t work. The SFMLab forums were a bad example of public discourse. There were only a few sections to the SFMLab forums that mattered. The support section and the requests section. The rest didn’t matter. Major problems: disconnection and moderation.
The SFMLab forums were disconnected from the rest of the site. It was just a different section. Whatever you posted there, didn’t fucking matter, because it wasn’t reflected on the rest of the site. Ideally, you would want the SFMLab comments to be their own threads. Similar to how the Steam Workshop works. You can have multiple threads regarding an upload/workshop item. This way, specific model questions are contained to their upload section, and they don’t clutter up the main board. You can then also easily bundle feedback/problems with specific models. More general questions could still have their forum, but it would leave less shit cluttering up the main page. Shit would be searchable but contained. I can even imagine uploaders having control over their own “upload forums” so to speak. Where they would be able to moderate their own comments sections. (which would mean significant implementation work, but that’s a different topic)
Second problem: moderation. Me being me, I strongly believe in free and open discussion. As such, I’ve always favored an unmoderated approach. (I understand why people might take offense to this in <current year>, but I’ll gladly debate this subject with you in #news-politics on our discord when I have the time) I’m in favor of giving people tools to use them for good, while knowing that they may be used to do unconstructive/bad/evil shit. People also asked for ways to share more long form guides and have slower paced discussion. Which is why SFMLab had a forum. At the time it made sense. But it became a place where people primarily used the requests section. People asked for the most basic shit. Not even abusive shit. Just shit they could have googled or thought about for more than 1 minute. There were tutorials and guides that could have helped them. I’d much rather help people with their own ports, but no, that’s not what the forums were used for.
“Please port this model, here is the XPS version.”, “I’m looking for some recolor of this Five nights at Freddy character” or “Please can someone port this anime bullshit for me.” And finally: “can someone please make a model of this clearly underage person for me, I’ll pay money.”
Clearly people didn’t share their knowledge, nor did they use the tools at their disposal to create these models. The knowledge was there. On the forums. I posted several tutorials myself. Other people did too. But when people just stopped reading instructions the instructions and skipped right to the requests sections to get instant gratification, hoping that someone would pickup their stupid shit, you can’t expect the learning cycle to work. Clearly that’s my fault for expecting people to be fucking curious and interested. Clearly people are the fucking worst and should be hated and shot down. Put to the wall and shot for their desire for happiness. Clearly I fucking failed to deliver them the fucking holy grail of SFM models. Do I need to explain to all 100.000+ SFMLab members to not post requests and just use their own fucking noodle? Use their own time instead of expecting someone to spend five hundred man-hours to deliver the holy grail of Tekken character models? No. That doesn’t work. People used the forums like that, and that only works when people are willing to reply in a similar way. That’s not reasonable. I appointed mods, but that did nothing to lessen the workload. Nobody would go there because nobody wanted to be the auto-reply.
Should the SFMLab comments even exist
My personal opinion: no. I find no value in the SFMLab comments section as it is today. People usually only post reactionary shit; whether or not the port sucks, the character sucks or whether or not all furries need to be put to death. It’s a waste of my fucking time. I’ve got enough experience with SFM that I know how most of this shit works without needing the comments section. Secondly I have lost interest in SFM itself. SFM as a product is a dead-end technology. It was great, but the lack of continued development (especially on the tool/engine side of things) has doomed it. When I have the time (which isn’t often these days 😞) I spend my time on Blender, because I strongly believe in open source software, and their open development practices. I have a good understanding of the software, can contribute fixes should I need to, and can get great results compared to SFM. And most importantly: I can use it on Linux with 100% support.
But I can’t just turn off the comments section. It’s a vital part of what I believe to be important about SFMLab as a resource for people to use. I believe that people who want to get help or provide feedback, will be able to contact uploaders. But I also believe that people who crave a safe space or a hand to guide them along, will not find it there. SFMLab is helpful to for everyone who is able to cut through the bullshit. With or without comments section.
I’ve completely dropped SFM as a tool that I care about. So why does SFMLab still exist? Because of the community of people who use it, port shit, and help others keep it alive. And, because SFMLab is actually a valuable resource TO EVERYONE. I can not willfully pull the plug on a valuable online resource. The GMod, VRChat, MMD, XPS and other online communities depend on it as well. Should SFMLab every be taken down, it is my goal to upload everything to archive.org or some other “lasting archive” - because I am certain people will be searching for character models on here years in the future. So far I’ve spend about 4+ years of my life on this site, and that’s not something I can say about many things. I have a fulltime job as a webdev now, and it’s very difficult to justify the time I put into the site, as it was essentially a fulltime job for me a little more than two years ago. As long as the wonderful people who support the site on patreon cover most of the server costs, I will continue to put in the effort to keeping it online and usable. As such, I find that this whole discussion about the comments section is also a personal struggle for me, as this is not the first time this issue has come up. And now that I’ve had less time to dedicate to it than ever, it becomes a very difficult conversation to have with myself also.
Summary
I care about SFMLab, the content it provides and its users. I understand and share your frustration, but I cannot afford the time to moderate the comments section or implement comprehensive moderation systems for uploaders. A significant step that would allow me to afford doing so, is a doubling of the patreon income. An increase of 300 euros per month would allow me to work part-time at my current job. (ie. give me roughly two extra days off per month) That time could go towards implementing new tools that would make SFMLab and Smutbase more usable. But in their current form, and recognizing that SFMLab has never seen above $350 in patreon funds, I don’t see that as a realistic goal. For now, I see only a few options: shutting off the comments section, or fixing minor issues and asking people to ignore/report the bullies en masse.
p.s. the issue regarding the dude with the zalgo/utf-8 spam was mostly solved within minutes after it was brought to my attention; please continue to report security/usability issues to [email protected] or #bugs-and-features on our discord.
