[Dr. Greg House]

Hello moderators of this forum, admins, readers, dev-teams, coders, users, server-operators, fennecs,

I find the direction in which all of this is going worrisome. In this post I will point out the things which have caught my attention to my dismay, without any name-calling (as this is unnecessary and everyone knows or everyone who should know knows). I will also present a list of proposals to contain and manage this, because I'm not a Grinch.
The situation as-is is very dire in my opinion. It has reached a point to which I question the purpose of any form of contribution.
Now without further ado...


The current situation:

As many of you know, behind the reach of these forums, there is a huge private sector. It is represented by coders here, as everyone "in the biz" has an alliedmods account. In this private sector, people are being scammed, and licenses are being violated.
Scamming happens either in form of over-payment, or by claiming authorship of a plugin. Plugins written are almost all badly coded and riddled with the following flaws:
-Prone to errors and crashes, particularly race conditions, but beginner mistakes in general
-Reduced readability (making it hard for an actual coder to fix things, if things are salvageable, which they are usually NOT)
-Bad coding style

Many times plugins are being distributed without their source code, which violates sourcemod's license.

Clients/Server-ops, unable to code by themselves (why they rely on help in the first place), are unable to verify the quality and origin of the plugins, and depend on the coder in question. This need of trust is being abused to the point where sourcemod has evolved into a platform where the ones profiting are not the community in general or the player base, but those few con-artists who openly laugh about the current situation and rub their hands in excitement, thinking of how dumb (not my words) the mods must be to let this happen.

This goes beyond the reach of the private sector, and delves into these forums in many aspects.
One is that even here, plugins are being (mass-)uploaded under incompatible licenses. Now I understand that the term of "derivative work" is somewhat hazy and complicated, but to my point of understanding the legal violation itself happens as soon as the plugin that carries the incompatible license is being compiled. Interesting enough, this makes the forum compiler and therefore Alliedmods an accessory to the violation of their own license.
The second example is that those con-artists have some public plugins uploaded here. Many of them, while not nearly as flawed as their private counterparts, are still insanely flawed to the point where they deserve unapproval. Unfortunately this currently does not happen, giving those people a reputation that is invalid. A reputation they abuse to scam further clients. Moreover, the recent approval changes, why completely understandable, good and justified, make this worse, implying that plugins are basically approved of by default (this is how it looks to the reader).
The third example is that a lot of drama is happening here due to this and a lack of moderation. Most moderators are somewhat inactive over the years, some of them have been offered jobs based on the reputation they had here, and are therefore unavailable. As a result of this, a lot of trolling happens, and resolutions, if they may ever happen, are unjust, un-reflected upon and are more like immuno-suppressants work for an infection: They make things appear better for a very short time until they take a turn for the even worse.

Furthermore, elaborating on the lack of moderation, violations of the forum rules are not being pursued. If so, even permanent bans are being lifted (I know of one particular instance where a mod told me it was purely based on not wanting to be molested anymore by the "banee"). Some users here are on their second and third accounts, and some even admit this publicly. The moderation knows about this (usually long before official statements are being made) and decides to not follow the rules. The same goes for intentional(!) license violations not being pursued at all or improperly. As many cooks ruin the dish, everyone seems to act on their own behalf, and posts and proof is often being deleted or lost in the flamewars that emerge from unresolved issues.


Proposals:

Signing of plugins
Signing of plugins can verify their origin. I would like to see the forum compiler sign every plugin that is being uploaded, if it is in the "approved section" (Needless to say, the current "Plugins/Plugins"-subsection). Ideally, pre-compiled plugins should not be allowed to be uploaded, and the author should have the ability to upload missing includes necessary for successful compilation.

Sourcemod's plugin blacklist should evolve into something more. Sourcemod should check for plugins that are not compiled by the forum compiler and are thus unapproved. In case of unapproved plugins being found, the server op should be notified by a warning. The warning should contain a link to an article on the forums which explains the danger of running unapproved plugins, and elaborate on the complicated nature that are private requests.
"Private request" seeking should also be disallowed (and not only advertising of turnkey plugins). If people want to see a public plugin being made that profits the entire community, they should be allowed to come forward.

Along with that, plugins should be unapproved directly if they have any flaws (and not still non-unapproved for a time frame to allow the author to correct mistakes). This is to allow for transparency towards the user, as the plugin in that very moment is one worthy of being unapproved.

Furthermore, I propose more unapproval criteria:
-Plugins having race conditions (i.e. clientIDs and entity indices in timers)
-Decreased maintainability unjustified by a plugin's complexity (i.e. very bad coding style, naming and comments being written in a language that is not English)

Also, a few plugin-types I would like their approval status to be thought about:
-Ads (Word is, in order to get support from third party source engine games, ad companies try to bribe the devs with percentages of ad revenue to get proper motd support, annoying users with ads - keep in mind, not many know how to disable the motds. If you can use windows update manually, you are a wizard. However, currently playing ads to users gets AM's stamp of approval. I either see a source of income here or a reason to unapprove of these plugins)
-MOTD enforcers
-Violations of Valve's Policy Of Truth
-Anything that screws with players (i.e. disallowing lobby votes as a means to force people to stay on the server in l4d(2)) or Valve (and their economy)

In the end, I also see a few forum and moderation changes to be necessary:
The subforums are a bit confusing. The "Off-Topic" section is in the AMX forums, and the "Plugins"-subforum has a "Plugins" forum. Adding to that, it would be nice to have active moderators. I fully understand that some people have moved on with their lives and hobbies, but in that case we deserve new staff additions.
Needless to say, please follow the rules (and their penalties) you have written yourself. I think the name of this community should truthfully remain "Alliedmods", not "AnarchyMods". This includes permanent bans for license violations, and dis-allowance of ban evasion and multiple accounts.



Thank you for your time reading this.
House