On Wesnoth’s Game Development forum

From a recent topic in Wesnoth.org’s Game Development forum:

[...] this is also quite close to advertisement, but you don't have the traits of a spammer.

This is one of my major qualms about the current organization of the Wesnoth.org forums. The non-indicative Game Development section was indeed created for that specific purpose of serving as a venue for advertising other games and potentially recruiting contributors. The definition of spam for this section is sketchy at best, but common sense suggests that the following forms of promotion would be off-limits:

  • Advertising things that are not games
  • Blatant advertising by posting links to different topics
  • Misleading information/scam

If advertising in GD in general was considered spam, then the forum would be nearly or entirely empty. The question is, why do we provide this marketing channel in the first place? It seems to me like the primary goal is promoting open-source game development, but the forum description implies that this is not a strict requirement for posting there. I am not terribly comfortable with the idea that it should be our mission to do this seeing as how there are larger and better organized communities for this kind of thing, but I can see how some people might prefer to have means to preach to the world at large without having to maintain a blog or register accounts on other boards.

Quite lazy, if you ask me.

But all this is fine by me as long as I’m not forced to read every single topic that crops up in there.