I don’t think people should utilize a forum for free advertising. My opinion is that anyone who wants to post advertisements for paid scripts should be required to financially support the web site first.
Thoughts?
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If someone’s really down on their luck but makes great scripts, I don’t think they should be kept from advertising here.
They’re contributing to the space of scripting with their work.
It’s not lack of financially supporting the forum that irks me about some spamvertisers, it’s lazy scripting and poor quality posting.
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Totally agree. Scripting is time and energy demanding and some people need the money. I would gladly support them financially - but only if the scripts were 10/10. Bought some scripts and got disappointed almost every time, while I’m sharing (IMO) quality scripts for free.
But I don’t see an apparent solution to this problem.
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When I buy a script from here and there’s clear issues, I comment in the topic to point the issue out.
Maybe it’d be helpful if this kind of comment could appear on users summaries. You see a topic that interests you in paid scripts, you click the user and read an overview of things they’ve fucked up before. Or the overview shows a great deal of positive feedback.
Depending on potential prior issues and how they were rectified, you decide whether on not to buy the script (and maybe block the user if they regularly make lazy scripts you don’t care about).
While it does help the site a bit financialy. I dont think its going to do a lot as its very often the same scripters showing up. Yet it acts as a barrier for newer ones. Sure, it does block those who outside of just using it as marketing have no interaction here at all (which i think is a good thing if we disrupt these).
There is also the part where someone already made 5 free scripts of good quality, and then decides to go paid only. They already contributed to the site in a good way at that point. Requiring payment seems a bit excessive here.
Reputation is often far more valuable in order to sell scripts, so on that forcing the users to build some of it wouldnt be a bad thing. Either through making a trial version of their paid script (although some restrictions are needed here). Or by providing a few free scripts entirely. It can be as easy as: single axis = always free. multi axis = always paid.
And that does require moderator action and takes time, which is a severe downside to it though. But maybe we can use the likes system on scripts as a minimum requirement here, so it at least acts as some sort of filter? The worst abusers might still need moderator action, but if we can avoid this on 95% of the userbase, its going to help a lot.
Yes a reputation/feedback system would be good. But hard to make it work well, what is a good script is subjective. I realised for example a lot of people are fine and happy with a poorly synced script as long as they like the vid.
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Remember that this forum is based on the open source forum Discourse so unless there’s an extension available features like reputation systems etc. won’t happen. Even if there is an extension available it might degrade the performance and therefore not be a viable option anyways.
What about people not scripting require a supporter status?
I just added something to my script collection page, Its a poll/ star rating system. I hope this is something thats in the right direction.
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Major risk of flooding the forum with low quality scripts by people trying to avoid having to pay something.
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I previously thought it would be a good idea to require some ratio of free scripts to paid scripts, but that just creates a logistics problem. You can’t automatically police a rule like that, and any solution which requires a large time investment from moderators isn’t a solution at all.
That’s why I think having supporter status makes the most sense. You get a badge for that, and I’m guessing it should be possible to restrict posting new topics in the paid scripts category to people with that badge. It’s just $5 a month, so it’s not some kind of extortion scheme for people trying to make a quick buck by scripting. It just means low-effort scripting which won’t garner even $5 in a month should go away.
But I’m not certain about that guess regarding new topic restriction. I did briefly try to figure it out, but Google is pretty worthless these days, so I didn’t really make any headway. So my main reason for posting this was to find out if my notion is even feasible.
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Question was not meant to be serious.
I also am against advertising using the free part of the forum. I think people should be allowed to but do it in the paid section. Giving half a script and calling it free because the sample is just seems against what the forum is for.