Unfortunately that is the only way to do it without setting up a team to moderate it, and that would take a lot of time and limit it to a few mods. I see it as a problem with the mod dev if they use this the wrong way, not our problem. Also, spam won't be a huge issue because you will only be notified with something you don't have to click on to see once per version...I foresee lots of spam then. "Game crashes in <extremely rare scenario which persists across world loads> - critical update!"
The idea for this was a very open-ended API for version checking. If we do any manual flagging of updates that won't be the case, it is up to the modder to flag the updates well and it is up to the user to trust them to not misuse it
That would also be a case of the above. Modder's problem, not oursNever mind that it will also be used every time there's a lot of new features.