(First of all, to everyone reading this thread, please try to distinguish between criticism of this policy and criticism of Reika the person or Reika's mods. They are not the same thing. I think Reika is a swell dude who makes swell mods, and I am offering constructive criticism in response to what I interpret to be a request for comment from Reika.)
Since you asked:
- I think any blanket provision that requires your prior consent for inclusion in a pack creates an unreasonable amount of friction for pack authors.
- There was some discussion about how asking for consent takes 5 minutes. I find that estimate to be disingenuous. I will probably spend half an hour just writing this post, and I'm not seeking your permission for anything. In addition, I would expect some amount of back-and-forth correspondence in the average case, likely taking days to conclude. And what about when you're on vacation? Or in the hospital? Or feeling lazy? Or a family member dies? If every mod required this, we just wouldn't have the kinds of packs we have today - it's too onerous.
- Pack authors are going to have good ideas that you just aren't going to be able to appreciate beforehand because they sound crazy or silly or impractical or whatever. If you're OK with the idea of preventing the next Crash Landing or Agrarian Skies from happening because you couldn't see the author's vision, you should feel bad.
- Ultimately, this is about perception. I'm sure you see yourself as a perfectly objective arbiter, but nobody else assumes that. Some pack authors will be turned off by the suggestion that you be given prior review of their creative work. Some will be cowed by the perceived judgement and won't bother. Others will assume it'll take too much time (keep in mind there's a huge flurry of pack creation that happens for the JamPacked competition, which has a deadline) and won't bother. Others will just find the requirement arrogant and not want to deal with you.
- I see you are attempting to solve real problems, but I believe there are simpler solutions that don't put you at odds with the community. For example:
- Strict license terms are easier to deal with than seeking your personal blessing. You could give blanket permission to use your mods, but only within certain reasonable limits:
- Certain items may not have modified recipes or oredict equivalency.
- Certain items can only have modified recipes or oredict equivalency with equivalent materials, defined by effort and rarity.
- All changes to the mod have to be documented in the provided book.
- Bug reports will only be considered with a repro case using the unmodified mod.
- Etc. And if somebody wants to go beyond these limits, they still have the option of approaching you and seeking special permission.
- Many of the problems you've had seem to be problems of perception. You could do more to communicate the extreme potency of the mods' endgame items and explicitly point out that they are unsuitable for any multiplayer environment not consisting of trusted friends. Heck, you could print it to the console when people log in for the first time.
- If you're that worried about compliance, you could do what Mojang does with their server EULA. That'll probably annoy people too, but it's better than asking your permission.
- Your goal here should be to keep honest people honest. Someone with malicious intent is going to ignore your requirements anyway; nothing you write as policy is going to stop them in advance. I think a lot of the backlash you're getting is from a sense that you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater; making the entire community answer for some shady things a few people did that have nothing to do with the average pack author.
And finally, I invite you to feel free to not pick this apart line by line. I understand that these are your decisions to make, and you don't have to explain to me why you're not going to do what I suggest.
. Our templates are pretty well optimized, but at the same time it's not too difficult to create new crafting-grid templates. I and the other staff member keep an eagle's eye on Recent Changes. Lastly, it's possible to make articles translatable if people are interested in that (they would need to speak to me, though. Those pages need special markup, and I'm pretty much the only person who is unlazy enough to add it).
