NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Talk about things that are not making games here. But you should also make games!

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Spoonweaver
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NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by Spoonweaver »

Greetings!
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I recently got a fan letter regarding the OHR podcast. In it, the person suggests that the slimesalad gamelist is unsafe for children and that it should be avoided because of that. I think it's no secret that we have some question content. I discussed this with the community in the discord and the solution we came up with is that we need the tagging system back. Also, we need to have a special tag that makes a game only show up if you're both logged in and opted in, a NSFW tag.
Now, I understand that this is basically just asking a lot of you directly Mogri. I wonder if you would be willing to let someone else make the changes tot he site for you? (I understand that you might not trust me specifically but there are others)
Please let us know either way what you decide.
And if you are a member of the community and have something you'd like to add, please post it in this thread.
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FnrrfYgmSchnish
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by FnrrfYgmSchnish »

I agree that the tagging system would be really nice to have back!

Back when it was first introduced I was concerned that people might abuse it and add insulting, irrelevant, or just outright incorrect tags to games (probably as a bad attempt at a joke, in most cases, but maybe maliciously every now and then)... but I don't recall a single time when that actually happened. And there was a time where I habitually checked the tags for some of my games to make sure nothing dumb had been added when I wasn't looking, so I definitely would've noticed.

Instead, people tagged games with what contests they were made for, what year they were made in, whether they were complete/incomplete/tech-demos/abandoned, if they used a specific limited color style like 8-bit graphics or monochrome, whether they were RPGs or platformers or puzzle-games or OHR-movies with no real gameplay involved, and so on. All useful categories to have for one reason or another, nothing uncalled for. The silliest thing I can remember anyone doing with the tag system was games being tagged with what kind of animals they had in them (there were tags for cats, wolves, frogs, and so on) but that was in the "harmlessly pointless" category more than anything, and maybe some people really did want to play all the games with cats or frogs or whatever in them. Or had a phobia of that animal and wanted to avoid them. So even those might've had some use.

Having an "18+ Only" tag that blocks out anyone who isn't registered and opted in to seeing explicit/"adult" content is probably a good idea, especially if we've had at least one person expressing concerns about having kids avoid the site because of the possibility of finding dirty games on it. There have definitely always been kids finding and playing around with the OHR (I was in 6th grade when I first stumbled across it!), and not all of them would be likely to have my "eh, that sounds kinda boring, I'll pass" reaction to porny games. I doubt most kids would be super traumatized by an X-rated OHR game even at age 12 or so, but explosive parent reactions if they happen to find it on the computer might be more to worry about.

(Also, I'm assuming the "letter" was actually an email? It'd be pretty wacky if some random Concerned Parent/Teacher/Priest/whoever actually sent a physical on-paper letter to you about the Slime Salad gamelist...)
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Fenrir-Lunaris
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by Fenrir-Lunaris »

[url=viewtopic.php?t=7922]This exact subject has come up before./[url]

The long and short of it essentially comes down to (A) the site's staff are under no obligation to police the gamelist and (B) having a small selection of people enforcing a content guideline for OHR games is an extremely slippery slope that only a very small (but vocal) minority want.

First and foremost, Mogri's under no obligation to give a thumbs up or down for -any- of the games on the gamelist. He could, if he wanted. If tomorrow he says "Fenrir, I'm removing your games from Slime Salad", there is absolutely squat that I can do about that. He doesn't even have to provide -any- explanation for why. This is his site, that is his right.

The position that Slime Salad has essentially had for the past few years has essentially been to operate on an honor system. It boiled down to asking the userbase to tag the games with relevant tags, and then if any question on the appropriateness of a game ever came up, one could simply point to the TOS that everyone signs that basically says "we're not responsible for the views of any one particular person, please use your judgement on whether X is right for you". It wasn't a perfect system. Heck, it was one that was open to abuse - especially if someone decided to tag something wrong on purpose (this almost never came up). It also didn't really cover whether someone had to sign up (and thus agree to the terms) to even download a game. But it was better than the alternative.

Then the upgrade happened, and wiped out the tag database.

Right now we're in that weird space where we're forced to rely on authors to specify in their game pages/games themselves whether there might be objectionable content. That's an untenable position, because what might be objectionable to one person isn't for someone else. Forcing game authors to include a warning that questionable content may exist IN their games has always been a non-starter because it can't be enforced. Remember, LGBTQ+ topics and members were once considered fair game to take potshots at IN THIS COMMUNITY. I don't think anyone here wants to go back to those days.

There is no easy solution here. But saying that, and providing a possible solution are two different things, so I'll try to suggest some.

Option one: A popup box tied a game's download page that says something like "this game has been tagged with X, and may not be suitable for all players. Are you an adult, and would you still like to download this game". Clicking YES downloads the game as normal, clicking NO takes you back to the game list.

Option two: Games tagged with (NSFW Content) simply don't appear as normal in the gamelist. You'd have to go into your user settings and click a box that says "allow NSFW tagged entries" or something similar. Anyone else, including those who don't make an account don't get to see them.

Option three: Do nothing. The problem is one that a very small group of people have. It is neither worth the hassle nor the time to address, given the already substantial workload placed on the community's caretakers/leaders/members.

That's the way I see it. I'd love the tag system back in some form or fashion, as even though it was a "bandaid" for the problem, it was one that was working, flaws and all. I don't think anyone would be upset if it came back and we had to go through the effort of retagging everything from scratch. The community will for that is already there. The real question is whether that would be too much work for one person to get up and running.
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by Hedera »

the tag system would be nice and even if there aren't any official warnings, my game will have some in any case because it'll have boobs and cursing and people sliming in it
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by Mogri »

The good news: the tags still exist in the database somewhere.

The bad news, part 1: I mean, obviously, they aren't in use anymore due to the version upgrade.

The bad news, part 2: I mentioned this to Spoonweaver some time ago, but I can't really justify spending time upgrading Slime Salad in the foreseeable future, because I've got more paying side jobs than I can keep up with.


The path forward, option A: I could integrate a third-party tags plugin. I haven't done a ton of looking, but some cursory investigation suggested that there wasn't a way to do this for just the Games subforum. Happy to be proven wrong here. This isn't likely to provide special handling for an "nsfw" tag, though.

The path forward, option B: Anyone else who has the ability and inclination is welcome to attempt this. Currently, Slime Salad is running a mostly-vanilla install of PHP 3.3.5. I'm willing to send the custom code to anyone who wants to give it a try.
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by MorpheusKitami »

Couldn't people just label any NSFW games they've made as NSFW somewhere in the description? And for people who aren't around or if there's something else a moderator could add it to the description. Yes, its the honor system, but then again most of the internet revolves around that for adult content. Its hardly an ideal solution or anything, but it seems like the ideal solution would not be possible.
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Spoonweaver
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by Spoonweaver »

MorpheusKitami wrote: Mon Apr 11, 2022 11:49 pm Couldn't people just label any NSFW games they've made as NSFW somewhere in the description? And for people who aren't around or if there's something else a moderator could add it to the description. Yes, its the honor system, but then again most of the internet revolves around that for adult content. Its hardly an ideal solution or anything, but it seems like the ideal solution would not be possible.
But that's a band aid on an issue that is only part of the over all problem.
Mogri wrote: Anyone else who has the ability and inclination is welcome to attempt this. Currently, Slime Salad is running a mostly-vanilla install of PHP 3.3.5. I'm willing to send the custom code to anyone who wants to give it a try.
When you say send someone the code, do you mean you'll send it to us, and then we'll fix it up and send it back and you'll upload that to the website?
I just want to be clear what you're looking for as I think there was some confusion in the discord about it.
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Mogri
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by Mogri »

I can send the portion of the code that has been modified. The majority of the code is already publicly available.

The other guy will send me any modified files, ideally having tested them locally. I will examine the changes and merge them in.
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by SwordPlay »

what's the solution? some kind of opt-in alternate nsfw universe slime salad?
it already exists, but not on the forums
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by TMC »

I'll volunteer to do it, considering that a couple weeks ago I was picking through the html in detail in order to update my gamelist scrapper to the new phpbb and reporting (a subset of) problems I found. It's far more than just the tags that I'd like to see restored. I'd like to see gamelist.php ported to phpbb3. However I don't have time immediately, first I want to help finish off Ichorescent (soon, honest). I don't know PHP, but that's never stopped me writing PHP before.
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Re: NSFW Conerns and the Slime Salad Gamelist!

Post by Mogri »

Excellent. I'll send you the relevant files on Monday; if I don't, please nag me.
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