The Challenge of Openness and Collaboration

SotA_ForumPostingPledge

Some of Portalarium’s most important founding principles are “Openness/Transparency”, “Collaboration” and “Sharing of ideas and opinions.”  We have put great effort into living by these principles on a daily basis with all stakeholders of the Portalarium tribe (employees, investors, partners, backers, community members, etc.).

One of the ways we acted on these principles was to create and maintain public forums, open for the entire world to participate in, both viewing and posting. We reserved some areas of our forums for backers only, but we felt it was important there be a community forum where the dev team, backers, and non-backers could interact with each other, share ideas and opinions, collaborate, and brainstorm.

For two years, we’ve been able to keep our public forums freely open for both viewing and posting. Unfortunately, recent abuse of our public forums by spammers is forcing us to remove free posting privileges. Our volunteer forum moderators are drowning in the hordes of spam posts that have recently invaded our public forums. For the past couple of weeks, our web dev team (i.e. Tassilo Philipp) had to set aside higher priority game and web development tasks while he endeavored to close the holes the spammers are getting through.

We on the executive management team felt it was necessary to stop spending our backers pledge money on the endless efforts necessary to block spammers, and instead, stop them by making them pay to post. We’ve anguished over this decision for weeks, as it is a compromise of our principles, and we will suffer from the loss of ideas that often resulted from free sharing of opinions in our public forums. However, we believe this is the best course of action to take at this time.

Please know that we do not consider this a permanent situation. As our funds and team priorities allow, we will continue to revisit the integration of automated spam tools that may allow us to re-open our general forums for free public posting.

In the meantime, starting June 29, 2015, our General Forums will remain open for everyone to read, but you must be a backer to post. All existing backers (including Steam Early Access backers) will be able to post. Non-backers can purchase forum posting privileges with our new $5 Forum Posting Pledge, which can be upgraded to a full game pledge at any time. If you pledged through Kickstarter you will need to link your Kickstarter account for forum posting privileges.

Dallas Snell
COO/Founder/Portalarium



28 Comments


  1. majoria70majoria70

    I appreciate the wording on this. It is unfortunate that it has come to this, but I agree to it. Not only was forum clean up taking unecessary time away from our developers, it has been a constant irritation to anyone trying to read and participate in the forums. Thank you for taking this step.




  4. RedDeerRedDeer

    I don’t like it when the freedom of speech is taken away from people (not all of non-backers are spammers) but at least those 5$ are subtracted from the game price so I guess it’s somewhat fair. I miss the times when all forums were spam and troll free :(


  5. Kendric Darrow

    Seems like a sensible move, let’s hope it puts a stop to all the shenanigans.






  10. Duke AndaluzDuke Andaluz

    A number of us have been in business long enough to know good management principles being put into action when we see them. Nice job implementing this, and even nicer job on the communication.


  11. majoria70majoria70

    Oh no to no Monty Python now ;) Perhaps he could come up with 5 bucks if he or they wanted to that is.:)






  16. DeliverenceDeliverence

    Finally I can visit the forums again without being spammed to death. Good one Dallas.




  19. AlbusAlbus

    It seems the right move at this point in time, it was at times difficult to sift through that annoying spam.










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