A note about donations

A few people have asked about project Patreons, Ko-fi links, etc.

The tl;dr is if your project/content itself is behind a paywall, your thread should be in the #community:shilling category. Also, do not leak other people’s paywalled content.

We will move especially egregious cases of donation-begging to that category as well, so be cool about it.

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If you’ll allow me to soapbox a bit, let’s also talk some nuance, beyond the concrete rules. If your engine is made in Lex Talionis, Tactile, or any other number of homebrew engines, this doesn’t apply to you (follow the licenses on those engines).

I’ll admit that it generally doesn’t sit right with me to lock ROMhack content behind a paywall, given the legally gray area we operate in in the first place. While I won’t begrudge you things like BuyMeACoffee or Ko-fi that are primarily donation links, we’ve by-and-large been a hobbyist community, with lots of
amazing tools and resources available for free (off the top of my head: FEbuilder, the skill system, the decomp, all the advances made in Event Assembler). There’s also the question of paying for content that uses proprietary assets – please, please use your common sense and do not put vanilla Eliwood on your Patreon.

When I first put this announcement together, I initially intended to make an explicit whitelist of how much you could put behind your Patreon before getting your project relocated to Shilling. Things like behind-the-scenes sneak peeks, script/asset update reveals, etc. After putting it to the rest of the staff,
however, most of us found it to be a bit in poor taste. donate for hax has been a meme for basically my entire tenure in this community, and I think it should stay that way.

All that said, it’s my hope that this announcement doesn’t change much beyond having a few donation links pop up here and there.

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