You say ‘the most recent project’ in a way which implies there was only one project you removed. I know for a fact you removed DGE, and what about Inheritance? What about ‘Many Emblem’? Fire Memeblem?
You have blocked, shut down, or banned four projects in 2020. That also doesn’t take into account the various Mangs-related hacks, which I have heard offhand either were not allowed to be posted on FEU, or were removed. I don’t know which; I wasn’t involved in those conversations. But given the four projects you removed in 2020, which had no prior year precedent for all of the FE community’s entire existence, I wouldn’t be shocked if you removed those too.
Very small tangent: If you did, in fact, remove the Mangs hacks, I feel compelled to point out that Mangs himself did not develop those projects. He is not a rom modder. His community makes the hacks, and he plays them. That means, by removing those hacks, you would essentially be punishing people who had nothing to do with Mangs’ wrongdoings (And whose projects were actually lighthearted and fun, having nothing to do with sexual misconduct or any of the acts he committed). It doesn’t hurt Mangs; it hurts the people who, by a distant proxy and relation to him, had their creativity squashed and thus suffered guilt by association.
I’m assuming you removed them, but I could be wrong.
Forget them for a second. You absolutely blocked, deleted, or censored four other projects in 2020. That much is irrefutable. What made 2020’s tasteless projects any worse than previous years? The community has had dumb, edgy, fart humor for literal decades. I’ve been around since 2003, so I’ve seen all of the big offenders, with the Gheb hacks by far outpacing any of the four removed hacks we saw this year.
Saying “we didn’t technically ban the creators/their projects, we only removed them or locked their topics” is mere nitpicking. You shut down their projects, one way or another, and that is my point. Why did you do that? Why 2020 out of all the other years? Is this going to continue? Are we going to start seeing projects shut down at the whims of the community simply because children making bad projects grosses some people out?
For the record: I don’t give a damn about any of the aforementioned projects. I certainly had no interest in playing them and their humor was not in my tastes. But Inheritance was not some thrown together hack intending to rile up the community; it was a genuinely good effort by a couple of kids/teens to try and make something they thought would be funny. DGE was a hack made by two people with the intent of making one chapter each, back and forth, without editing the previous chapters. That’s fun and creative stuff, even if the potty humor ended up sucking doodoo and most everyone agrees the end result wasn’t that great.
But by going out of your way to shut those projects down, you have signaled to the entire hacking community that you are drawing a line, where before there was no line. You have become the arbiters of creativity, and anyone whose tastes are too crude to match yours cannot put their projects out. It’s also ramping up a culture of hostility toward actual children.
You said this earlier. No. No, that was not ever the case. Since no projects had ever been banned on the merits or lack of merits regarding their creativity, nobody (except for maybe a few brainlets with an agenda, I suppose) would have blamed you for continuing to maintain that position of neutrality.
But now? Now, the admins have made a stance clear, which means that now, if you do not block a project, you are tacitly endorsing its existence, while if you do block one, you are stating that it is inexcusably bad.
Before, if a project was bad, people would just ignore it, laugh at the little kid dum-dum, and move on. Now, they have a reason to go out of their way, bully the person, and sicc the mods on that person, making their project disappear, and the creator leave.
How is this okay? This will lead to a smaller, less vibrant community over time. I already gave you the far superior solution, so, using words like “This site is attached to me and people will blame me if a project isn’t banned for being bad” does not pass the sniff test.