from Hacker News

Official statement from Godot Foundation board

by Flex247A on 9/30/24, 2:33 PM with 4 comments

  • by ImJamal on 9/30/24, 7:04 PM

    A bit of a milquetoast statement. They did not address the offical community manager banning people for no reason. This was not a mistake like they are claiming but a deliberate ban by that manager. What are they going to do to stop that from happening in the future?

    Instead of addressing the real issue they criticize the mod in some unofficial discord. What a joke!

    If they actually want to take full responsibility for the actions, like they said in their statement, then get rid of the community manager.

  • by 0x_rs on 9/30/24, 8:32 PM

    This is genuinely a terrible response, dishonest to the point of gaslighting and putting into question whoever was involved in the decision process. What is referred as "unofficial Godot-related" Discord server was, until earlier this year, the de-facto official server, used by developers and contributors alike to discuss and organize pull requests among other things (as it is plainly visible in the project issue tracker history). That changed when a new server was started instead of taking over the previous one, formerly labelled as being official, that they've now figuratively thrown under the bus claiming no responsibility despite "strongly condemning" years old messages. But that's just tangential drama on top of the tweet, in response to a troll account in a discussion that had nothing to do with Godot, that turned into a massive and immediate blanket blocking of countless accounts expressing all sorts of opinions (if even that), including simply quoting a founder's statement verbatim. It should be noted earlier this year it was announced the project would have a, quote, "louder" social media presence.

    I am personally not hopeful about the future of the project as it is now, unable to distance itself from constantly generating purposeless drama every, single, year. The community—one of its bigger strengths—surely will reach a breaking point eventually, and doubling down without addressing any of the issues pervading it inspires as much confidence as claims of its readiness from certain figures known to overstate and under-deliver. Past and present shenanigans are well-documented online, and the reactions have always been just as immature and increasingly more militant to any sort of feedback or critic.

  • by blackeyeblitzar on 9/30/24, 8:55 PM

    For those wondering what this is about: my understanding is that Godot has been turning increasingly political over time, and its community spaces in particular have become very aggressively political (towards the far left). A community moderator has been taking that to new levels, by posting political messages from official Godot Twitter/X accounts, such as a joke rebranding of the engine as “Wokot” (like “woke Godot”).

    They then went on a spree of banning anyone who criticized them even in the slightest, such as people asking Godot to focus on the engine’s features, bugs, etc. This led to donors cancelling their funding of Godot. But the community moderator doubled down on mass bans for uncontroversial pushback, and seemingly the same individual or group also had the ability to control their GitHub accounts, since developers who pushed back on politicization were getting banned from contributing.

    All of this is deeply unprofessional and goes to show how far politics has invaded spaces that really should be apolitical. The head of the project was expected to bring the situation under control, but the statement from the foundation board seems dishonest and has not admitted that the ‘unofficial’ server is basically the official one, or that the people banned did not say anything wrong, or that they need to refocus away from personal politics to what Godot should be. And it doesn’t seem like there has been any accountability for the rogue community manager(s), who should really all be fired.

    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/godot-engine-user-bloc...

    https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/1fsvcdg/from_the_god...

    https://youtu.be/ZXlWz09tqgs