What happened to BetterUI?
Yesterday May 18, 2024 I took down all the latest versions of my mods from Thunderstore, including BetterUI, which is now marked deprecated and the latest version has been stripped of all the main features.
Why?
I’ve decided to do this because of an ongoing harassment campaign that started 2 years ago over some drama that happened then, and has continued until now, on and off. This harassment has come from a small but impactful enough part of the ror2 modding community, including a member of the moderation team. This has left the ror2 modding community and Thunderstore as a place I experience far too much toxicity in for me to want to continue existing in it.
Why are people harassing you?
TL;DR a few toxic individuals decided to harass me over a disagreement, then decided to do it again.
The first drama
The drama 2 years ago, in short, was that as a bit of a joke I added a Blacklist to BetterUI to stop a guy that annoyed me from using my mod. That same day I removed the guy from the blacklist. This feature was never hidden. Months later, I added a button to the main menu that opened a small window with some info and links, including a donation link. Originally this was intended to become a in-game settings window for BetterUI and maybe even an in-game mod manager where you could edit the settings for all mods and enable/disable them.
People were unhappy about where I placed the button and that it had a donation link. At this time they also looked through the code and “discovered” the unused blacklist feature. Lies and misinformation started being spread about this feature and myself. Out of a principled position I refused to remove the blacklist feature, because even though I wasn’t using it and didn’t intend to, I believe mod creators should have full control over what they want to do with their mods. Someone made a mod that would remove the button from the main menu and disabled the blacklist. At this point I contacted thunderstore and asked them to take this mod down and they agreed to, because they also didn’t think it’s a good idea to have mods that actively target other mods to change them in ways the author doesn’t approve of.
Throughout this and especially after this, a few membes of the ror2 modding discord who disliked me started riling people up to hate me, including one of the moderators, who encouraged harassment against me and then muted me. This went on for a few days, with people harassing me throughout, trying to dox me and sending me death threat and wishing harm upon me, along with other similar harassment.
After some time, Thunderstore made new a ruling that disallowed blacklists and my mod was deprecated until I updated it. I wasn’t a fan of this ruling, because I still believe in creator autonomy, but after some deliberation I decided it would be better to keep my mod on Thunderstore to not hurt all the people who use my mod.
After this drama, I basically removed myself from the RoR2 modding community because it had become such a toxic place. While there were still a lot of people I liked and was on good terms with, there were too many people who had harassed me and been terrible towards me. At this time I also significantly reduced my time working on BetterUI. I still made some updates, like the big translation update I’m very proud of, but I never expanded on my original plans for the main menu button and just left it where it was.
The second drama
A few months ago, I discovered that a new mod had been uploaded to Thunderstore that removed my main menu button once again. I wasn’t happy about this, because I still believe in creator autonomy and rights to control their work. The button showed people where to get help, how to connect with me and also how to support me. While I didn’t have a problem with people who had seen the button and wanted to hide it, my concern was that this mod would end up in modpacks and shared using mod profiles, hiding the button from people who had never seen it before.
I reached out to the creator of this mod, voicing these concerns and asking why he didn’t work with me to make it happen in a way that could address these concerns, instead of going behind my back with this mod. The discussion wasn’t fruitful and the creator then took the mod down himself.
A few weeks pass and another similar mod comes up, this time with the creator hiding who they are, so I simply went to Thunderstore and asked them to remove it, in accordance with the previously established sentiment that mods shouldn’t modify other mods in bad faith, and they took it down. Not too long after, a new mod came up, made by one of the people who previously harassed me, that instead let users generically remove buttons from the main menu, circumventing the ruling by Thunderstore. It was also immediately used by modpacks to remove the button, which is exactly what I was concerned with. Since Thunderstore wouldn’t take this mod down, I instead made it so my mod wouldn’t work if the button was removed, and I put out a statement explaining my feelings about the situation, that I didn’t mind people wanting to hide the button, but that I had concerns about new users, etc.
This sparked a new wave of harassment, along with a back and forth between myself and the creator of this mod, changing our mods to adapt to the others changes. This culminated in the other developer making a mod breaking the functionality of the modding framework the community uses, which Thunderstorm saw as clearly bad faith and took down. In outrage/protest, some of these developers started breaking their own mods if BetterUI was installed.
It was at this time that I started considering simply taking down all my mods because I was tired of all the harassment and senseless hate. Once again some toxic individuals took a simple disagreement of morals and opinion and turned it into a hate campaign against me.
After some time, one of the Thunderstore moderators caved to the angry mob and made up some new rules, which would disallow donation links in the main menu, and disallowing mods from making themselves incomaptible with other mods for no reason.
Once these new rules went into effect, I updated BetterUI to remove my donation link, but I kept my mod incompatible, because in my opinion it is valid to say that my mod is incompatible with another mod that was made only to remove something from my mod, the main menu button, which I care about. The moderator who made the new rules arbitrarily (in their words) decided that the button didn’t matter and I can’t make my mod incompatible because of it.
It was at this point I decided to finally go through with removing my mod, I was still being harassed, with the moderation doing nothing about it, and instead literally making up arbitrary rules to decide what is important in my mod. This is why, in protest, I removed everything from my mod other than the button.
In the aftermath, while I was continuing to be harassed, the moderator who originally abused their mod powers against me 2 years ago , did so again, while leaving all of their friends unpunished for harassing me, further solidifying my decision.
That brings us here. While I’m very unhappy with what happened here, I don’t want anyone to go out and harass any of these individuals. If I see anyone doing so, they will be banned from my community. The moral of this story shouldn’t be to respond with the same hate these people have, but instead to be better.
That being said, a lot of misinformation is spread by the people who have harassed me so I absolutely encourage anyone who feels like it to correct that misinformation, civilly.
And no, I don’t think I’m perfect or completely blameless in what has happened. I know I’m a very stubborn individual who will push back if I feel like I’m being treated unfairly, but I’ve never ever harassed any of these people or gone after them like they have me.
What happens now?
For now, the mods remain taken down. Yesterday after I took down the mods, a few people joined the discord and were quick to offer me money in exchange for access to the mod. I didn’t feel comfortable with that, so I instead made it available here on discord for free and encouraged people to still donate if they wanted it, but I don’t want to charge for the mod. I will mirror this sentiment here. I’m not in the best financial spot right now and could use any donations, and BetterUI hasn’t made me much money over the years. Here are the donation links if you do feel kind enough to help me out:
GitHub Sponsors: https://link.faby.dev/Sponsors PayPal: https://link.faby.dev/Tip
The mod will remain free to access here on discord for now. If I do decide to take it down, I will give perpetual access to anyone who’s ever donated before, even in the past, simply contact me. This is not an attempt to charge money for the mod, this is simply because it doesn’t feel right to me to take it away from anyone who was kinda enough to donate to me.
You can find all the downloads in on my Discord Server
Extra info
Speaking of misinformation being spread about me, there are a few common lies I want to counter here.
I have never broken any Thunderstore rules. Both times rules were changed, my mod was deprecated as per the procedure for these new rulings, and was reinstated once I changed my mod.
Thunderstore has also never given me any special treatment. While it could be argued that the rule about modding other mods was made just for me, it applies universally and was born from the principles that TS leadership believes in. Meanwhile multiple rules were actually made against me, and I was unfairly punished by moderators, while the people harassing me barely were.
BetterUI has never contained any malware or anything dangerous or collected user information. The blacklist was coded in a harmless way, and simply checked an external list to see if the mod should harmlessly disable itself. There was never any risk of any harm due to this. BetterUI also never collected any information. Ever since the update that allowed BetterUI to automatically update the language files, I can see how often these files are downloaded, but that doesn’t give me any information about anyone and BetterUI has never collected any.