The godot community forums are closed

Heres a link to the linked post: https://godotforums.org/d/35412-sadly-i-think-godot-is-a-scam-im-not-sure-i-can-do-this

Comment by the previous community forum owner (before the one that shut it down) that I feel should also be put in this thread

While I cannot speak for Cybereality and his experiences and feelings on Godot and such, i can speak a bit more on the forum side of things.

I ran the Godot Community Forums for 4 years and 7 months, back when Godot 3.0 wasn’t even in alpha yet. However, I resigned in May 2023 and handed the reins over to Cybereality, whom I believed would run the forums similar to how I did and seemed enthusiastic to do so. I resigned because I realized I didn’t have the time to dedicate to it like I felt a leader should and so, instead of being at the helm but not having the energy to properly help the forums grow, I stepped down. Simply put: I was burning out and didn’t have time to run the community, and Cybereality offered to take over it and so I passed it along.

I did not expect this turn of events and I am saddened by the entire thing. I understand being frustrated with the direction Godot can take, the difference between expectations and reality, and can sympathize with not running a community you do not believe in. However, I am most saddened that the community we built together on the forums is frozen in place simply because of an individual’s feelings on all this. The forums was more than just one individual, even if that individual was the owner of the forums. I know there are great people in the Godot forums that may have been willing to take it over should he have offered. Cybereality is a good person, and I wish him the best, but it saddens me to see years of community be locked in place. The forums grew so much in the last few years and has become a wealth of information on Godot, and while I am glad it is kept in read-only mode rather than being deleted, it pains me to see the forum community this way.

Something I’d like to address though, because I think there is a bit of a misconception on how long Cybereality has run the forums and what that means finically. I’ve seen a few claims that he’s spent hundreds or thousands on the forums.Cybereality has only run the forums for a few months, since May 15th. The reason I bring this is up is that, prior to this point, I was solely funding the Godot forums for the entire 4 years and 7 months, I did not take donations, run ads, or ask anyone to help fund it. While I understand that Cybereality has claimed to have spent hundreds (and he may have! I didn’t have paid plugins and such, and my server provider didn’t charge for bandwidth/vistors), I know for a fact that the forums cost (roughly) a couple hundred a year when I ran it, not hundreds a month. He certainly has not spent thousands on the Godot forums if he ran it the way I did. He has only spent his own money on the forums since May when we transferred the server to him, prior to that the forums were funded entirely out of my own pocket and no one else’s. I don’t know what server he used, whether he paid for bandwidth, how expensive the plugins he bought were ,etc., but I do know that the notion (implied or otherwise) he’s been paying for the forums for years is false, he’s only been paying for it for a few months.

Finally, the forums were never an official Godot social platform and we were entirely community driven, unlike the other Godot communities that are linked on the Godot community page. The forums was also linked on the Godot community page, but we ran our own ship, had our own set of rules (we observed and adhered to the Godot Code of Conduct, at least while I ran it), and forum staff (entire volunteer!) were composed of people from within the Godot forums community. We managed ourselves and did our best to make a healthy community. I can confidently say that the forum staff I worked with were some of the most talented people who really cared about the community and helping everyone use Godot, and we all spent countless hours of our free time to make the forums what it was. We truly tried to make it a place for all Godot developers, at least while I was running it.

It saddens me to see that it all went down this way and I’m sorry for everyone on the forums who enjoyed and participated as part of the community. I hope you all find new communities to join that are just as special as the forums. I also hope that Cybereality finds another project he can believe in and is able to pour his enthusiasm into that project and help whatever community he lands in next grow. I wish everyone I interacted with over the years on the forums the best and I hope you all keep making games (with Godot or otherwise) and find great communities to be a part of.

• TwistedTwigleg

I can understand the accusations that Godot tends to over-promise on features and then push them back. As a user of the engine I've seen firsthand features getting flagged for the 4.0 milestone, then 4.1, and now 4.2. There are some pretty big bugs that are still unresolved and I get that. But the accusations that the lead developers of such a big and complex project are stealing money based on a hunch that the forum owner has is just ridiculous.

1. The devs have talked about missing features many, many times. The official Godot team is small, it's just a handful of people that are officially working on the engine and there are some spots like Physics that are completely missing a dedicated person working on it (but allegedly they are almost done with hiring). The devs work hard, there are tons of merges every day on GitHub but when they say "this feature will come in 4.0" they actually mean "we hope someone from the community will work on it by 4.0". Making accusations saying the devs are wasting money and aren't working hard when Godot has such high effort put into it is ridiculous.
2. Calling the whole project a scam and closing the forums is kind of rude. Godot is an open source project, hundreds of people poured in their efforts over many years to make this project a reality. Why tarnish the reputation of the project and everyone else if your disagreement lies with the project lead?
3. Why not just talk to Juan directly??? Why make an entire post over a hunch and some tweets? His tweets could've been as simple as just casual marketing to make as much money as possible to put into the project. Or it could've been they spend their money on events and marketing. Or it could've been they're storing money in case of emergencies. Or it could've been anything. Making sudden accusations without even assessing the situation with Juan is a terrible move.

I still like Godot and I still believe in what the lead devs are doing honestly. cybereality's post isn't very convincing nor is there any evidence it's a scam. $8 million sounds like an infinite amount of money but I think he might not realize how big of a project it is and how much money they could need. Besides, it's an open source project and it's not like they're going to steal the engine from us. Saying it was all a scam and meant nothing is... Well... Dumb.

I will say Juan is exceptionally bad at public communication, and personally, I'm glad he has been working on passing the torch to other people in the project (especially since too many projects rely on The Guy Who Can Do It All). Guy is a bit confusing to follow and I tend to go to other members for info.

Now, I can be convinced that Godot has management issues. Godot 4.0 was a pie in the sky goal filled with over estimation of ability to finish things. The engine underwent a re-write to almost every system and feature. It was a development hell as when A got changed B need to be updated, when B got update C need to be fix, and so on.

But, I'm not concerned that it was "all a scam" as major mile stones did see progress. I cannot stress how incredible the work on bi-direction text was. BiDi text is hard. It was messy. It was complex and complicated. Even big engines like Unity have spent a decade getting nothing done. Additionally, I remember how rough 3.0 was and 4.0 was an even bigger leap. 4.0 was trapped in development hell, and hopefully it'll result in the Godot project learning from that trial by fire.

This forum post reads a bit like someone suffering from burn out. Even I had to clock out of following 4.0's development until the team decided to push towards release. It was a fucking slog of development. With tons of features being pushed back because it would break 3.X compatibility or couldn't get done in time for 4.0. I couldn't imagine putting the amount of time and money into Godot that they have.

Listen, these are serious claims against the Godot foundation, the core team, and W4. If they're true, I could maybe see shutting down the forum as protest. But this can also seem like the forum owner trying to hush the community and control the conversation.

If we consider some mismanagement without any outright wrongdoing, closing the forum stops us from talking about these issues which doesn't make much sense. There's also chatter about passing ownership of the forum in the middle of the thread, which makes me wonder why they'd close the forum at all.