Public Spigot Forks - What policy should we have?

[Stefatorus]

Preface
With many people using mc-market to sell, research and buy public spigot forks, I believe this is the best place to discuss the pros, and cons of these products, and specifically how we should treat them in regards to our free optimization discord bot.

Over 2 years of dealing with publically sold spigot forks, along with clients of all sizes, from small startups, hoping for a good entrance into the niche, to large enterprise networks with over 5000 players at peaktime, I've had mixed results with the entire category of products.

While they did provide visible performance boosts, they often caused huge instability, incompatibility with plugins, or broke behavior that some servers we worked for deemed essential for them. While we do not deny their usefulness in some cases, we want to address and start a public debate about the following issues:

• Unexistent warnings about potential side-effects of optimizations
  While some smaller optimizations can be done without visibly affecting gameplay, some larger changes (and the ones bringing the large benefits), often change vanilla behavior significantly. This can cause issues for some servers, or even bring instability, either when used as-is or coupled with the public, but popular plugins.
  
• Poor technical description of projects
  While most of these products are geared at large networks (as their scope is increasing the max player base for already established servers), they often lack a detailed description of the features they provide. This makes it difficult for the client to know what he's buying prior and often leads beginners in the niche (which are by far the majority, with clients purchasing premium plugins, custom jars, etc, having on average under 15-20 players online) to take uneducated decisions that cost them dearly (These jars start low, but often go in the hundreds or thousands in terms of price).
• Bad Advertising Practices
  We believe that advertising should not omit the always existent downsides of each product. Nothing is perfect, and clients should be able to take decisions once they know the full story behind products, not just the positives.

Currently, I try to notify my clients about the potential downsides of these implementations, as I feel it's a fair middle ground to meet (not discredit public jar's values, but also warn about issues they may cause)
As I was recently contacted by one large and well-known developer of this category of clients disagreeing with my approach, I feel we should launch a FRIENDLY, POLITE, and OBJECTIVE discussion about these products, and find what and how they should be treated, and potentially build a general guide to help clients better research, understand, and use this kind of projects.

 

[I_Luv_Cowz]

Spigot forks are required to be handled on a case by case basis.
Although I do agree that spigot forks should better document everything they change that could affect gameplay. This is something that needs to become more common practice.

In regards to your question, can you elaborate on "policy [for your bot]."?

 

[Stefatorus]

Spigot forks are required to be handled on a case by case basis.
Although I do agree that spigot forks should better document everything they change that could affect gameplay. This is something that needs to become more common practice.

I do agree that it's best to discuss specific sellers and products, but I've already been contacting saying that I target specific sellers with my views.

I think the issues are widespread and affect the whole public fork sellers, if you look, I think none of them have any detailed explanation on the technicals, and for all of them, advertising is done in a way that skews opinion by misleading customers.

I know that advertising this way is allowed and recommended on mc-market, but I feel it's destroying the community's trust in products, and leading some to make poor decisions in terms of purchasing the respective products.

In regards to your question, can you elaborate on "policy [for your bot]."?

I have been contacted by one of the most popular jar sellers recently to remove the warning that I have placed in my timings analysis bot that jars can cause instability and may have issues with third-party plugins, but most sellers regard any negative press as bad.

Because of that, I fell it's better to bring the discussion a public space, to hopefully debate it in a civilized manner, and find solutions to this.

 

[I_Luv_Cowz]

I do agree that it's best to discuss specific sellers and products, but I've already been contacting saying that I target specific sellers with my views.

I think the issues are widespread and affect the whole public fork sellers, if you look, I think none of them have any detailed explanation on the technicals, and for all of them, advertising is done in a way that skews opinion by misleading customers.

I know that advertising this way is allowed and recommended on mc-market, but I feel it's destroying the community's trust in products, and leading some to make poor decisions in terms of purchasing the respective products.


I have been contacted by one of the most popular jar sellers recently to remove the warning that I have placed in my timings analysis bot that jars can cause instability and may have issues with third-party plugins, but most sellers regard any negative press as bad.

Because of that, I fell it's better to bring the discussion a public space, to hopefully debate it in a civilized manner, and find solutions to this.

Your disclaimer should just be to make customers aware that issues could possibly be a result of the custom spigot.

It should recommend testing if lag/broken plugins persist after using regular PaperSpigot and to contact custom spigot developers if PaperSpigot fixes lag/broken plugins.