Today we’re releasing some long-awaited improvements to our resources marketplace along with significant changes to our moderation of different products and services.
Resource marketplace improvements
We have a very huge and exciting update coming to BuiltByBit resources in a few months, but before those changes can be made, there have been a number of improvements required to make a solid foundation for us to build on.
Sale events
Providing discounts can be an effective tool to increase resource revenue. Today we are releasing a new, easier-to-use system for authors to provide temporary price reductions on their resources which we're calling Sale events. Creating a sale event is easy and can be done through our new Sale events page in the author dashboard. To eliminate the possibility of these sale events being misused, they have the following restrictions placed on them:
- You must wait at least 28 days after the time that one sale event ends before a new one can be created for your resource
- It is not possible to create a sale event for a resource that has had its price increased in the past 30 days
- The duration of sale events must be at least 1 day and only up to 2 weeks long
- It is not possible to change the price of a resource when there is an ongoing sale event
Starting a sale event creates opportunities for increased exposure as well as interest, through new discount-related filters available in the resource filter sidebar, vibrant price styling, among other new and future benefits through our wish listing system.
Wishlist
Speaking of which, another new feature we're introducing to synergise with sale events is a wishlisting system, which is a more advanced system to replace resource bookmarks. Users are able to wishlist any resource they have an interest in. If one of those resources goes on sale, they'll be notified via on-site alerts as well as emails! This ensures that sale events are directly communicated to exactly those most interested in knowing about them. All existing bookmarks of paid resources have been converted to wishlist items.
Covers
One of the most common complaints we’ve received since the introduction of our image carousel is that forcing its use on authors is needlessly restrictive and complex. We’ve removed the requirement of using our image carousel and have added a new cover photo system that will display on the resource list. Using a cover will be required for resources where you can upload an image like before, or you can use a simple text cover.
With this change, we’ve also fixed how resources display across the site to be more consistent with using this new card design and removed all instances where the old icon image would display. Cover images are automatically cropped in to be a 2:1 aspect ratio, so authors of existing resources may need to tweak images not to have any important details cut off. We recommend designs are created with 1000x500 pixel dimensions for best results when using an image cover.
All existing resources that utilise the image carousel have had their first image set as their cover and cropped. Resources that didn't yet set any carousel images have had a text cover set matching their resource title.
Title & description restrictions
The title of a resource will have a significant impact on its success, so authors try to make their titles as engaging and detailed as possible. This has spiralled into an arms race of trying to make the most engaging title, often fully in capitals with star emojis, which is bad for usability. To remedy this, we have introduced new restrictions on titles. Resource titles must not be more than 40 characters and must not include:
- The price of the resource
- Whether the resource is on sale (as this can now be done with our sale events system)
- The versions the resource is compatible with
- Emoji and excessive capitalisation
- Subjective opinions, such as ‘best’, ‘#1’, etc.
These new title restrictions apply to all resources through automatic checks and manual review by our resource moderation staff. We haven't made any automatic changes to titles, so authors have to manually change their titles to meet these new requirements. Authors will be unable to edit their descriptions, post new updates, or bump resources until their titles comply with these restrictions.
We have also introduced a new rule, 5.8, which clarifies that the description field of resources must meet our existing minimum quality standard. We've always had this policy in place, this change only serves to make this expectation explicit to new resource authors when setting up their first resource.
Content ownership pushing
It is now possible for Premium users to transfer ownership of any thread or resource they own to any other Premium user automatically and without staff intervention. Previously if an author wanted to sell the rights to their resource, they would have to create a ticket and wait for a moderator, but now it's as simple as clicking the 'Change author' button and entering a username. The receiver will be notified and see the request on the new Push requests page with 7 days to either accept or reject the content ownership. This new process is particularly great for large authors with dozens of products already, as it is now possible to have a member of your team upload resources and push them to your account before approval.
It's crucial to note that push requests should only be accepted when they're made by people that you trust. The user accepting the content also accepts full liability and responsibility for the resource or thread.
Other improvements
Some smaller quality of life changes and bug fixes that have been made are:
- Added a reminder for users leaving reviews that they are not the place to ask for support or report a specific issue
- Adjusted the minimum length of a resource review from 4 characters to 20 characters
- Adjusted the author dashboard to use a more intuitive sidebar navigation to be more extensible
- Adjusted the embeds created from resources in places like Discord to contain the cover image and tagline
- Fixed issue where the title of updates was always being set to "0"
- Fixed issue where resources having a long title would prevent buyers from checking out
- Removed the search bar from the top of the resource index page
BuiltByBit is continually striving toward being the safest and most legitimate marketplace that we can be. We’ve come a long way from where we were just a few years ago, and today are taking the next big leap to protect the rights of others through new policies about forbidden products and services. We've formally disallowed the following products and services in their entirety:
- Social media botting (SMM) panels
- All other forms of bot following and other similar automated actions en masse services
- Falsified & fake review services
- Smurfing, boosting, or cheating services
- The sale of items on Minecraft servers, unless explicitly and officially allowed by the server
- Medical/fitness/diet advice & related services
Along with us completely disallowing the above offerings, we're introducing new restrictions in the following areas:
Minecraft server jars
For too long, the licensing obligations of server jar sellers have been disregarded. Many authors on our platform have not been respecting the requirements for using the primarily open source projects that their own projects are based on or take code from. We are looking to resolve this over the coming weeks through the introduction of the following policies on selling server jars:
- CraftBukkit forks, Spigot forks, Paper forks, and forks of any derivatives must follow the terms set by the GNU GPL, including providing the unobfuscated source code of the distributed project to any buyers who request access, for no additional charge
- All server jars downstream of other projects must provide credit to all relevant sources where code has been utilized from
- Server jars that market themselves as optimised improvements of other projects must include specific benchmarks of how they are better than the program they are being compared to. Descriptions must include proof of the performance improvements with fair benchmarks depicting how the programs compare to each other in order to show that there are genuine improvements to optimisation
These policies apply to all current and future server jar resources on our platform. This means that current authors must update their resources to comply with the restrictions, or the resources will be deleted from BuiltByBit. Authors will have one month from today to make these changes and, if applicable, begin providing the source code to their buyers who request it.
Homework & tutoring services
Being a marketplace for young entrepreneurs means that many of our users are currently in school or studying. This has resulted in the rising popularity of services relating to tutoring and studying advice which we think is a great and valuable offering to our community. Others have gone a step further and started to offer homework completion services similar to essay mills, where they will do work for other people in its entirety, which we are disallowing today. Tutoring and assistance are allowed to be offered, but not essay writing and homework completion services.
Account sales
We're increasing our rigorousness of which accounts we allow to be sold on the site. From today forward, the sale of accounts from third-party platforms will be disallowed on BuiltByBit, even on sites that allow account sales, such as YouTube. We are also closing a loophole by disallowing the sale of account usernames, where users would unclaim a username so that the buyer could take it on their own account.
Clarification on investments
We've tweaked the wording to more accurately reflect our current policies on offering or requesting investments. Previously the forbidden products list said that investments and loans were completely disallowed, but we have updated it to instead say “loans, IOUs, or investments in which ownership of equal value in the invested project is not immediately received”. This provides more clarity and freedom to our authors to find partners through our platform.
Other products & services forums
An overwhelming amount of the items we're disallowing are being offered through the Other products and Other services forums. As such, we have moved most of the threads made in these forums to the Thread drafts of their creators. If you would like to have your thread moved back to its previous forum, let us know through a ticket and we'll move it back for you as long as it complies with our rules.
We understand that our many creators may not like these changes, but we are confident that they will make our marketplace a safer, more accessible, and more compliant place for our users and the broader community. If you have any questions, please Create a ticket, and our team will assist you.
Discord improvements & giveaways
Our Discord server continues to grow and become more engaging each month, which is a very good sign for the future of our community. Since the previous announcement, the following updates have happened to our Discord:
- Our server has now been verified by Discord
- Added a lottery system to spend points on (!lottery)
- Added more rewards to spend points on, including a new role and permanent profile medal (!rewards)
- Added new channels for established resource authors and current advertisers
- Adjusted claiming daily points to be claimable at any point during the day and no longer have a cap
- Adjusted permissions so that server boosters can now claim daily points
- Adjusted a bunch of smaller quality-of-life features to make the server better
We're giving away 3x 1-month Discord Nitro subscriptions in our Discord server, with the prizes being given out tomorrow! To enter, you just need to join our Discord and react in our #giveaways channel.
Staff changes
As usual, the team we have working on improving BuiltByBit is constantly evolving. Since the previous announcement, we've made the following changes:
- Alistair F. and Sky. have been promoted to Chat Moderator
- Luduphilia, Kyonei, Xeify, and Vierdant have been promoted Feedback Moderator
- Andrew has been promoted to Resource Moderator
- Save and PixelMine have resigned
We're optimistic that these changes should help to minimise backlogs, especially with resource approvals. We now have a team of 23 people working to provide the best possible support for our dedicated community and achieve our vision of being the safest and easiest place for young entrepreneurs to learn about business and earn money.
Other changes
We've also made the following changes. Follow us on Twitter and keep an eye on our Discord server for more details on changes as they happen.
- Added filters for switching between Minecraft and Discord in the Server setup creation forum
- Added filters for the new 1.19 Minecraft version in relevant forums and resource categories
- Adjusted visibility of posts made by banned users to guests
- Adjusted the structure of URLs across the site to include the content title
- Fixed the Upgraded forums showing to guests when it shouldn't
- Fixed permissions in the Middlemen forum that allowed anyone to post threads without meeting the reputation requirements.
Mick
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