SWRP Developers: Hostile Moderation and Unreasonable Rules
My experience with SWRP Developers has been extremely disappointing.
I joined their Discord because I wanted to get the Developer role so I could showcase my work, participate more actively in the community, and use the developer-related channels. I contacted their bot and submitted my application, then waited around two days just to receive a response.
Eventually, I was asked to provide a video demonstrating one of my projects. I sent it immediately. After that, I had to wait another couple of days, only to be told that my application had been rejected — and that I would not even be allowed to apply again for another three months.
I understand that communities are free to set their own requirements for developer roles, and I have no issue with being rejected by itself. What I found frustrating was the extremely slow process combined with a three-month cooldown after a single application. For a community that is supposed to bring developers together and encourage people to showcase their work, the whole process felt unnecessarily restrictive and unfriendly toward new developers.
There is another situation that also left a bad impression on me. This one happened to a friend of mine, so I am describing it based on what he told me.
He was already part of the community and had been publishing his work there. Later, the owners of a Garry's Mod server asked him to post their server package for sale in the #sales channel because they themselves did not have the required Developer role.
After he posted it, another developer contacted him and pointed out that the server package used one of his weapon addons from the Steam Workshop. My friend confirmed that the addon was being used. According to him, he was then permanently banned from the SWRP Developers community with no possibility of appealing the ban.
I can understand removing the addon from the sale, requiring it to be listed as a dependency instead of being included, or asking the seller to change the description if there was a licensing or redistribution issue. Those would all be reasonable responses.
What I do not understand is immediately issuing a permanent, non-appealable ban instead of first asking for the content to be corrected.
Garry's Mod servers commonly rely on publicly available Workshop content such as weapons, playermodels, maps, vehicles, and other addons. Of course, individual creators may have their own redistribution or commercial-use rules, and those should be respected. But if the problem could have been solved simply by removing the addon from the package and listing it as an external dependency, a permanent ban seems massively disproportionate.
Overall, my impression of SWRP Developers is that the moderation is overly strict, the application process is unnecessarily slow, and punishments can be disproportionate to the situation.
A developer community should make talented people want to participate, share their projects, and collaborate. My experience had the opposite effect.
I would not recommend this community to developers looking for a welcoming and reasonable place to showcase or sell their work.