Lemma Soft Forums

After discussion with the rest of the admin team, I've reorganized the Recruitment section. Our opinion is that with everything lumped together in a single forum, it was getting hard to for people to find projects they're interested in working on, and people they're interested in collaborating with. So we've split the Recruitment section up into multiple sub-forums. We've broken the projects up forums based on how much compensation a person might receive - free projects, commercial collaborations (where one might get paid at the end of the project), and paid work. For people offering services, we have a number of sub-forums based on the role you play.

In this system, someone's talents might cross multiple forums. It's okay to have threads in more than one forum, as long as your threads are relevant to the forums they're in.

Right now, everyone's threads are in the "Old Threads" section. We're happy to move your threads into a new forum - just tell us where. If you want threads in multiple forums, you'll have to pick one for thread to go to, and then create new threads in the rest. Just post a message in your thread - we'll see it and make the move.

We also have an archive section we can put threads into if they're no longer relevant. Again, just ask.

Thanks to everyone for bearing with this move, as we strive to continue to support the creator community.

I think everything is great with the recruitment thread, but I do worry about things like the 'Free Project Section'. I understand that people want to get paid, and it's totally fine, but for those who can't afford to, it would be a bit hard to find others who would be willing to help for free, or exchange skills. Would maybe adding the first three together be a good idea? That way anyone can see it, and maybe even one who wants to get paid might find a free creator's project good, and will work something out with them.

My thinking is having a separate section - the first section - for free projects lends prominence to them. Hopefully, it will make it easier for free projects to recruit, now that they're not getting pushed down by commercial projects.

I assure you I'm a big fan of free work in it's own right, and also for the fact that in many cases, teams that formed to work on free projects have stayed together to produce fine commercial work.

Kk, I get what you mean. And it's cool you are. I get that people want to be paid, and am for it, but sometimes it's hard in this day and age. I thank you for answering back to, and it's good you explained it a bit to me as well. Thanks again

Hmm, I'm also worried that threads will get even less attention than before now that there're so many subforums. F.ex. I have a thread offering to pay for art, it should probably go to "I'm a programmer, director or other", which means that people looking for free art, at whom my offer is directed, will never see it.
Also I think there're more free projects offering at least some compensation than fully commercial projects.

It seems the categories don't quite fit:
Free Project
Commercial Project Looking for Collaborators
Commercial Project Looking to Pay

This seems to imply Free Project means they are looking for free artists (I'm using the word artist broadly), but as Katta points out quite a few Free Project directors are willing to pay their artists. There is a conflation of two different things: If the project organizer conceives of the project as a free game or a commercial game and if the project organizer is looking to recruit free labor, partners, or paid labor. While not that frequent, I have seen project organizers advertise for free labor for their commercial project. And I have frequently seen project organizers wanting to pay for their free project.

Perhaps a better category division would be:
We Are Looking for Free Artists.
We Are Looking for Collaborators.
We Are Looking for Paid Artists

^I agree that the sections could be clearer. Another option could be having one section for free projects and one for commercial projects and just adding a little extra description under the header like with the Old Threads Section. It could say something like 'the positions can be paid, collaborations, or unpaid'.

Though if the point of the different sections is to separate people looking for free artists from people who are looking to pay artists then that's obviously not a good idea XD.

I could be completely wrong and if I am I'm sorry, but it seems the most thing recruited ,whether it be paid or not, are artists(BG,CG, and Sprites.) Maybe making a section called "Artist Recruitment" would be good instead of having the first three. The others are good though, and are very clear. Maybe having something like "Artist Recruitment" though would be good since it means that both paying and non-paying people can have a chance. Also, artists will have their own forum, so they won't post their threads there. I just feel like it's a bit easier for people, and maybe a little less confusing.

For some reason it says this announcement is in the Group Plays section.

I echo that it's odd there's a special section for Commercial projects willing to pay, but not so for Free projects. Just because the final product is available free of charge doesn't always mean the project is made at no funds investment from the lead.

Even if you intend to release your project for free, as long as you're willing to pay your contributors money up-front, you should post your thread under "Commercial project offering paid work". "Free projects" are those where the only compensation for the production team is the joy of having completed a project together.

I've tweaked the names of the forums a bit, to make things clearer.

I quite like the new thread titles!

Do you prefer users to carry over an old thread or start a new one?

I don't have a preference - it's user choice. We're happy to move threads, but this is also a good opportunity to start a fresh thread

I don't see why we don't just have one forum for Recruitment, and one for Services Offered, aka Looking for Workers and Looking for Work. That way people looking for opportunities of any kind can go to just one forum, and people looking for workers of any kind can go to one. Separating the Services Offered maybe makes sense, but I really feel as though the Recruitment forums should be all in one. It's tedious to have to click through multiple if you're looking for any kind of work.

If you're worried about differentiating in the Recruitment, just encourage posters to tag the thread titles with [Free] or [Paid].