Hi everyone,
With the rapid rise of AI-assisted development tools, creating new utilities and features for OGame has become faster and more accessible than ever. We love seeing the influx of fresh ideas and modernized tech stacks in the Community Showcase.
However, as technology changes, the core values that keep our development community healthy must remain rock-solid. We want to take a moment to discuss the culture we want to foster here and outline some practical guardrails for using AI responsibly.
1. Our Culture: Transparency & Respect
The OGame tool development community has thrived for years because creators generously share their time and code. To maintain this, transparency and mutual respect are non-negotiable.
- Give credit upfront: If your tool relies on an open-source baseline, say so clearly in the first few lines of your thread.
- Respect active projects: Building on history is great; copying an active peer's current, distinct work without their permission is not.
- Cooperation over competition: For years, developers in this community have discussed tricky logic, shared solutions, and actively pointed users to each other's tools. We are a collaborative ecosystem, not a cutthroat marketplace competing for users. We succeed by lifting each other up.
2. A Reality Check on AI Agents & "Inspiration"
We need to talk about how AI agents actually behave. If you feed a live community website or codebase into an AI tool and tell it to "take inspiration from this" or "make this better," the AI isn't going to just learn from it—it is almost certainly going to copy it outright.
As a developer, your use of AI must be conscious, aware, and responsible:
- You cannot hide behind the AI and claim ignorance if it hands you a plagiarized layout, specific custom features, or exact code structures.
- "Vibe-coding" a tool in a few minutes is fine, but you are entirely responsible for auditing the final output before you publish it as your own work.
3. Our Enforcement Policy: We Are Not Code Police
To be completely transparent: the admin team is not going to actively police this section. We do not have the time or the desire to proactively audit every GitHub repository or run background checks on every new UI that gets posted.
- We operate on a report-and-verify basis. If a creator brings a plagiarism or licensing issue to our attention with clear evidence, we will step in and look into it.
- First-time offenses: If a tool is found to be an unauthorized clone or an uncredited replica, the thread will be locked or removed until the issue is properly resolved with the original creator.
4. Escalated Consequences for Repeat Offenders
While we prefer to resolve things amicably, we will protect our community's integrity. Repeated offenders or those acting in clear bad faith will face strict, escalating consequences, including:
- Permanent removal of all their project threads from the Showcase section.
- Complete revocation of the tool's official "tolerated" status.
- Being permanently blacklisted from private API access and community developer resources.
Moving Forward
We want to keep this space collaborative and exciting. Use AI to automate the boring stuff, optimize your performance, and learn new stacks - just don't use it to appropriate the hard work of your fellow community members.
Thank you all for helping us keep Origin a space built on trust, respect, and true innovation!
