Third Party Tools & Responsible AI Use

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.

To be explicit about where the line is: other developers' code has no place in your development process. Not as input to an AI agent, not as a working model, not as material to restructure into your own codebase. Seeing a feature in another addon and building your own version of it is normal and always has been — that is how this community has worked for years. Taking another author's implementation and having a tool generated from it is not the same thing, and rewriting the result afterwards does not fix it.

If a tool could not have been built without other people's source code in front of you, it is not your tool.

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. We do not proactively audit repositories or run background checks on new tools. If a creator brings a plagiarism or licensing issue to our attention with clear evidence, we will step in and look into it.
• We also act on what we see. When a tool is submitted for toleration, we review what is in front of us. If that review turns up copied or appropriated work, we will act on it — a report is not required for something we found ourselves.
• 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 offences, or a single case serious enough to warrant it, 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.
• Suspension or permanent loss of the ability to submit tools for toleration.
• 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!

Update — clarifications to this thread

I've made a few edits above, following a case that made clear the original wording left room for interpretation. Nothing here is a new rule; it's spelling out what was already meant.

Where the line is on using other tools' code. Section 2 previously warned that feeding a codebase to an AI will produce a copy. That was framed as a risk. It's now explicit that it isn't acceptable regardless of how the output turns out: other developers' code has no place in your development process — not as input to an agent, not as a working model, not as material to restructure. Rewriting the result afterwards doesn't change that.

How we find out about it. Section 3 said we work on a report-and-verify basis. That still holds — we don't audit repositories or run background checks on new tools. But it now also says we act on what we see: if a toleration review turns up appropriated work, we don't need a report to act on something we found ourselves.

Consequences. Section 4 now lists suspension or loss of the ability to submit tools, which was missing, and no longer reads as though it only applies to repeat offenders. A single serious case can be enough.

As always, my PMs are open. If you're unsure whether something you're planning falls on the wrong side of any of this, just ask — I'd much rather have that conversation before you've written the code than after.

Same as when this thread first went up: use AI to automate the boring parts, learn a new stack, speed yourself up. Just build your own tool.