Summary: I want to link to a spreadsheet and a blog, something that technically isn’t allowed in the rules but I feel would be a worthwhile amendment to them.
Hello! I write weekly blog posts to keep my community in the loop as many do through the Bulletin Board section of the forum.
One of the rules for this section is:
Only links to Twitter, GitHub, Gitlab, YouTube, Twitch and Trello are allowed. Do not post links to other domains (such as Discord).
And I understand that since this goes through the main Roblox site there needs to be a higher standard of self-censorsing what we post. However I have 2 key resources that I think would be quite helpful to my community in these posts.
The first one is my design document, currently hosted on Google Sites: https://shl4.dev. The actual link this domain redirects to is SHL4. Google Sites is a very simple website making tool that only allows images and text (though you can embed off-site videos in it - same as with Twitter).
The second one is essentially linking to Google Sheets, if players wish to know when the next update to my current project is, they can just go to https://nextupdate.net (surprisingly cheap domain), which redirects them to LP3 Task Breakdown - Google Drive. This page is literally just a published google spreadsheet that auto-estimates how much time I have left. Think of it like a trello analog focused on answering the big question: when is the next update coming out?
Now I’m aware there are multiple arguments for why these links should not be allowed. For one mods are busy enough without having to vet every new site added to a post, also these sites aren’t as readily censored by the services that host them. I know this rule exists for a reason.
All the same though, I think these options should be allowed. For one they’re both public-facing, so if something is bad they can be immediately taken down (similar to if someone puts bad content in a trello board), and at the same time they can allow the communication of important information. While a google site to an extent can be broken down into text, it would be very difficult to show a spreadsheet on the forum currently, and as so much of my work is game balancing, analytics, economic simulations, etc, being able to link to spreadsheets would be amazing.
As to the custom domains, I’m fine if I can’t link to them - they’re fun and make it easier for the community to remember how to access the links, but they do put a layer of obscurity over the entire process - I’d be fine posting just the raw link, likely hyperlinking to some text.