I’ve never heard of or had even ONE positive let alone neutral experience on hidden devs and figured I’d try and make my own competitor.
It’s in the REALLY early stages right now but so far we have a couple things,
those being; Animator roles to display a rough skill level, a strict ban on AI and overall slop, commissions board, open source board, and we are FAR more likable compare to hidden devs.
Again this is in the REALLY early stages and I plan to have more like ranks for other roles and even dedicated sections for each role, I really am just tired of there being no one good place to go to share your work, to commission, and to just talk or get some help if you’re struggling with something like animating or modeling or whatever you do.
Discord Server
(sorry this post has such bad formatting, I’m a lil tired rn and just really needed to get this out onto the forums)
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Anything but just using devforum nowadays 
Oh wait its devforum
Also, a ban on AI is insane, bro
AI is a tool and refusing to use it for arrogance cope is stupidity
And yes, I disagree with vibecoding
Can you imagine that there is a thing such as AI assisting and not vibe coding? 
im shocked too, bro.
Also why would anyone join the server?
Does it have some innovative form of, I don’t know, “governance”? Let’s just say it.
Or is it a classical top-down power concentration that lets moderators do whatever the heck they want without consequences?
Also, speaking of that, does the owner have full power, or is everyone facing some sort of accountability?
The good accountability idea would be making logs fully public, for example, so moderators would face consequences for misusing power as everyone would see it.
But obviously none of it will be addressed, and it will become just as bad, if not worse, than the previous server you described
I played this game before, and these reasons I listed are why it so happens.
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Also, on top of that, how are you going to rank “skill”?
“Skill” is inherently subjective. If you’re going to use it as an actual ranking system, you need to define what the term means in an objective and measurable way, while keeping the criteria transparent.
Then there’s the more important question:
What does this server actually provide that the DevForum does not?
And more importantly, as I already said, who assigns these roles?
How many people are responsible for assigning them?
Who verifies that the process is fair?
What criteria are they using?
And what consequences do the people assigning these roles face if they abuse the system, apply the criteria inconsistently, or improperly assign someone’s rank?
Because if you’re going to introduce a hierarchy based on “skill,” then you are creating an authority system.
And authority systems need accountability .
Otherwise you’ve just replaced one community with another centralized moderation structure and hoped the new one will magically be better. (it wont)
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It should be a ban on generative AI.
For example, being paid to create a thumbnail and returning an AI image, or being paid to write code and getting AI to do it for you.
Final works should always be human made. AI can be used to assist on the way, it shouldn’t be used to generate (create).
Best option I could think of would to have skill determined by those you do work for, although that could easily be abused.
Services like Hidden Devs are moreso job seeker websites.
The devforum is a community site where developers interact with eachother, these sites are moreso where employers can find employees and vice versa.
Honestly I don’t think we need another one of these services, most of them die anyway because they don’t ever get the userbase required to make them usable.
I should have said generative AI but that doesn’t change much since most AI being pushed in creative spaces is generative.
The moderation is not willy nilly and I’m setting things up to make sure mods can just run rampant, I also always have audit logs open to the public though I believe I need to enable that as I may have forgotten.
And as for how skill is ranked, there are objective skill levels, nothing is inherently subjective, there must always be a level of objectivity less we devolve and do whatever it is that we please because it’s subjective. The ranks take into account application of different fundamentals and rules of the given role, a style is also taken into account so that you are not given the wrong rank purely from your style having deviations.
Comparing the server to the DevForums is a rather challenging thing considering the DevForum somewhat high barrier to entry for new devs while the aim for my server is to lower that.
The people assigning the roles are unbaised creators who are in the same role, so an animator will review an animator, an artist will review an artist, and so on. If someone were to improperly rank someone then the role will be changed to reflect the correct skill level and the reviewer will lose their permissions.
Sorry for trashy formatting and poor writing but it’s about 8:26am and I’m still tired, it didn’t help that when I woke up to check if my post was approved that I seen someone coming purely to question every little thing, not saying asking questions is bad but the server is super small currently consisting of around 20 something members total if we don’t include bots to handle things like tickets, so coming at it is a little harsh at such an early stage.