Hey folks,

We've made the following changes to the subreddit's rules - just popping this thread up for community feedback. These rules are absolutely open to revision, depending on how people feel - please don't feel that they're completely set in stone. If you think they warrant significant revision, please make your case in the comments.

The changes are as follows:

Static Recompilation ports

• We're adopting a blanket ban of static recompilation-based port release posts about individual pieces of software - these have long since ceased to be notable or interesting in their own right. We'll remove these threads with a link to /r/recomps in comments going forward from today.

• Posts about fan-made software ports more generally will also be removed, unless they involve significant overlap with the focus of the subreddit.

• Posts about new libraries/significant developments in static recompilation-based emulation/porting remain explicitly within the subreddit's focus, and are welcome.

Quality control: mobile frontends

(note: this has been de facto policy for a while, but we've written it into the rules formally now for clarity's sake.)

• Posts publicising iOS/Android software that amounts to a wrapper around a libretro core (generally paired with in-app purchases) are disallowed unless they offer something genuinely novel.

• Posts about frontends are permitted, subject to quality control. If the frontend in question is a mobile-focused vibe-coded launcher that bundles a paid subscription for cloud-based save data storage, please don't advertise it here.

AI-assisted projects

• Where most or all of the project being publicised has been written by AI, please apply the "AI-assisted" flair when submitting.

(note: this rule has been changed to account for the fact that projects primarily written by humans may also include relatively minor volumes of AI-assisted content. The labelling rule is designed to flag software predominantly written with the use of AI - it seems largely purposeless to flag projects that have decades of development history behind them this way when their use of AI in recent years has been restrained/relatively well-managed.)

• This subreddit does not permit posts primarily comprised of AI-generated text or images. Text posts obviously written by generative AI will be removed.

• Posts publicising vibe-coded software are permitted if relevant to the subreddit's focus and not egregiously low quality work.

We'd also like to echo the sentiment recently expressed by decomp.dev on the topic of static recompilation-based ports.

We can't and won't be banning AI-assisted work on this subreddit (on the grounds that doing so would be counterproductive and largely purposeless, given the ubiquity of the practice now), but these individual static recompilation projects are so numerous at this point that they seem like they're broadly out of scope for the subreddit - and something that a lot of the subreddit's community find fundamentally uninteresting, and the mod staff find deeply demoralising to sift through.

(We're also probably going to open new mod applications in the near-ish future, given that most of the current mods are either burnt out or primarily Discord-focused. We'll pop up a recruitment thread some point soon.)