A few words regarding the recent tensions

Greetings BeamNG community,


If you have been actively following the forums lately, you are aware of the tensions within the community. We wanted to shine some light on this situation today and encourage those of you who have been a part of the discussion to rethink your interactions.

The conflict centered primarily around two issues – re-uploading content without the author’s permission and harassment surrounding the so-called ‘meshlap’ mods. Issues arising from this included personal attacks, continuous off-topic, intentional spam, and provocations.

Needless to say, we do not condone this kind of behavior on our forums. BeamNG is a modding-oriented game and we would like to maintain a constructive, welcoming, and friendly atmosphere in all discussions related to the creation of mods, no matter which stage the development of the mod is currently on.

We support creators regardless of the type of mod they wish to develop. Please recognize that some players enjoy different types of content and utilize mods in different ways. Remember that there are real people sitting behind the screen on the other side of the forum, you cannot bash them down and imply that they are a lesser member of the community because they haven’t made everything from scratch. Everyone has to start with something, even one of our founders @tdev started out by making simple mods for Rigs of Rods.

Let me elaborate on the potential examples of these cases and what you can do if you encounter one.

When you see someone re-use content, especially without permission – report it to us and we will deal with it. For example, taking a model one found online and gluing it to one of the existing jbeam, without actually changing anything, doesn’t add value to the community.

When you see someone putting in the work to modify/create a model on their own, or use an existing model with permission, while also putting in the work to modify the jbeam, do not harass them regardless of how much work you believe they should have put into editing. If their mod is not to your liking – distance yourself from the discussion. It is completely acceptable to re-use parts in this way and doesn’t mean that the author is unworthy in some way.

None of these situations warrant offensive remarks, ever. This is simply not constructive and will not solve anything, it’s unreasonable and unacceptable.

On the topic of unacceptable, we would also like to point out that if an author has decided to stop or delay the development of their mod, it is their decision, and everyone should respect it. Persistently pushing them to continue the work or publish the mod, or even worse – stealing and distributing their work without permission, is disrespectful and disheartening. It takes time for any creator to make a mod that suits their vision and standards. Everyone has a different life situation and the amount of time available for their hobbies. Do not put unnecessary pressure on creators. If you wish to continue someone’s work, you may ask for their permission, but if they refuse – that’s their choice.

If an author has decided to take down their mod, they can request its removal via DMs. Once the mod has been removed, please respect the author’s decision, and do not publish any further content with it, especially if you were directly asked not to.

As a result of this situation, some members of the forum have received notifications about the removal of their messages, and some have received warnings or even bans. None of these actions were a mistake and this was not done with malicious intent, but we will protect the integrity of our community when we must. If you would like to appeal a decision, please feel free to use direct messages or contact us via support@beamng.com, do not add fuel to the fire by creating threads or posts to discuss this in public. It will only result in further sanctions for you.

Related to this, please note that, unfortunately, our current forum software is deprecated and there are certain technical limitations to the flexibility of our moderation options. Some features have been abused by certain members (yes, the ‘informative’ reaction…), which led to us being forced to disable it for everyone as there is no selective removal. While I cannot promise specific dates yet, we are working on implementing a forum software upgrade soon. The process is complicated as our repository is integrated into it. Meanwhile we ask you to cope with this decision in a reasonable way and avoid spamming the forums. Your signature and bio are not the place to express these frustrations.

Our moderation team has been generally lenient and forgiving and the extent of the actions that had to be taken in the past few weeks is rather unprecedented. Should this behavior continue further, we will no longer be lenient. Offensive content will be deleted, and culprits will lose their forum privileges permanently if that’s what it takes. Please understand that we are also a small team, and moderation is currently done by BeamNG Staff. We are human, having to go through literally hundreds of offensive messages daily is hardly enjoyable and disrupts our work and personal lives.

These are difficult times and everyone is under a lot of stress already, we believe that the community would benefit from a kind and compassionate environment.

Lastly, a reminder that if you see someone breaking the rules – please use the Report button, do not derail threads further by engaging in the same behavior.


Thank you,

BeamNG Team