The contributor permission is increasingly being abused to allow players to continuously republish extremely similar games - this is because rooms you are “contributor” to do not show up anywhere on your portfolio. This means you can create/earn revenue off of rooms that break the CCOC and not be punished for it, since there’s not much tracing you back to owning the room at all. The most recent of republish trends I’ve seen abusing this are the “survivethe”/“escapefrom” rooms. They’re park templates where something chases you and drags you into a cave. There are tons of these out now, and they’re all the same functionally and artistically. Many of these rooms are owned by level 1 brand new accounts.
The CCOC forbids “extremely similar rooms” but many creators are opting to create brand-new sockpuppet accounts as the room owner, then place themselves in contributor to bypass this.
In the past, it was very easy to highlight and report room republishers since they ultimately had to have the room somewhere on their portfolio to make revenue off of it. But now, with the introduction of the contributor role, things have become much more difficult.
The thought is something can’t be an “extremely similar” republish if the room owner doesn’t have any other rooms on their portfolio… Contributors can still make earnings from a room, but the rooms themselves won’t be viewable on their portfolio. The only way to check for contributors abusing the permission like this is using Jegard’s discord recnet bot. This means it is becoming incredibly difficult to create concise reports on users obfuscating themselves to republish the same room over and over, thus harder to enforce the strike system, and causing an influx of low quality, extremely similar games to flood the platform.
Having rooms you are “contributor” on will fix this issue. There’s also no reason why I would want to “hide” maps I “contributed” to, so people using this benefits users using the permission in good faith, I think.