OneBookShelf’s Recently Amended Conduct Guidelines

A letter from Steve Wieck, President of OneBookShelf

This week, we shared an updated version of our Publisher Conduct Guidelines. Enough people have been asking questions and making some assumptions about this document that we felt it might help to further explain some of the points and perhaps allay some fears.

A number of people have asserted that these guidelines are entirely new, but that is not true. These conduct guidelines have been in place since shortly after DriveThruRPG launched around 2004; they have been amended a couple of times in the past, but they’ve been around since a little before the formation of OneBookShelf in 2006.

This current document is simply an update to the prior version, and I’ll outline what exactly changed this week. As I go, I’ll offer a bit of explanation where it’s warranted, and then at the end, I’ll also share our reasons for a few other parts of these guidelines that people have asked us about.

What Changed

There are only a few changes that were new this week.

POD Process and Print Proofs

We amended this section to clarify that a proof must be ordered with every change to print files. This guideline is not a change in policy from the prior version of the document but simply a clarification of the wording.

The reason for this requirement is that, as experience has shown, even the smallest changes to files can change the book or card title in ways the publisher never expected. As a result, at best, they end up having to go through revisions again at their own cost — and, at worst, they have activated the title for sale and are now also on the hook for replacement costs for any customer orders of flawed products.

Our goal here is to save publishers time and money. We don’t see any profit from proof copies, which publishers always receive at cost (i.e., price of printing plus shipping).

New Material

Beyond the change outlined above, the only new additions to the Conduct Guidelines are these final three sections: Treatment of Staff, Social Media Behavior, and Hostile Marketing. Our goal in adding these sections is to protect both our users and our team from predatory individuals peddling misinformation and people making unwarranted personal attacks.

Treatment of Staff: This section should be pretty self-explanatory. If you are being abusive or making personal attacks against any employee of OneBookShelf, privately or publicly, we may not wish to continue doing business with you.

Social Media Behavior: This one deserves a bit of explanation since it’s the one new section that has inspired the most questions and assumptions.

We are not interested in policing the social media of every publisher. People tend to think of DriveThruRPG as some faceless monolithic corporation, but we are a relatively small company with under 40 employees. Our Publisher Relations team numbers seven, and we’re busy enough already. We couldn’t police everyone’s social media even if we wanted to. And we would rather have a conversation with you about what is making you unhappy with our site or service to see if we can help.

Here’s the main thing, though: We have had publishers make libelous statements about our site, services, and staff before, and some of our employees have been doxed.

If you are making legitimate complaints about our site or tools or service, then we aren’t going to come looking for you. We’ll take it in stride and try to do better, although we’d rather hear it from you directly so we can do better and try to help you. But if you are maliciously using your platform or your social capital to excoriate us or your complaints are false, and you haven’t bothered to reach out to us so we can try to fix whatever is upsetting you, then that is a different story.

Hostile Marketing: This one was added as a response to a small number of malefactors we have dealt with in recent years, who have consciously and maliciously manipulated our policies.

Let me call out this section of our Product Content Guidelines, which have also existed for as long as OneBookShelf (but which have also been amended a couple of times over the years):

Neither your Work, description, nor any promotional material, including blog posts or press releases, may contain racist, homophobic, discriminatory, or other repugnant views; overt political agendas or views; depictions or descriptions of criminal violence against children; rape or other acts of criminal perversion; or other obscene material without the express written permission of OneBookShelf.

Illegal and Infringing content is not allowed. It is the content creator’s responsibility to ensure that their content does not violate laws, or copyright, trademark, privacy, or other rights.

Every time a title is reported on our site that might be breaking these rules, our policy is to pull that title down for an internal review by our staff, which normally takes up to two weeks. This is invariably a difficult part of our job. We abhor censorship, and we will always lean toward allowing rather than banning titles.

Sometimes, though, publishers deliberately push this boundary, knowing full well that their title will be reported and deactivated for review and that it will reflect badly on DriveThruRPG when that happens. This behavior in itself is malicious, but it is compounded when the publisher also builds this launch-report-deactivation pattern into their marketing plans, since stirring up controversy brings them attention and thus, they presume, more sales.

This marketing ploy depletes time and resources, both professional and emotional, from both our customer service and publisher relations teams each time it happens, invariably far out of proportion to any benefit we see from selling such titles.

In short, we are not interested in being the scapegoat for any publisher who wishes to repeatedly market titles via attempting to generate outrage towards us.

Other Concerns

As noted, only the sections I’ve outlined above are new to the guidelines, but there have been a few other concerns expressed, both on our Discord server and in emails from publishers, about other parts of the document that folks maybe hadn’t read before. I’ll address those here.

Links: Publishers can’t include links to external sites, with a few exceptions, on their title description pages. They can, however, include those links in their purchase notes, i.e., the note customers receive by email when they purchase that title.

Again, this rule comes down to a handful of bad actors who have abused our site by posting links for their customers to buy their titles from other third-party sellers. We don’t think it’s unreasonable for us to ask publishers not to direct customers toward our competitors when they are shopping here.

Front-Page Flooding: This rule is an amendment that was introduced in 2015, based entirely on customer feedback. At that time, we were receiving regular complaints about a handful of publishers who were releasing long lists of short one- or two-page titles at a time. Their cover images would entirely fill the “Newest Products” carousel on the front page, making it harder for customers to see what other new titles were available. As a result, we introduced this policy to limit publishers to just a few new titles per day (except stock art products, which are not limited in this way).

Today, we do programmatically control this issue in some key places on site, automatically limiting the new titles they can show and thus making it in a publisher’s interest to release a few titles per day instead of a flood all at once.

Pricing: Our directive regarding similar pricing across sites does not include the common practice of “community copies” — where for every n copies purchased, the publisher makes a copy available for free download to someone in need who therefore does not have to purchase it at full price. We understand that community copies provide value and solidarity within the TTRPG community and support publishers who wish to let everyone play.

We also plan to implement tools to allow community copies more easily on our new site.

Reviews: Publishers and contributors cannot review titles on our site. This rule has been in place since 2012, when we discovered that a surprising number of bad actors had been abusing the review system to downvote competitors’ titles and upvote their own. That is a bad thing, and I don’t think there’s much more to explain here.

In 2018, we found that a number of publishers were still engaging in this kind of behavior, in a few cases despite repeated warnings, so we banned one publisher, temporarily banned a couple of others, and coded our site so that publisher accounts cannot review titles (except Publisher Resource titles such as stock art).

Let’s Talk

We are not unapproachable. If you feel like DriveThruRPG is a giant company who won’t listen to you, then we would like the opportunity to show you that is not the case. If you are a publisher or creator, we are always an email away (publisherservice@onebookshelf.com), or you can join our Discord server (https://bit.ly/DTRPGDiscord) and ask us questions directly there. We may not always be able to give you exactly what you want, but we will certainly try our best to help.

I can also vouch for our fantastic customer support team being among the best out there. If you have a problem with our site or an order or product as a customer, or if your customers are having a problem, just reach out to our customer service folks and the issue will be answered and often resolved within the hour. They truly are top-notch.