A cancel culture smear. Some easily offended people were literally hacking the account and trying to get to the bottom of who was running it when it's really none of their concern.

@matt1211: Fair point. I think there's pretty much a unanimous hate of region locking across damn near the entire internet though. And that is a completely different argument altogether, since it isn't exactly straight-up overt pirating by any stretch of content. Thre is also pretty open-season discussion about the evils of pervasive drm, as long as people aren't soliciting discussions of ways to pirate content/suggesting methods that go beyond making inaccessible drm content accessible into the realms of public sharing, then. A lot of DRM tactics go beyond legality into corporate lockin anyhow, and most indie devs even don't like pervasive drm initially, indeed this is why we're seeing so many devs on itch.io

@98:
Your first example is actually a counterpoint to what you're trying to say. I remember that topic, and as far as I remember most if not everyone supported the developer and were shocked that someone would do that, meaning this is not an issue of the forum. Refusing to send people here is not going to prevent people from leaving crappy reviews on the app store! In fact it will as was shown on that topic lead to people going to give it good ratings. I'll check out the second link later, haven't seen that one yet. Also didn't follow the goldgun thing but it does ring a bell so will search for that. But the thing is, no matter where a developer posts something they're pretty much always going to get criticism mixed in with praise, that is not something that is in any way unique to this forum and in fact is often worse in other places. So I still don't see the problem. I mean in post 30 of this topic Liam himself criticises a game, it's just what people do when they don't like something. I don't know who this Ian guy is, but if he has influence and he's using it to turn people away then in my opinion he's part of the problem. What you're saying is an extreme exaggeration if you're characterising the entire forum like that. Can you name anywhere where people can post comments that doesn't have the above mentioned happen ever? I would actually say it's relatively rare on this forum and generally kept in check by the mods.
Also, hatred towards the mods has gone down dramatically from what it used to be. I know there was a user named moonwalker who was an example of this, but as far as I remember they were banned for something, and the other people have either come around or left, so I don't think that's really a thing anymore.
In general people really seem overly negative and exaggerating the negatives while overlooking the positives. I mean most developers get a lot of support and constructive criticism, and the the mods often get a lot of support for most of their decisions. I just find it interesting that people just ignore this and disproportionally focus on the negatives. Not that we should ignore the negatives, obviously they do need to be addressed, but exaggerating them beyond their actual scope is not going to help.

@Zakc93: To be a bit more clear, I linked to that topic for reference, but I was focusing specifically on Ian's post reminding people that the general negative attitude that prompted the topic in the first place is one of the reasons why he turns most developers away from the forum now. It's true that infighting can happen anywhere, but for that to be a developer's first impression of a never-heard-of-until-now community would not make them want to invest further into their games. The Code 7 topic was, to make a long story short, a variation of what happened with Galactic Colonies presented on the forum. Not so much a review but a disproportionate slamming of the developer by one person while pretty much everyone else reading the thread told him off.
I don't think we are overlooking the positivity by any stretch, I mean goodness knows we have come a long way and despite a few reappearing regulars, most of us are pretty civil and united in the goal of keeping this a welcoming place. But as is with any social site, the bad actors always make the most noise, and that could be the first thing a new dev sees, and we absolutely do not want that.
For all Ian's advising devs to steer clear of this forum, the devs don't have much to lose, as they have valuable feedback from influential figures in the accessibility advocates/consultants field, including Ian himself, Brandon Cole, SightlessCombat, ABleGamers, and many others, who, guess what, don't even need a forum to reach out to these developers. Pulling the Ian's part of the problem card is not a good idea, because true or not, it's a useless manoeuvre that goes against the sentiment that is making this forum a pottentially better place so that maybe more developers could be encouraged to come here.
TLDR: The only ones that are part of the problem are those causing the drama in the first place, thus tarnishing this community's reputation. But even a hard stance can always change, and talking of positivity, the time it took to falsely label Ian as part of the problem could have been spent posting something that doesn't make this issue so black-and-white.

I see both sides of this. The thing is, asses are always gonna ass, no matter what community they're part of. It boils down to the same thing that always comes into play whenever these discussions come up. The drama only seems worse because it's a small community, but mainstream forums have a greater number of drama starters by default because of sheer numbers. And yet, I get it, the gut reaction of "ugh, what will devs think if they see all this crap going on in disproportionate amounts?" You stick around long enough, and take what some of the less mature members of this forum say to heart, you might just become disillusioned and believe all the stereotypes about blindies. It could always be worse, though. There are far worse introductions one could have to the blind community. Vorail was mentioned in passing somewhere in this thread, need I say more?

Absolutely guted about MyTrueSound, I was reall looking forward to Music Maze.
Now, in regards to mainstream devs, please keep in mind that some of our favourite games might not have become accessible, for the simple reason that the decision was out of ours, and the developer's, control.
Case in opint, Killer Instinct. From what I understand, the HUD stuff got implemented nearer the end of the lifespan, just as Season 3 was coming out. The "let games read to me" thing got announced by Microsoft, but by that point, Killer Instinct season 3 was coming to an end.
I have a feeling if they had just a little moe time or another season, we might have seen it. But it's also not that simple. Mainstream game menus do not work like audiogaming menus, even though it might seem like it. I think these days, some menus even change their behind the scenes code every few seconds to prevent cheating, or that's one reason I've heard, so the screen reading feature would have to keep track of that while not losing it's place.