Hi, I'm new to the community here after finding the really cool game jam section, and while a lot of it is great there are a few nit picks I have with the current system. First and foremost is the inability to PM / DM people looking for teams, which causes a lot of the community tabs to just be people looking for other team members, and then a lot of publicly shared Discord tags and emails to actually figure things out.

I think it would help communities greatly if people had a way to contact each other by visiting their profile page and sending them a direct and private message. Then team-finding threads could be more one-post-per-person where you show off your skills, and all the contact and forming messages would only be sent to the relevant people who were interested in those minutiae. This is kind of how everywhere else does it, and it feels like a major security oversight not to have this, likely brought on by the belief that developers don't necessarily want messages from players littering their notifications. But for communities where people are on equal footing, it's almost essential to have this feature, especially when you're shy like me and you prefer to only share contact information publicly when you have to.

Another thing that appears to be a major oversight is that there's no list of people that joined the jam anywhere, as far as I can tell. So I know there's 53 people that joined, but I have no idea who they are. And even if I did, there'd be no way to contact them unless they made a post somewhere or have an email or Discord listed on their profile. All very frustrating!

I haven't found anything else like your public game jam community on the internet, so I'm hoping these improvements will be considered. They would add a lot of value to my personal experience, and let me show past work and contact info on a case-by-case basis, instead of publicly.

Hello, thanks for the feedback. The lack of DMs and a non-public participants list is intentional right now. We don't want people soliciting others without consent. But, I do think there should be better ways for people who are looking for others to work with on jams to have a system to get together. Maybe a "join a team page" on jams that let you opt into being shown on a list where people can reach out to you.

Yeah, something like that! But opt-in often reduces the number of people who do it, so maybe that should be the default when you join and there's just a separate "Join Privately" button underneath it with the current behavior. I think jams in general are about working with other people that you don't usually work with, so I would assume most people would want to be put on the list unless they specifically opted out of it.