STOP THIS SHAME!

After months the RBRPro community has endured all kinds of aggression (spamming insults and even porn videos on Discord channels, spreading defamatory posts and videos, comments on our subscribers' Youtube channels) and any kind of spreading false news, at the aiming to manipulate public opinion and move players to competing projects, we believe it is time to make our voices heard.

We believed that these were isolated initiatives that would diminish over time, but we were wrong. While we underestimated the effect of false information spreading on Discord and websites and remained silent, many have come to believe the defamation.

But now is the time to properly inform people and put an end to this shame.

RBRPro has always been under attack, this is because it is perhaps feared by many modders who see in our project the attempt to take possession of the intellectual rights of the contents and the various plugins contained in the mod attributing them to ourselves.

In particular, we have been accused of:

1. Wanting to hide the Czech plugin property by changing its name

2. To release free of charge the work of other modders who would not have given their authorization for the publication of the contents in the mod

3. To copy work from other projects, for example SimHub

4. Asking for donations illegitimately (accusation often degenerated into the word scam)

All of this is not only false, but rather it constituted an attempt to intentionally denigrate our work in order to hinder its diffusion.

In fact, it is obvious to anyone that it is absolutely impossible to hide the ownership of the Czech plugin as a registration on that site is required. Our work, on the contrary, aims to integrate and improve what we believe is the best project ever born in the history of game modding which is precisely the Czech plugin. It is also evident that the intellectual property of the plugin has always been attributed to its authors in the manager's credits page.

Regarding the accusation of spreading the "work of other modders", we would like to inform the community that no one in the world can consider themselves the owner of 100% of the contents of any existing mod.

In fact, what we currently call "Richard Burns Rally" is the result of the independent work of dozens of people.

RBRPro is not the only project to apply a donationware policy to their content. rbr.onlineracing.cz in fact applies exactly the same type of policy since (in a completely legitimate way) it requires a donation to obtain the authorization to create events. However, it is clear that the developers of the plugin and the site are not the creators of the physics, stages or models, which they also distribute for free. Therefore the donations made for this site concern exclusively the online plugin and not the contents, even if this is commonly misunderstood.

Similarly, the donations to RBRPro are not for the contents themselves but for the manager's functionalities, translations and all the numerous additional features and contents that are only found in our mod and being the result of our work only, they cannot be replicated on others.

Some modders believe that illegally stealing content from commercial games (such as DiRT) may be subject to donation. In all honesty, we would be ashamed to steal audio illegally and then ask for donations for it.

Regarding the accusation of copying from other projects, especially SimHub, you can contact the SimHub developers directly and learn from them that we have been in contact and collaborating for years. We were the ones who allowed the implementation of NGP telemetry in Simhub and allowed the resolution of a bug that caused it to malfunction together with RBRPro.

Our code accused of "plagiarism" is open-source on GitHub and you can ask the SimHub developers themselves whether it is a copy or not. We would never have used someone else's code without their permission.

Instead, we would like to draw your attention to what we have learned about the activity of the Hungarian developers and their collaborators:

1. In order to allow online use of the BTB stages they have not developed any new features but rather found a way to hook their plugin to the RBRRX. This way of acting is generally considered an illegal use of the code of others, as this must be analyzed and studied, violating the intellectual property of the original authors. This practice is known by the name of reverse engineering, or "disassembling" the code of others in order to use it for their own purposes, and in a normal "commercial" context it would be completely illegal.

2. Finnish modder mika-n, one of the developers of RallySimFans, has posted on the web code containing reverse engineering of both the RBRRX plugin and the Czech RBRTM plugin. This code, in addition to being a violation of the rights of the respective authors, is potentially dangerous for the whole rbr.onlineracing.cz community because it shows methods to alter plugin parameters and cheat in the game (we cannot go into further details here for obvious reasons ).

Pretending to release open-source code, the modder actually stopped the release of the source code for months, when he had to implement functionality related to the Hungarian plugin he is a collaborator of.

In fact, therefore, he is protecting his own project while violating those of others.

In light of this we believe it is good that the community begins to make its voice heard before that code is used by someone in the wrong way. We therefore call for the immediate removal of that code from the public domain by its author.

In fact, we would like to announce that it was precisely the statements of the finnish modder on a Discord channel that, read by our collaborator Andrea, led us to the existence of a rather simple cheat to make, which fortunately we immediately reported to the Czech developers. We hope that this will make you understand the danger of the knowledge that he is spreading with his code.

We have not seen such behavior from Czech developers and even if we had seen it we would certainly have condemned it. Neither we nor our community has spammed on other people's channels. We point out that we are not even subscribed to other people's channels, while the Hungarian developers were subscribed to ours we don't know for what purpose.

 Finally, we appeal to the conscience of individual users so that they realize that behind a "result" there may be legitimate or unlawful means to achieve it and we ask them to inform themselves and evaluate, ignoring any false information disseminated on the net for the purpose of defamation.