Help develop guidelines for identifying and rejecting spam (shovelware) font projects

[eliheuer]

Low-quality spam font submissions are becoming a problem.

Due to the nature of the OFL (forks of high-quality fonts) just regular quality standards aren't enough to prevent SEO spam and similar spam.

The kind of font projects I think we want to encourage in the OFL ecosystem look like this:

• Active long term maintainer(s) of the project
• Users of the font that are not the designer (Ideally the font has a community of users like Inter)
• High-quality drawings and attention to detail
• Culturally relevant (a poorly drawn font might get a pass if it has cultural meaning or memetic energy)
• Beauty and/or artistic merit (I know it when I see it, but it's subjective, so a diverse group needs to be involved in decision making about what to accept and reject)

But many fonts that are submitted for onboarding are just endless variations of the same low-quality styles, many verging on being SEO spam, vain self-promotion, achievement farming for resumes or college applications, or what in the game industry we called Shovelware.

Low-budget, poor-quality video games, released in the hopes of being purchased by unsuspecting customers, are often referred to as "shovelware". This can lead to discoverability issues when a platform has no type of quality control. Shovelware video games often have a negative reception from critics and players.

The key thing to think about is how these shovelware spam low-quality fonts hurt discoverability. Onboarding a low-quality font to Google Fonts can make the product worse from a users perspective.

The worst user experience when looking for fonts is sifting through a lot of junk and spam. For many designers a small collection of 100 high-quality fonts would be preferable to a collection of 1000 mixed-quality fonts.

An additional problem with fonts like these is that onboarder productivity is judged by how many fonts they onboard. So when an onboarder gets to a spam font, they might know it's bad and will do a disservice to whoever will use it, but will onboard it anyway, because that is what is incentivized and measured.

A better use of time and energy would be collaborating on improving higher-quality typefaces and onboarding styles that do not have 100s of low-quality variations already.

[davelab6]

This seems like a small part of #3