There is a significant issue with the data pack section on PMC, one that is primarily felt by creators of the biggest and most complex packs such as myself, but really by any data pack creator.

That issue is how several people on PMC post large quantities of spam packs containing at worst singular recipe files. Not only can these packs easily be made with a generator such as this, and can be cranked out in mass quantities, they also flood the feed, pushing down packs that may have taken tens or even hundreds of hours to make with packs that could have been made and uploaded in a minute tops.

Often times, these spam packs add cheaty recipes such as easy diamond or easy netherite, which could easily be made by the end user using something like the generator I linked above. Also, the legitimate recipes are often only slightly different; for example, most saddle recipes use leather, iron and string. There is no point to having multiple near-identical packs on the site unless there are significant differences.

Additionally, the people who make these spam packs could easily compile them into a singular large pack. I am unsure how the staff would designate larger packs as fine to upload, but as it is, posting them as separate packs feels like they're farming for XP to me, since many of the people who post these recipe packs have upwards of 5 or more packs.

As someone who makes actual data packs, it doesn't feel like my effort is being respected over that of these recipe pack creators. Hundreds of hours of our time are being rendered ineffective because whenever we publish an update, the spammy recipe packs overtake it in the feed. Many other pack makers feel the same; I made a forum post a few days ago specifically about cheaty recipe packs, and several long-standing members of the community expressed their agreement.

Currently, these packs can sometimes be removed for spam; however, this is not always the case. I've seen a PMC mod state on the Discord server that they're "not sure where we are supposed to draw the line between what is allowed and what isn't". There need to be concrete rules set in place to remove these packs whose existence negatively contributes to the community, as right now these packs can only occasionally be removed for spam.

So, following that, I ask of the PMC staff: please disallow data packs that only add recipes or find some other solution to separate these packs from others or improve their overall quality. For an archetype of submission that contributes so negatively, I am surprised this was not disallowed or otherwise changed weeks or months ago.

Thank you for your time.


Edit: Another key point to mention here is that the mods category has an explicit rule against unoriginal or repetitive content. The datapacks category does not. I feel like the datapacks category could greatly use such a rule, as it would not only cover these recipe packs while not affecting higher quality ones, it would also cover spammy packs that add random low-quality gimmicks, another issue I have.

Edit: Update to my thoughts on this a bit, after discussing with some friends and others who disagree with the content of this ticket.

I feel that the main issue is not with the presence of the recipe packs, but rather with how the site treats them. Take the popular reel, for instance. A pack that reaches a certain threshold is often able to be displayed to all members in a banner. However, the issue with this is that it has a very low threshold for when a pack can be posted to it, and it also can only feature a pack once in its lifetime, regardless of how many updates or changes have been applied since it was featured.

Thus, the popular reel favors members who post many packs instead of updating the same packs over and over again. Updated packs tend to be higher quality, so I propose to update the popular reel to allow submissions to be re-featured if they receive an update and have not been featured in a certain time period. I sincerely believe this is a better solution to the problem than disallowing recipe packs.