New tiered support policy

[Paint_Ninja]

This has already been the de-facto standard for quite a while now, but figured it would be a good idea to properly formalise it and make it clear for everyone.

TL;DR: You can ask and offer support for Forge on any MC version, as long as you're not demanding it from staff and can accept that older versions may receive less attention due to people moving on to newer, shinier things.

 

Tiered support policy

There are now essentially three tiers of support: full, legacy and minimal.

Full support

This tier has dedicated channels for help on the Discord, gets priority for documentation, new features and bugfixes, and is generally considered the main focus for Forge development and support. Triage actively ports and backports things as needed for versions within this tier where time allows.

The MC versions covered by this follows the existing "LTS" system. In other words, the latest MC version and select versions before it are covered by this tier. We recommend people consider using the newest version possible, as it's likely to be fully supported for longer.

Legacy support

This tier is for older versions of MC that are no longer covered by the full support tier. This tier gets less attention, but is still supported to some extent. To be clear, this is not a "no support" tier, but it is not the main focus. You're welcome to ask for help, submit PRs and help out, but please be aware that you may not get a response as quickly as these versions are generally not as popular anymore and may not have as many people around to help.

Staff may still choose to work on these legacy versions and help people, but please don't demand it from them.

Please note that due to the nature of the old toolchains used for building legacy versions, developing mods using the default MDK may not work. We also cannot easily publish updates to some of these old versions without your help - if you're interested in fixing this, please reach out to us.

Minimal support

This is rare and usually only applies to versions of MC where there's no legitimate reason to be using them. A real-world example of this is 1.20.3, which had a data loss bug that was fixed in 1.20.4 shortly after. All mods made for 1.20.3 work on 1.20.4, so there's no reason to use 1.20.3.

We will help you update to the fixed version instead, but that's about it.