Split "Cursed" into multiple subcategories for more clarity and less irony-poisoning

[LemmaEOF]

Is your suggested enhancement related to a problem? Please describe.

I've been pretty openly frustrated about the "cursed" descriptor for Minecraft mods since the beginning of Fabricord. It's always just felt too mean-spirited to me; a backhanded insult to refer to any mods bucking standard conventions for the sake of either humor or experimental. We should be celebrating mods that push the boundaries, not insulting them, especially when many genuinely good and helpful mods end up in it. I don't think just dismissing them all as "cursed" is fitting.

Not only that, but it's incredibly broad, and nobody can really figure out what counts as "cursed", resulting in a lot of completely and normal and innocuous mods being thrown into the category for the hell of it. It's almost an anti-category; something that only increases difficulty of finding mods you're interested in instead of decreasing it.

Describe the solution you'd like

There are three general reasons mods get put into the "cursed" category. There's experimental or unstable mods, like Sodium Extra or Porting Lib, there's silly or joke mods, like Blast Travel or QuickMäth, and there's more horror-adjacent mods, like From The Fog or The Corners. It feels like these would be much better split into multiple categories, since right now they're kinda all just crammed under one supremely unhelpful label.

The new categories could probably just be called "Experimental" "Silly" and "Scary" or the like, with the new Experimental category taking the old bug icon from Cursed.

Describe alternatives you've considered

This is a tough thing to do! It'd require either making everyone who uses the Cursed category to relabel their mods manually or having the moderation staff go through and recategorize all 734 "Cursed" mods themselves. Nevertheless, I still feel like something needs to happen here - the Cursed category is just too expansive. I've been thinking about other solutions, but there's just not really anything you can do to fix this that wouldn't take a lot of effort on someone's side. Basically the only other option is to do nothing, which is technically valid but I think does the community a disservice by allowing this mess to stick around and set the tone for a less-friendly mode of interaction.

As for category names, I've also thought of "hacky" or "clever hack" for Experimental and "joke" for Silly.

Additional context

No response

[Ampflower]

The only thing I would add on here would be some kind of grace period for mod authors to manually change it themselves before the category is totally removed, disallow assigning it during said grace period, and automatically notifying all of the mod authors using the Cursed category about the change via means available.

Tho I'm not sure on the technical feasibility of this compared to just outright removing the category, since this would be the first time this has been done, as far as I know.

An advantage if this were to be done would be to help lower the burden on Modrinth for reassigning if they choose to go through this and not just outright drop the category without fixing it.

[Arathain]

A technical-debt-but-minimum-effort solution would be to keep the Cursed category and add clarifying categories like Experimental or Joke; I don't know if there's enough "scary" mods to justify having an entire category for them, when there's incredibly broad categories like "magic" (which deserves a whole conversation about subcategories on its own)

[syorito-hatsuki]

Add category Mixins-Free. That can help search mods that not use them and users can make mo stable modpacks

[triphora]

@syorito-hatsuki mixins themselves don't make mods more or less stable, nor would that be a useful search

[TheKodeToad]

I'm pretty sure - at least in theory - mixin free mods should be better in terms of compatibility

[triphora]

Not really, no, not unless the mod author is doing something wrong