Help? I tried making a Subclass,(WIP, don't go looking for it for now)but it says "Too similar to Circle of Spores to post", even though it's not in any way. Is this an error I should report, or is this a regular problem someone knows how to fix?

Reminder that you don't need to publish homebrew content to use it or share it amongst your players.

It likely is too similar to the spores druid, maybe you didn't delete some text or left in a bunch of features from the spores druid.

You and other players in your campaigns will be able to use it. It's just that the system has found commonalities between your subclass and the Circle of Spores, so it can't be published to the public homebrew collection.  If using it yourself was the point, great you're good. If it was made for publication to the public, put your subclass and the spores next to each other and see what exactly the similarities are. Maybe you could change some text or tweak features a little.

The 'Too similar to circle of spores' message is a misleading one that appears when you haven't properly saved your creation. Go in and hit the save button on the main page and see if that removes the message

Oh, that's interesting, Any idea why that message is the one that pops up?

A quirk of the system that is intended to detect errors and conflicts with other content.

Is there any chance that the error message could be updated at some point to be clearer on what issues it's actually detecting? Feels like every couple of months at least we get someone with this confusion, and if changing just the text of the message wouldn't require a lot of review time, it might be a helpful change.

The error message is a glitch with the system that the team is aware of, but is from what I've heard not a trivial fix. It's presumably tied into the algorithms that do likeness detection which are, needless to say, fairly complex

Ah, fun. Makes sense.

Just curious, is there a reason why it displays Circle of Spores? It’s not like it’s first or last alphabetically or anything, with Circle of Dreams being first and Circle of the Moon being some point after it for Druids, and other subclasses like assassin being before it overall. Does it just have the first internal ID or something?

Not being a Dev, I don't have the insight into how the comparison algorithm works, but if I had to wildly guess, I'd say the maybe the wording of the subclass features of Circle of Spores is either the strictest or least strict match. This means when the system catches an error but can't find a user message to return, it defaults to the message at the top or the bottom of the list, which is the circle of spores message.

However, I could be completely wrong, lol

From my time in programming, and not knowing the exact timeline, two other explenations could be that the glitch was introduced when Circle of Spores was added or updated. Or that when Spores was updated for Tasha's it became the most recent subclass in the list?

Spores showed up even before Tasha’s, so I know that’s not it, sorry.

Quote from ZomblesKlein >>

From my time in programming, and not knowing the exact timeline, two other explenations could be that the glitch was introduced when Circle of Spores was added or updated. Or that when Spores was updated for Tasha's it became the most recent subclass in the list?

It's because Circle of Spores is nefarious and insidious and thus most like the murky vague error that triggers the warning.

At least that's what I tell myself.  Algorithms can be poetic sometimes.  I tell myself that a lot too.