This post is to serve as a Discussion Board about what, if any, Exceptions to have for Melon Folder Loading.
The original intention was to have no exceptions and subfolders being ignored has been an oversight since early releases.
Currently only folders that start with ~ are ignored.

An example of this being an issue for existing setups, a friend just updated ML and had files in various sub folders in Mods, unknowing to them those mods now loaded and were causing weird errors. As part of the migration the installer really should add the exclusion prefix to existing sub folders to prevent such issues.

A few people suggested possibly ignoring all folders with a name equal to "Disabled" or "Broken"

A few people suggested reverting the behavior
Going back to a less inclusive scan that ignores all folders unless manifest.json is found

One of my big concerns with this is that it is a significant change of behavior for how mods load that isn't obvious to most users, as honestly, most don't read change logs.

Some modding communities use automated tools for sorting outdated/broken mods into separate folders, Disabled or Broken, and those tools can be easily updated to migrate to ~Disabled and ~Broken or something of the like without much hassle.

The situation where more confusion may come from is users that knew that Melonloader didn't load sub directories before and used that store unloaded mods in a sub directory of their Mods folder, if just for convenience.

I have no issue with loading from sub directories going forward, specially if ~ continues to work on an exclusion prefix, however I would suggestion the following,

• Temporarily roll back to less inclusive for the next hotfix, yell at modding communities to update any tooling before the next ML version.
• Have the updater rename sub directories in the Mods folder to start with ~ when going from a version of ML that had less inclusive scanning to one with more inclusive. This ensures that mods that weren't loading on the old version, continue not loading on the new one.

The situation where more confusion may come from is users that knew that Melonloader didn't load sub directories before and used that store unloaded mods in a sub directory of their Mods folder, if just for convenience.

Its convenient for both modders and players.

Or player stop caring at all because loading from subfolders works, but the mods load additional files that are not directly in the mods folder were it expects them to be. And suddenly all these new errors pop up.

Thats basically on the mod devs, but there are a LOT of mods out there that people will play to the end of time, even if the dev has faded into legend a long time ago.

But that goes for any change I guess. So from the perspective of the TLD modders ... we are lazy and don't like change :D
We'd be happy with keeping subfolders unloaded, but are prepared for players crying for support either way.

I'd suggest just shoving an autogenerated README txt in the Mods/ folder notifying of this behaviour and how to make subfolders that are ignored. Supporting a period as a prefix as well would be neat.