KasperVld Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 Hello everyone! We’re receiving a lot (a lot!) of emails, messages and tweets with questions about what happened to KerbalStuff, what our response to the statement currently on the website is, and if we could step in to take over the website. Because KerbalStuff was arguably the most popular third party community website we feel it’s important to share our view on the events of the past few days. To understand the position KerbalStuff had in the community it’s important to go back to its roots. Back in the day we hosted our own mod repository named SpacePort. It was a very simple system based off a Wordpress platform and maintaining was, well, not the easiest thing. In 2014 we had come to the point where we had to decide on the future of that service. We were faced with one of two options: rebuild the SpacePort platform from the ground up and continue to invest significant amount time, or outsource the mod repository. We eventually opted for the latter and partnered with the Curse network. During that time the community had also started the process of creating a community-run Spaceport replacement (the “Majiir challenge”). When we announced our partnership with Curse that effort picked up steam and Sircmpwn’s proposal called KerbalStuff was born. KerbalStuff grew to be (one of) the biggest mod repositories for Kerbal Space Program. It featured tight integration with CKAN, a mod manager that many players and modders use. Although the website was initially hosted by Majiir, Sircmpwn moved the website to his own servers after some months of operation and Majiir is no longer involved. Lately, Kerbalstuff had grown to the point where the current hosting was no longer adequate. This is definitely a testament to the website’s popularity in the KSP community. This week, the website went blank and ultimately came back with the message that it had been closed down. It’s fair to say that this took everyone by surprise. Given that KerbalStuff was an independent website, closing the service is Sircmpwn’s personal decision, and we had no part in it. We have not received a request to help with or take control of the website prior or after the shutdown, nor are we aware of anyone who was asked to help or take over Kerbalstuff. The message that Sircmpwn put up on the website cites that a lack of interest in continuing the service is the reason for its closure. The reasoning behind the apathy contained, and still contains, elements that we disagree with. Because these arguments have caused a lot of.. let’s call it passionate questions in our direction we feel compelled to reply to them. Firstly, we were blamed for continuing to support Curse as the official mod repository, in spite of KerbalStuff hosting more mods. The reason for this lies in the history of the website’s creation: it was developed specifically to be an unofficial, independent alternative to the official mod repository. Curse provided, and still provides, a stable platform for uploading mods and other ingame content, and we have no reason to end our partnership with them. Because of those two arguments, we never explored the possibility of making KerbalStuff the ‘official’ mod repository. At this time similar arguments can be made for other community initiatives, such as KerbalX, CKAN or the KSP Subreddit. Related to KerbalStuff not being an official website, we were blamed for never mentioning KerbalStuff in public. Although we did not link to KerbalStuff from the game’s launcher, Kerbal Space Program itself or our websites, we did often talk about it in community conversations, forum posts, and on social media. We never actively promoted the website, but we feel we certainly didn’t ignore it. Many people who work for Squad have expressed their fondness of the website, and the developers who work on the game sometimes also had mods on the website. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, was the accusation that we threatened the website with legal action. We would like to stress that no such thing happened. Back in 2014 when the website was being developed we were in the process of acquiring a trademark on the word Kerbal, and part of the obligations one has as a trademark holder is to investigate possible infringements of your trademark. Failure to do so may invalidate the trademark entirely at a later point. To this end we talked to the people behind Kerbalstuff to determine what the website was going to be, and several scenarios were discussed briefly including possibly renaming KerbalStuff. As it was to be a non-commercial community website it quickly became clear that no legal action was warranted against KerbalStuff, and we never pursued legal action against Kerbalstuff or any other community website for using the phrase Kerbal in its name. We’re thankful that Sircmpwn has since retracted this part of the statement from the Kerbalstuff website, but we’ve received a lot of questions about it. It’s probably time to wrap up this post, but we couldn’t possibly do that before thanking Sircmpwn for his efforts that undoubtedly benefited the community. Maintaining a service like KerbalStuff is both costly and time consuming, and not many people would step up to do what Sircmpwn did. Thank you. Currently the KSP community is already working on an alternative website (working name SpaceDock) based on the open source framework of Kerbalstuff. We hope that this new website will fill a void for many people. At the moment of writing it does not seem to be the case that Sircmpwn will allow this new team to use the KerbalStuff name, domain registration or user and mod database. That means the website will largely have to start over, but if help is needed we’re ready to look at ways in which we could support it. Meanwhile people are free to upload and share mods from any source they wish; we can happily recommend Curse for this purpose, at the very least as a stopgap measure. Thanks again to Sircmpwn and Majiir for running this amazing website, an even bigger thanks to our amazing modding community and the best wishes to the team picking up where KerbalStuff left off. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Glaran K'erman Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 (edited) Truly appreciate a response. Wasn't one with "passionate" feelings but I was left questioning some things and I think this answers everything. Sidenote: just got done dealing with EA "customer service", we should all be thankful for the active relations Squad has with its community. Edited February 17, 2016 by Glaran K'erman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
omelaw Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 I guess this is the reason of the devnote wednesday. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KasperVld Posted February 17, 2016 Author Share Posted February 17, 2016 Just now, omelaw said: I guess this is the reason of the devnote wednesday. No, as I posted yesterday I had an exam today so I was away, and Badie was caught with a few unexpected tasks so didn't have the time to sit down and write them either Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maculator Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 Spacedock.info Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barklight Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 Thanks for the explanation, Kasper. Really helps to clear the air and hopefully will get a few pitchforks put away :3 Hope the exam went well! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amankd Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 just thought i would let you all know that spacedock.info is live and well althoug it had to start from scratch and currently still has a 2min max upload time on mods Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PickledTripod Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 You said that Sircmpwn never contacted you (or anyone else) for help and that he intended Kerbalstuff to remain an unofficial alternative, and that you might be willing to help the new SpaceDock team if they ask. What if they tell you they want SpaceDock to become the new official mod repository? Would you consider it? Would your contract with Curse prevent you from swiching to them if you wanted to? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 I think this is the perfect response. I think many people take this community for granted. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stuff Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 i click the link for spacedock.info and its still waiting for it to load Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KasperVld Posted February 17, 2016 Author Share Posted February 17, 2016 3 minutes ago, PickledTripod said: You said that Sircmpwn never contacted you (or anyone else) for help and that he intended Kerbalstuff to remain an unofficial alternative, and that you might be willing to help the new SpaceDock team if they ask. What if they tell you they want SpaceDock to become the new official mod repository? Would you consider it? Would your contract with Curse prevent you from swiching to them if you wanted to? There's no point to have this discussion now. If the SpaceDock team has any specific requests they can always contact us, and we'll go from there. It becoming official seems unlikely at this stage, though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hobbes Novakoff Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 (edited) 8 minutes ago, KasperVld said: There's no point to have this discussion now. If the SpaceDock team has any specific requests they can always contact us, and we'll go from there. It becoming official seems unlikely at this stage, though. I wish it would be official. I feel like a lot of people often click "mods" on the KSP menu and never end up seeing the amazing stuff that's only on Kerbalstuff Spacedock. 8 minutes ago, stuff said: i click the link for spacedock.info and its still waiting for it to load As I understand, servers are currently... Work in progress, so to speak. Give it some time, KS closed down what, two days ago? Websites are hard. I realized this, after making the mistake of right-clicking on the Google home page and selecting "View source." Also, that is a most excellent username. EDIT: hey, 700 posts! Edited February 17, 2016 by Hobbes Novakoff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
omelaw Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 Just now, Hobbes Novakoff said: I wish it would be official. I feel like a lot of people often click "mods" on the KSP menu and never end up seeing the amazing stuff that's only on Kerbalstuff Spacedock. I think we will have to wait until 1.1 come out. 1.1 will break most of the modes, and the site that has more 1.1 supported mods will be majority mod site. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hobbes Novakoff Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 1 minute ago, omelaw said: I think we will have to wait until 1.1 come out. 1.1 will break most of the modes, and the site that has more 1.1 supported mods will be majority mod site. Not sure that that's really how that works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
swjr-swis Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 Thank you Squad for an official statement on this event. I appreciated that KasperVld had already voiced most of this on personal title, but I think more than one of us was hoping to see a 'more official' reaction, and this statement on the official announcements does the job for me. The way things transpired left no room for more than a eulogy, which is unfortunate; that's water under the bridge now, and I want to look forward and see how things develop from this point on. Two lessons learned: As mod users, and as Squad: let's try better to not take the amazing volunteer efforts of mod makers and hosters for granted. I am still unhappy that I never saw this coming until it was already too late. And thank you for overall restoring my confidence in this community, your voices of support in this event largely overwhelmed the negative ones as far as I'm concerned. As mod authors and hosters: if you feel yourself running into a corner, please, please voice it before you hit that wall. Not just as a side remark in some thread that a lot of us could miss if we happen to not stroll along it, but feel free to post a statement on a front page or in a new thread. Give us a chance to see it and react. I think you might be pleasently surprised by the reactions, enough to ignore those that can't seem to do but complain. And thank you for the silent time and effort that you keep pouring into the mods and services we use and enjoy. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Helladog Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 How about steam workshop? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IGNOBIL Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 A shame about kerbalstuff, loved the site, I absolutely hate curse! I always thought KS should have put some ads to support the costs, hope spacedock does it or can face the same fate! But it was in no way squad's fault, they never opposed KS in any way, their partnership with curse, no matter how much we hate it, makes sense in a business point of view, (as many other game developers do) to save them the trouble of managing mods! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tmccreight651 Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 46 minutes ago, omelaw said: I think we will have to wait until 1.1 come out. 1.1 will break most of the modes, and the site that has more 1.1 supported mods will be majority mod site. i agree Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SolidJuho Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 4 minutes ago, Helladog said: How about steam workshop? I havent ever liked steam workshop, even curse sounds better and it not give good support for non-steam versios. Ofc you can use steamworkshoploader site for them. And this post sounds like pretty honest. When it is Valve vs Squad, squad care vetter care from community than valve. (Still thinking this was reason for devnote wednesday, meh meh ;)) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
godarklight Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 Thanks kasper! This provides a very accurate history of kerbalstuff, we'll keep working to put out the fires so we are fully operational again Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inigma Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 (edited) Thanks KasperVid for the support! On behalf of the SpaceDock team, we are happy to carry on the work that KerbalStuff started, and we appreciate Squad's support as we continue the development and stabilization of this new service. If we need anything specific, we'll reach out privately. Thanks for being there for us! You guys are amazing and we are only honored to be able to serve this incredible community. Sincerely, The SpaceDock Team Edited February 17, 2016 by inigma Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tantalus Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 (edited) 2 hours ago, Hobbes Novakoff said: I wish it would be official. Well, what would be different? I think it is even better to be unofficial, it gives a kind of freedom to the maintainers they wouldn't have otherwise. I also liked KS more than Curse, but that was a decision made *before* KS was born. We shouldn't blame Squad for standing to their decisions, or maybe even to agreements, contracts or whatever happened in the background. I really hope SpaceDock will be as good as (or even better than) KS, and I've no doubt that its popularity will reach at least that of KS in no time. Making it the official mod repository would be neat, but is IMHO not really necessary. Oh, and by the way, great response @KasperVld, lets hope things calm down a bit now. Regards Tantalus Edited February 17, 2016 by Tantalus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maars Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 Much respect for the letter you wrote and its cultured tone Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spartwo Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 Spacedock already hosts nearly 1/6th the amount of mods that curse does. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SolidJuho Posted February 17, 2016 Share Posted February 17, 2016 1 minute ago, Spartwo said: Spacedock already hosts nearly 1/6th the amount of mods that curse does. Yeh, and tomorrow even 1/3 of mods. And after week there is more mods than curse have Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts