FEichinger

Oh look, another decision with predictable (and predicted) consequences that gets overturned after a few months because those very same consequences did indeed happen. Guess why I'm not surprised at all! I mean, it's just the third time this happened this year.

Okay, after looking through the more recent posts here, the filter has become even more ridiculous than when I was on the team. Look, removing the word without leaving a trace is bad UX, there's absolutely no way around that. i don't even care how you're rationalizing that with "we just want it to disappear" - I don't give a damn. But stripping a word from a user's post without the user having any idea and feedback as to what happened, that is not okay whatsoever. And then there's a part that always bothered me: For a long time, I've seen moderators hand out infractions for profanity ... after the profanity was filtered. I mean, I get it, "everyone knows what's behind the asterisk", but still. Are you now too lazy to even do that? And all of that at the expense of various valid uses for the phrases that are being filtered. Which brings me to the next point ... Are you kidding me? It seems as though you're absolutely afraid of anyone ever getting to see something that might somehow be interpreted as perhaps-profanity. Not only is it impossible to filter out every bad word without seriously impairing the forums, it's also utterly pointless. As has been pointed out before, you don't need profanity to ruin the "image" of the forum, or "hurt the poor children". The filter does not help the image of the foru, proper moderation would. Rather than getting so utterly stuck up on moving threads to the right forum and harshly punishing anyone you happen to dislike, how about actually doing your damned job for once and being a little bit professional?

I always like the use of ♥ for censoring. You ♥♥♥♥ing ♥♥♥♥s.

Just a little word of advice to everyone who's praising this community's quality and all: There are a lot of really awful posts that you just don't get to see unless you religiously check every thread almost instantly when it gets a new post. The moderation team here does a lot of clean up to ensure this atmosphere you all like so much. Now I'm not going to comment on the censorship argument, or whether this atmosphere might be a little "too friendly", as some seem to see it, but you should all keep in mind that there's a lot of crap around here that doesn't even make it to your eyes.

As far as I recall, the reason was that rep was supposed to actually mean something, rather than being awarded for all sorts of off-topic stuff, and forum games.

Spessport is optimized for any width > 500px (and width < 2400px), but there's even more to be done for that. As for API functions, I'm actually working on some of that right now.

The problem with making a "single collaborated effort" is that we have a lot of people here who are hasty, overly enthusiastic on the one end, and people who are grossly inexperienced on the other. And then we have people with a massive lack of time. The result is that I can almost guarantee that getting everyone to work on one project will be near-impossible, and leave a lot of very obvious flaws purely by the nature of team work with such a difficult team. Not to mention that a lot of us have very different ways of going about this kind of stuff. But, again, any mod creator can feel free to contact me about Spessport and we'll get it set up and sort everything out that you need.

No. Flat-out no. Spaceport was entirely unsalvageable. The data might have been migrate-able in some way, but the system itself needed to be rebuilt from scratch. There was no way of "fixing it up". Spaceport 2, on the other hand - N3X15's attempt at doing exactly that rebuilding - was rather finished, and needed only some optimizations. You can make up your own mind about why Squad axed that, I believe the official reasoning is "We don't want to do the mod repo ourselves anymore."

As has been mentioned, Spaceport was lacking in a lot of ways - security vulnerabilities and a horrible search function being just the tip of the iceberg.

No. Quite simply: No. Curse is one pile of crap, but Spaceport had to get axed. There was absolutely no way around that. The solution should have been a dedicated in-house system, but apparently a marketing company, too, can fall for a PR speech, so now we're stuck with Curse. Or, well, any of the numerous alternatives. </shameless plug>

Spaceport needed a lot more than just "a clean out and polishing". Again: It was a terrible mess, all the way down to the code. That was not salvageable at all.

Alright, folks. Now that Spaceport is gone, I figured I'd post here as well. I've been busy over the last couple of weeks, slowly putting something together. It's rather crude right now, and I'm not permitting uploads and registration at this time - but if you contact me directly, we'll get it all set up. In a short while, you'll also be able to edit your existing mods, upload new versions, etc - new mods and user accounts will remain disabled until we get this properly off the ground (and until I get some cleanup done on the code). So, with that said, go enjoy this very bare-bones (but perfectly functional) Spessport! I'm very open to suggestions, some of my current plans are on the /about page. I intend to leave the layout somewhat similar to Spaceport, since obviously a lot of people were rather content with it in general - the problems were mostly the horrible search function, and inconsistencies.

Spaceport was indeed a pile of security vulnerabilities, terrible navigation, a really horrendous backend, and some weird programming to somehow make it all work together. It should've gotten the axe ages ago, and it could've gotten the axe months ago. The fact that data will be lost is simply something you will have to accept. Blame the mod creators for their choice of license, or for their refusal to reupload, or blame Squad for partnering up with Curse (which, inevitably, chased away some mod creators that are now no longer willing to reupload.) But at the end of the day, this is how it goes.

The review system barely affects anything, but that's not even what I'm talking about. The way Spaceport was written leaves holes left and right, as well as in the backend - easily exploitable and putting essentially the entire infrastructure (including the shop) at risk.

It is one single massive security leak and horrible to maintain in any capacity.

The only way to move stuff from Spaceport to Curse is if either the mod creator uploads it there themself, or the license is permissive enough to allow redistribution (although, personally, I see moral issues with that, but do whatever you want I guess). The databases are also incompatible, so there won't be any form of automatic transfer - and there appears to be no plan to maintain a read-only archive of Spaceport. Spaceport itself, however, really has to be shut down as quickly as possible, and should've been months (if not years) ago.

It's not that simple. Because of licensing, it's not always possible to simply redistribute those mods. On top of that, whether or not the authors have a forum account really has no bearing here - if it's only distributed on Spaceport, and the license doesn't allow redistributing it, then, well, tough break: it will die with Spaceport.

A fair warning: The system is heavily work-in-progress, the design is only a slapped-together rendition of the existing Spaceport design and there may be some unexpected side-effects by larger traffic volume. Please do not hesitate to use the system, though - those unexpected effects are exactly what we need to figure out. Shoot me a message if you come across anything that looks like it shouldn't be happening.

I have jeblikesboosters.com, btw. (I don't intend to give that up, because I'm using that for all sorts of internal things, but I could set up any sort of redirect from any subdomain, in case that's wanted.)

As I already hinted at in the Curse thread, I've got some time on my hands right now and do this kind of stuff for a living. I need a few more hands and a bit of a run-up with organization, but I could probably get around to doing something like this. I'm not keeping tabs on this thread here, though, hence why I asked Majiir to contact me directly. Just thought I'd leave that note here as well for you folks.

How is "General Add-on Affairs" a terrible place for a thread about mods and modders? I get that you like complaining about "nobody ever looks there!", but at the end of the day it's not our fault people don't go to the proper sections, it's the fault of the very people who refuse to post their threads in the right place. There are a lot of flaws with our forum structure and I'd love to see some proper restructuring at some point - and there sure are some threads I don't think belong into a given section clearly enough for us to move them from wherever else they were posted - but in the bulk of cases when this complaint about "burying a thread" is brought up the thread very clearly belongs into the section it was moved into. That said, repeat offenses of "Move this back to General Discussion for views!" requests will be considered backseat moderation as per our [thread=30064]Community Rules[/thread]. If people were posting in the correct sections to begin with rather than taking a huge dump on General Discussion, maybe there'd be more traffic in those sections as well. As for Spaceport - let's all just agree that it's a terrible mess, makes little sense most of the time and a replacement is underway. Until that replacement hits, we're pretty much stuck with a broken barely functional system that simply will not be updated any further.

The addon exists, sure. But it's also of rather low quality, and hasn't been touched in years. (There's also some technical reasons as to why adding this particular one wouldn't be as easy as it may seem, but that's beside the point.) There are a couple of solutions that might work, though. I'll look into it and see what I can produce within the bounds of what we can do.

No, the title doesn't say it all.

And I'll say it again: I cannot reproduce the error you're getting. Without specific examples of where this is happening, we can't figure out what's going on. It is, as far as I'm aware, not possible for a normal user to insert tracking code into the forum itself. So, unless you provide examples to the contrary, you're barking up the wrong tree. You speak of "their (mod creators') pages" - are you talking about the modders' own sites, linked to from the forum? In that case, there's little we can do. We have no rules telling creators how to build the website they're linking to - and you're free not to click any off-site links if you feel strongly about it. Where are you getting these errors? How did you come to the conclusion that these are caused by tracking code from mod creators? What are you asking us to do?

No, we are not moving threads to General Discussion just so more people see them. Every forum has its specific purpose, and this thread (as far as I can tell) simply belongs here. As it stands right now, your thread also serves little to no purpose. What are you trying to achieve? We cannot reproduce the problem you're having, and you're making vague accusations against people. If you feel you know what's going on, make a detailed report about it. If you don't wish to do that publicly (which probably is a good thing), contact a moderator directly.