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SpaceDock.info (Mod Hosting Site)


VITAS

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1 hour ago, Yemo said:

Maybe KerbalX.com needs some "timeout" as well to remind people of the value it brings to their ksp experience?

54 minutes ago, Yemo said:

Many patrons for spacedock.info, after kerbalstuff is dead. But non for KerbalX, while it is alive...

Right! Imma shuttin' her down!! ...........

 

.....I just couldn't do it. ;)

To be fair, I only just setup that patreon page and before that I'd been running a paypal donations thing and have had some very kind folk put in towards the costs. But paypal is well, ugly would be nice description, so I'm hoping patreon will be more accessible. 

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5 hours ago, Yemo said:

Maybe KerbalX.com needs some "timeout" as well to remind people of the value it brings to their ksp experience?

 

It's one thing to request assistance to maintain an operation, but it is quite another to hold your own mod or service hostage to get money out of users. The very suggestion is reprehensible.

It's already been said that money had nothing to do with Kerbalstuff going down, so let's not pretend that it did to further an agenda.

 

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On 2/19/2016 at 8:14 PM, VITAS said:

as i stated earlier today we discovered a hd was close to death and it was swaped for a new one. my monitoring tells me average site generation is down to 0.53s bandwidth usage is max 8% so no reason for it to be slow anymore.

 

i will repeat: NO ADS on spacedock!

if you wish to support donate on patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2903335&ty=p

but i made sure we can survive without donations if we must.

if you dont want to sign up for patreon you can ask the guys on the team via #spacedock on irc.esper.net  for their address and order them something nice like a cake or some massage seats :)

also its an ongoing discussion if we allow sponsorships of comapnys and in turn make a "thank you" page with logos and links.

everything is good on the station that is spacedock so join us there.

p.s. now we are working on the logo

Why not put a link to the Patreon page somewhere on the site?  At the bottom might be a good place, although it might not get seen. Maybe a very occasioinal popup?

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15 hours ago, daniel l. said:

I think spacedock should be renamed SpacePort as a symbol of the curse of modding being broken. 

(see what i did there)

I suggested LaunchPad because it is where you go for "Pre-Launch".

Anyway, even though SpacePort has been gone for a long time, we could hit legal trouble.   

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12 minutes ago, BinaryDude said:

I remember seeing that SpaceDock is a WIP Name, and could be renamed if rehosted at a new, permanent domain. 

 

I remember seeing that the DOMAIN name (ie .info), could be renamed to a more permanent domain (ie .com), but that SpaceDock would remain the actual site name... ???

It wouldnt make sense to change the sitename at this point... That would just screw up the branding and cause more confusion later on...

Edited by Stone Blue
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34 minutes ago, godarklight said:

We don't currently intend to change the domain - people have already started using spacedock and we don't want to break everyones forum links ;)

I, and the VERY large spreadsheet I keep of mods & links, both THANK YOU very much!! :D

Edited by Stone Blue
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One and all, I'd like to contribute to this effort.  I have no technical expertise, but I do have LEGAL expertise, as I am graduating law school in 85 days (wow!) and my school has free student-clinic representation for non-profit corporate clients.  I am based in New York, USA, but I can access other jurisdictions either within or potentially outside of the United States through my own personal network of lawyers, law students, and other professionals.

KerbalStuff failed, ultimately, because of a poor incentive-model (cost of time and money) to update and maintain it.

SpaceDock, or any successor, will eventually run into the same problem in some form.  Squad's licensing, of course, is with Curse.  Curse predicates its own commitment to Squad based on an economic model of forcing mod downloaders to physically visit their website and be exposed to banner ads as their primary method of cost defrayment and profit generation.  This is reasonable, because mod cloud-storage is not free; mod hosting and listing and indexing is not free; and bandwidth for mod downloading is not free.  Indeed, anyone who knows or prefers CKAN understands that Curse is VERY CKAN-unfriendly, as CKAN is based on metadata files that presume the ability to remote-call and remote-download hosted mods -- Curse actually updated their software to affirmatively prevent CKAN from doing it's thing, specifically to ensure that mod downloaders were forcibly exposed to Curse's banner ads.  This is why CKAN management favored a mod that was hosted on KerbalStuff, Github, or some other miscellaneous hosting (such as Dropbox / OneDrive / GDrive / etc.)

I am unfamiliar as to the exact particulars of Squad's licensing, but I'm fairly certain that Curse's deal is one of exclusivity -- that any other mod-hosting site is prevented by licensing restrictions from adopting any for-profit model that would compete with Curse.

My Proposal: With someone else's help, I can act as point man in forming a non-profit corporation of some kind (my own jurisdiction of New York would offer several filing options for this, and other jurisdictions may offer different options, each with advantages and disadvantages.)  I can even serve as a member of a corporation's managing board.  I suggest we find a way to manage and navigate the existing licensing restrictions, or possibly even negotiate with Squad in good faith to allow some form of compromise solution, that would allow SpaceDock or some KerbalStuff-successor to operate and generate modest revenue from hosting and CKAN integration, not for the purpose of generating lasting profits, but for the exclusive purpose of strengthening the non-profit product so that it remains as available and robust as the technology could allow.  From actually offsetting the digital costs of webhosting and bandwidth, I foresee the possibility to manage a small cohort of otherwise-volunteer programmers and other mod hobbyists by actually offering them some sort of financial incentive to donate their time.  I'm not suggesting we hire someone full time with salary and benefits, but something that would make their late nights of sacrificed personal time worthwhile.

I can be reached by PM here, or by email directly at [email protected].  I get a lot of emails from other sources, so to make yours stand out, please indicate "KerbalStuff Successor" in the subject line.  I am convinced that there can exist a fully-legal, fully-compliant, self-sustaining solution to this issue, and I'd care to be a significant contributor to that effort.

Best,
David

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It would be really nice to know what sort of arrangement squad and curse have going its all been so secretive and behind closed doors so the community had no idea what was going on till it was done. Any revenue that could be generated in a tasteful manner would be acceptable personally i like the sponsorship idea 

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8 minutes ago, Virtualgenius said:

It would be really nice to know what sort of arrangement squad and curse have going its all been so secretive and behind closed doors so the community had no idea what was going on till it was done. Any revenue that could be generated in a tasteful manner would be acceptable personally i like the sponsorship idea 

Waaaaaaa?

Why would two private businesses, engaged in a contract with each other, do that? You pay Squad money, Squad provides you with a game. End of deal. Aside from that, Squad really owes “the community” nothing and everything else is just (sensible) icing on the cake, like providing space for a forum and even brokering a deal with Curse to have a curseforge site where you can host mods, free of charge and free of ads, and where you can download mods, free of charge and free of ads, incentives to upgrade a download client, etc. That itself is “above and beyond” and there should be no obligation for Squad to disclose how much they paid Curse for that (or how much Curse paid them). Is it good business sense of Squad to foster a community? Yes. Is it good business to disclose to that community how they run the financial end of their business? I doubt it.

Perhaps Squad should take a look at how Microsoft supported the Flightsim community for over 20 years, and do it that way? 

 

 

3 hours ago, MisterFister said:

(...) specifically to ensure that mod downloaders were forcibly exposed to Curse's banner ads. 

Banner ads? There are no banner ads in curseforge. Of course, one can choose to go to curseforge's cousin, curse, to get the banner ads. But that would hardly be "forcibly exposed" as one made the choice to visit the ad-laden site instead of the ad-free one.

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6 minutes ago, Table said:

I'm not an idiot.

 

I'm saying that they should switch to this site instead of the horrible Curse

I didn't say you're an idiot. I said they already have an official mod site. With no intention of switching.

 

Curse is actually not a bad hosting site. Plus it has the infrastructure, staff, and reliability to host long term. Unlike KerbalStuff

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KerbalStuff was a single man battling against Curse, I can understand Squad in there decision to go with Curse at this point in time.

If Spacedock can proof to Squad that it is here to stay and has the backup of the community, there is a good chance that Squad is rethinking there position. This means that there is an organized association of people and financial backup behind it.

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1 hour ago, Kolago said:

KerbalStuff was a single man battling against Curse, I can understand Squad in there decision to go with Curse at this point in time.

If Spacedock can proof to Squad that it is here to stay and has the backup of the community, there is a good chance that Squad is rethinking there position. This means that there is an organized association of people and financial backup behind it.

Never going to happen. Curse already supports mods for multiple games and has an established support team. Fortunately, the CKAN/StarDock folks aren't deceiving themselves into thinking that Squad will ever back them.

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