SpaceDock.info (Mod Hosting Site)

[inigma]

Update: new logo is up.

[Dragon2234]

I would like to mention a few things and inigma if this is not the time or place, be honest like i know you will. first i am not a ksp modder but I know the time and dedication it takes to build a cipher and code. https://github.com/KSP-SpaceDock/SpaceDock/wiki/SpaceDock-Team has worked endlessly to help the ksp community have a better game play experience. Two, I am sure (I use GitHub only) that some mods are being used by other players or being post to other sites without prior knowledge to the original designer and according to http://www.spacedock.info/privacy statement they can and will ban you from the site if you fail to follow the terms. I do my part by calling out others that try to take my codes (i.e. programs, cipher, data) I would suggest modders to due the same. 

[VITAS]

15 hours ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

Does the Spacedock/kerbalstuff code have provision for blocking source IPs or registration emails?  Not that either system would be anything resembling a true block, but it might go a way toward.

No but i welcome you to add it to github as feature request.

We a bit short on python coders, so implementig it will take a while.

[Mokmo]

BIG HEADS UP FOR THE DEVS 

I just got a mod-update e-mail and the "to" field has over a dozen adresses visible. Seems your e-mail is misconfigured. 

[TiktaalikDreaming]

15 hours ago, VITAS said:

No but i welcome you to add it to github as feature request.

We a bit short on python coders, so implementig it will take a while.

It's probably not the best plan for IP based, it's too liable to create false positives, but yeah, I'll pop up a feature request for email address blocking for banned users.  Not that that stops much, it's just a hurdle to throw out there.

I had to do some python debugging recently, and I'm a perl person.  God, couldn't run away from python fast enough.  I don't even know what it is that annoys me about it.

On 27/2/2016 at 11:51 AM, CommanderSpock said:

Well, just go the the mod, and go to his page. The user image is incredibly inappropriate, and the whole thing seems like a scam, and dangerous.

That was meant as a bit of light-hearted silliness.  In person, you can tell I'm joking because my lips move.  Sorry to have confused you.

[VITAS]

i was asured by $devs that the email to problem was fixed but if not ill ask again.

 

if we realy net to block ppl (wich hasnt come up yet) ive idears how to implement that without ips and cookies.

[CommanderSpock]

7 hours ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

 

That was meant as a bit of light-hearted silliness.  In person, you can tell I'm joking because my lips move.  Sorry to have confused you.

Yeah, I understood the lightheartedness of it, I just thought it needed to be addressed, which it was.

[ToukieToucan]

Can you browse per category on this?

[VITAS]

Not (yet)

[Elway358]

2 hours ago, ToukieToucan said:

Can you browse per category on this?

That would be really nice. I think KerbalX has one of the most amazing choice of sort options that I've seen on any site. For me, a good sort/browse category option set is the most important feature on a mod site like this.

Hopefully the Spacedock team will look into this once things settle down a bit.  

[NecroBones]

19 hours ago, Mokmo said:

BIG HEADS UP FOR THE DEVS 

I just got a mod-update e-mail and the "to" field has over a dozen adresses visible. Seems your e-mail is misconfigured. 

 

I submitted a code fix for this, but it looks like it's not deployed yet.

 

[InsaneDruid]

On 26.2.2016 at 7:22 AM, Acea said:

The new blue theme seems a bit too dark... and site icon doesn't have a transparent background

I'd suggest #08437c which looks quite nicer IMO and here's a preview:

The Blue is just awful and really "bites" with all the other colors used on the site, and makes for an eye-hurting bad contrast on the dark grey background as well.

PLEASE use something like http://paletton.com/   to find a better suiting palette.

[Acea]

1 hour ago, InsaneDruid said:

The Blue is just awful and really "bites" with all the other colors used on the site, and makes for an eye-hurting bad contrast on the dark grey background as well.

PLEASE use something like http://paletton.com/   to find a better suiting palette.

Which do you refer... to the current site theme or my preview version?

[InsaneDruid]

Well both, actually. Yours is better, but still hurting the eye for beeing to dark and destroying the color balance.

The original Colors (Blue, lighter blue, and green) where a perfect, balanced tetrad of colors with the ochre being complementary to a blue, probably the lighter one. Adding another, darker blue just destroys everything. To much, to dark, too off.

Edited February 29, 2016 by InsaneDruid

[VITAS]

Design proposal:

 

Some explanation:

this would be the startpage (its only a screen atm)

sub pages would have a menu on the left.

there would be a special page with a searchable and sortable table of all mods.

Users could post reviews, videos and other stuff about ksp and mods. (no forum)

the teasers in the black area would be admin picks.

The teasers on the right would lead to SpaceDock Services like webchat.

 

Edited March 1, 2016 by VITAS

[hoojiwana]

There's a lot of non-mod stuff there, what I liked about KerbalStuff and like about SpaceDock is the very tight focus on pretty much only showing mods. The news/blog sections seems completely at odds with this, especially since there are other places people can this info (the forums, the subreddit). If it was purely SpaceDock related news then that would be fine, but having a blog and a news section for basically the same thing seems a bit weird, even more so when you have that link that presumably goes straight to this thread.

6 minutes ago, VITAS said:

Users could post reviews, videos and other stuff about ksp and mods. (no forum)

This again seems at odds with the tight focus of the site, and it directly competes with the forum that pretty much every modder already extensively makes use of.

[VITAS]

the content is placeholder text.

we now have a blog function on SD thats taken over from KS. it isnt linked anywhere so its useless. it would be mostly about SD related posts and anouncements.

The forum link too is only a placeholder and would be replaced, like i wrote, with usefull stuff like e.g. webchat link

i dont think the design takes away from the focus on mods but rearanges some stuff.

the thing im realy interrested to hear: is this better than the current layout /colors

and i understand that ppl are sentimental about ks and they basicly want sd to be ks but i promised not to use the name, logo, domain and other stuff so we need to make this different (the good kind) over time.

 

[hoojiwana]

8 minutes ago, VITAS said:

the thing im realy interrested to hear: is this better than the current layout /colors

Well there's not a massive great star-field bar taking up a quarter of the vertical screen space and replaces it with more mods, so that's a huge plus. That's what the homepage should show. That's my concern with the news/other links parts, they're meta type things that I don't think should take up space on that first screen. If they had to be scrolled down to be seen that'd be fine since they're still on the homepage but their current slot should be taken up by mods, since those are the reason people visit the site in the first place.

Edited March 1, 2016 by hoojiwana

[Elway358]

1 hour ago, VITAS said:

 

there would be a special page with a searchable and sortable table of all mods.

 

If this is added, the rest could be a plain white page with nothing but black text as far as I'm concerned  

Being serious on color theme though, I personally think the dark blue theme you have now looks really nice and isn't at all hard on the eyes but I wouldn't be too bothered by whatever colors it is if the layout and functionality is nice. *shrug*

Edited March 1, 2016 by Elway358
typo

[VITAS]

i understand. i might move possible reviews somewhere else.

its important to have at least the table headers in view so visitors see what else is to see IF they scroll down.

i see mod authors as content deliverers and theyre visitors too but the person im realy designing the startpage for is the end user that wants to browse and discover mods. to give them as much information as possible they should have access to reviews (that are mostly hidden in some post on the forums, on blogs and on youtube) and also enable them to post reviews on the site itself. so spacedock could be an iformation hub for mod users that dont want to read trough lengthy threads (but could go there via links if they want to). i also want to offer mod authors more ways to stage their mods. like videos, more mod detail page cusomization and so on.

what i will definitly will implement are tags for mods (instead of categorys), more detailed stats for mod authors, rating by users, more personal startpages using webstats, on site mail/pm, chat, mumble,...(list is still growing)

because we took the ks source code and just dumped it on a server were still debating if we want to do a compleate rewrite or not.

a different theme and with it new features and the removal of non proofen ones is the first step in that quest to let spacedock step out of the shadow of beeing a KS clone and make it something on its own.

[hoojiwana]

28 minutes ago, VITAS said:

what i will definitly will implement are tags for mods (instead of categorys), more detailed stats for mod authors, rating by users, more personal startpages using webstats, on site mail/pm, chat, mumble,...(list is still growing)

Tags are a whole can of worms by themselves, due to the huge variety in KSP mods you either have a few tags that are too vague to be useful, or too many specialised ones. Custom ones like how Steam does it kinda solves that, but I don't think the userbase is anywhere near big enough for that to work. Ratings also have problems since people tend to either rate maximum or minimum based on nothing consistent. For example, someone might give a mod a minimum rating because they installed it wrongly and it broke their game due to no fault of the modder. There's also a problem when everything gets a 5 star rating, it becomes impossible to differentiate between anything.

I love the attention the site is getting beyond mere maintenance, but there are some things that weren't included in the first place (on KS) for good reasons.

Edited March 1, 2016 by hoojiwana

[RockyTV]

2 hours ago, VITAS said:

Design proposal:

 

Some explanation:

this would be the startpage (its only a screen atm)

sub pages would have a menu on the left.

there would be a special page with a searchable and sortable table of all mods.

Users could post reviews, videos and other stuff about ksp and mods. (no forum)

the teasers in the black area would be admin picks.

The teasers on the right would lead to SpaceDock Services like webchat.

I don't think having the site half black and half white would work. A greyish color would be nice, or even a blue grey (since SpaceDock is blue).

Regarding reviews, videos and other stuff about KSP: they're nice suggestions, but turning a service which was made for hosting mods only, into a kind of social platform for KSP isn't going to succeed. One or two features can be implemented, but in general, I think SpaceDock is still not ready for this kind of stuff unless the developers change the goal/objective of the service.

[Stone Blue]

On 3/1/2016 at 10:57 AM, hoojiwana said:

This again seems at odds with the tight focus of the site, and it directly competes with the forum that pretty much every modder already extensively makes use of.

While I agree with your sentiment, and I feel the best thing would be for ALL mod authors to make a forum release thread for ALL mods, I have been seeing an alarming trend, of more and more new mods just being thrown up on Curse, or SpaceDock (before that, it was even happening on KS), with absolutely NO forum thread, or ANY other place where the mod was hosted, or where people could come across it, or discuss it, or even get a basic idea of WHAT the mod was....

I think one reason (and I know this will bring out the mob with torches and pitchforks), is because of the rising popularity of CKAN... There are people (and dont tell me there arent), who think CKAN is the be-all end-all of finding and installing mods...So it seems like some new mod authors dont bother hosting, or even listing, mods, anywhere, but where they can get scraped into CKAN...

So while I would LIKE to see EVERY mod have a forum release thread as the main focus for mod introduction, and on-going discussion, reviews, and such, it just doesnt seem to be happening, more & more... So if people are just going to throw mods up on SpaceDock, or Curse without a forum thread, if SpaceDOck does add those functions, then at least they might be encouraged to add something more about their mod THERE, and have a place where people could leave feedback, and actually get on-going support...

I WILL say I believe ratings, and the social media stuff is worthless, and I find it annoying, and detracting from the main purpose of a website... I could care less about what everyone else thinks, or feels they have to "tweeter" or "insta-gossip" about...
And ratings, I guess I'm one of those people who never seem to agree with, much less put any stock in, when forming an opinion of something...

Again, I'm just playing devil's advocate, as I would really like to see everything on a forum release thread, and yeah, just have SD, Curse, Github as basic hosting mirrors... But it just doesnt seem to be happening with newer mods...

Edited March 3, 2016 by Stone Blue

[Stone Blue]

I like the proposed layout.... The lower half of the current homepage DEFINATELY needs to be changed... The three huge blocks of alternating light blue, with white text, and then the white background at the bottom with light blue text, is just too hard one the eyes... Not contrasty enough...

[GreenWolf]

I'm going to chime in with the people who are opposed to the addition of social features. It was bad when Steam did it, it was bad when Nexus did it, it was bad when Curse did it, it would be bad here.

If the purpose of SpaceDock is to be a mod hosting site, it should be just that. Ratings, user reveiws, etc... are just excess fluff that distracts from the content.