SpaceDock.info (Mod Hosting Site)

[tg626]

9 minutes ago, VITAS said:

because its still the old crap with some css slapped over it.

(to be clear im calling the sourcecode crap)

btw i dont want to recreate or emulate kerbalstuff.

 

Then why did you start with their code?

[VITAS]

i dont care about ranking because more users dont earn me anything apart from the feeling of acompishment. But ppl want to look up stuff on the bus nowdays and ive to respect that.

@tg626 you remember how all this came about?

i had no choice but to roll with it because there was a big void that i was asked to fill yesterday.

What im doing now is to migrate everything to a state where it doesnt take the whole of silicon valley to run it with the amount of usage we currently have.

All that trying to keep downtimes at a minimum and everyone happy. (the last thing is impossbile because some complain i should fix bugs instantly and others say i shouldnt change a thing and dont even think about restarting the server)

i should take a break im a bit exaustet so please excuse my temper

[AlphaAsh]

13 minutes ago, VITAS said:

i should take a break im a bit exaustet so please excuse my temper

Yes, please do! I'm getting worried for you chap. Seriously, step back, consolidate and project plan. Make do with what you have and set yourself some sensible workload and deadlines. All I want is an alternative to Curse that's as good as I felt KerbalStuff was. Honestly chap, all this other stuff, these bells and whistles, they just give me a headache.

Slow down.

[godarklight]

@tg626 we got caught between a rock and a hard place, we either had to backport fixes onto a new branch and manually change the database, or just push what we mostly have with the fixes - it was the issue where "For (missing KSP version) was appearing. That's mostly why we pushed multi-game support too early.

I also disliked the new layout compared to the old one, and I'd be lying if alarm bells didn't go off when we implemented multi-game support, but that's because I care about spacedock and don't want to see it get worse. I'm not worried so much about it now though, because I can see where spacedock is going - it's not finished yet, but this change also brings about performance improvements as we shed some load off the server.

Also, you've probably got to look at the multi-game support from @VITAS's view. It's a combination of having a website for people to upload mods to, playing other games, and noticing that forums aren't the best way of doing mod hosting

I am not worried about spacedock's future like some others, but that's because I'm part of the team and can see where it is going. I'm going to keep looking for improvements to spacedock's backend, I still think the CPU usage is awefully high for what it does. VITAS is also looking at making the website scale horizontally when the time comes, but I'm doing my best to make that not a requirement :).

If anyone has concerns, I'd quite happily talk to them here (although the forums really are aweful), IRC, or some other chat program such as skype or G+.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, godarklight said:

because I can see where spacedock is going

I wish I'd seen the dev site...  I've been daily checking the beta site to see if you guys had actually done what you said.  Now that makes sense.   It looks good!  Much better than before!

[VITAS]

yes sorry beta wasnt updated because as you can see theres heaps still to do.

 

[tg626]

@VITAS I'll excuse your temper if you excuse mine!

As far as I know, the story goes:

The owner (and maybe coder) of KerbalStuff decided to suspend his/her services to the community.  This took the unfortunate form of simply taking the site down and putting in it's place a message outlining their motivations and the facts as they perceived them.

At some point later a Torrent link appeared containing the sum total of all the files once hosted on KerbalStuff.

At some point later then that you opened SpaceDock and after a short time it appeared to essentially be a rebranded KerbalStuff. I assume you obtained the code from GitHub.

More recently there were changes made, then reverted, then published again after some bug stomping bringing the SpaceDock site to the state that it is in today.

Now, my view point:

It was obvious to me that some bad decisions were in place at KerbalStuff long before it closed.  The biggest being that it would take ages for various thumbnail images to appear on the front page, they would slowly appear line by line from top to bottom, giving the impression of a very large image that was being presented in a much smaller resized image.  It would also at times take ages for pages to load.

I have no idea if this was bad coding, or overloaded servers, or just what all.

Even so, it was working as it was. 

The way things are at SpaceDock at the moment appears to be a significant step backwards in that regard.  You say you do NOT want to emulate KerbalStuff however the UI and general flow worked as it was so I'm not sure why you state that.  Perhaps because you've been wading through the code, you are left with feeling that it is a bloated kludged together incomprehensible mess?

Whatever the reason for that opinion, what ever the reason you open your site using the old code you don't wish to use, it's been done. Were it up to me I'd leave SpaceDock as it was, a clone of KerbalStuff, until a new system was fully ready to be rolled out, and then and only then deploy that new system.

What you seem to be doing at this point is testing in a production environment, which in my view is tantamount to deciding to see if a bare wire sticking out of the wall is live or not by standing bare foot in a puddle of water and sticking the wire in your mouth.

Yes, you'll find out if it's HOT, with a lot of unneeded consequences in the process.

[godarklight]

beta.spacedock.info is our staging area, the last few times we have used it was to stage database changes so we know how to update production (mostly checking that alembic works correctly, and everything works with the full production DB).

dev.spacedock.info is always running the latest version of the git repo, the dev branch. It automatically deploys the changes we make.

[Guest]

7 minutes ago, tg626 said:

<SNIP>

It has been stated several times, and I don't think anyone will disagree with me in saying that there were some mistakes made in the rollout of the current branch.  It has also been stated that next time they are going to make sure it is indeed ready to be rolled out.

Don't think I'm in total agreement with some of the latest SpaceDock changes, but they're working really hard to help make it better.  If you would like to help with that, then go onto GitHub and clone it.

Edited April 20, 2016 by Guest

[tg626]

Well I'll admit the work I see at http://dev.spacedock.info/kerbal-space-program looks damn good so far, and I know there were mis-steps made - and anyone can do that.

And I have no idea how far off the "new" version shown in the link above is, but in the meanwhile:

This makes the editor a wee bit hard to use....  Speaking of, I'd like to make a plea to adopt GitHub's flavor of markdown.

 

Oh, and the GitHub repository - https://github.com/KSP-SpaceDock/SpaceDock (right?) this is the new site, not the one presently displayed at spacedock.info correct?

Edited April 20, 2016 by tg626

[godarklight]

@tg626 Woah, a thing like that is a huge bug, thanks for letting me know - I've fixed it now

 

EDIT: Yes, https://github.com/KSP-SpaceDock/SpaceDock is the correct git repo, master is production, dev is dev. Occasionally we'll merge dev into master and try it out on beta when we think it's ready, give it a bit of testing and then we'll merge master on the prod server - that's the only time when master won't match what's running on prod.

Edited April 21, 2016 by godarklight

[VITAS]

i started rewriting the whole frontend. its a huge undertaking so it will take some time.

[Cakeofruit]

I strongly recommend that the follow mod didn't send a email but that there is a notification system on the spaceDock. maybe a option ?          

I would also like  _  filters like for ksp version / parts or plugins or both / Impact on performance      

                            _ Add mods to a modpack directly from the mod Spacedock page.

                            _ Gallery for the mods packs !

                            _ KerbalX.com links on the profile

Keep the great work, this site is nice !

PS : the mod pack don't work right now for me ;(

Edited April 21, 2016 by Cakeofruit

[katateochi]

17 hours ago, VITAS said:

im working on having different sized thumbnails depending on the box size

Don't know if this will help, but do you know of the ImageMagick toolkit? That's what I use on KerbalX to process the thumbnails into different sizes.  KerbalX is written in Ruby/Rails so I use a library (gem) called paperclip which actually handles the interface with ImageMagick and (after some head scratching) it's come down to about 10 lines to define the different sizes, urls for each image size, and stripping of meta data from the images.  I've not worked in Python, but from a quick blunder around stackoverflow it seems there is a python lib called wand that does something similar to paperclip. Might be helpful to you.

The dev version of the site is looking nice man. Just one thing I noticed (on chrome, chromium & firefox in Linux) there is a slight delay as it resizes the page. It's a very slight delay and only apparent when increasing the browser width, but causes the right side of the page to "flash" (<-best description I could think of for it).  You're using media queries so that's a bit surprising as this feels like a more javascript thing.

One suggestion. Could we have a setting for "prefered game", and then when we're logged in the root url takes us to the game we're interested in.  Would also need a page/menu to enable getting to the other games, but for those folk who just want to think of spacedock as nothing-but-ksp it sort of gives that impression. 

[katateochi]

2 hours ago, Cakeofruit said:

KerbalX.com links on the profile

If a mod is on CKAN then KerbalX uses the ckan "identifier" value as the reference for the mod.  So any CKAN available mod has the url kerbalx.com/mods/{ckan_identifier} ie: https://kerbalx.com/mods/KWRocketry | https://kerbalx.com/mods/b9 (case is not important)
So if spacedock knows the CKAN identifier then putting a link to list the craft that use that mod should be quite easy. Not sure how to handle non-ckan mods though

[godarklight]

@katateochi we use the python library 'pillow', I implemented thumbnail support at 320x320 (configurable) using whatever format the input was, I believe vitas has lowered the resolution and forced jpg, which wasn't a problem until the site redesign.

The thumbnail stuff on the backend side is trivial, but the frontend side is completely in VITAS's domain, I'm not crazy enough to touch HTML or CSS

Also, spacedock does not know the identifier, although support would be fairly trivial to implement - but it would require keeping a ckan repository around. I'm of the opinion that mod packs, craft files and universe files are a bit out of scope for spacedock though, as ckan metadata files are the best way of doing packs, and craft files are kerbalX's area - it's not something that would really fit well into spacedock.

I've personally not used the mod pack feature, and I'm unsure what it does or who has actually used it

[katateochi]

@godarklightah, cool. Just thought I'm mention it.
re tracking ckan identifiers; yeah if you have to maintain and periodically parse a clone of the ckan repo then that starts becoming extra stuff and I think you guys have enough on your plate right now!  I'll have a think if there's another way, but my head's a bit broken right now (and yes, it's CSS that's to blame!)

[xD-FireStriker]

 

On 4/20/2016 at 7:33 AM, godarklight said:

because I can see where spacedock is going

man that is nice keep it up i cant wait for it to look like that, the kerbal stuff website was good but deep down i was wanting them to do somthing like that.
keep up the good work guys 

[VITAS]

After 24h of very intense coding my rewrite now looks like this:

NOTE: isnt finished! contains known bugs! missing stuff (e.g. list view from dev)! has known visual shortcommings (e.g. contrast on menu text)!

In order to not break dev or beta ive not pushed it to the repo. so it wont be on any public accesible site until all functions and pages are built.

For the moment this is purly about making a lagecy free codebase that is more easy to fix and that works on mobile.

I post this purley to show what im working on.

I hope you like it even more than whats on dev

 

 

[inigma]

Really looking better @VITAS!

[VITAS]

i always scratch my head when i read these code lines:

{% if stupid_user %} <div class="module"> <h2>You haven't finished filling out your mod listing!</h2> <p>Before you publish it, you should at least <a href="{{ url_for("mods.edit_mod", id=mod.id, mod_name=mod.name) }}">edit your description</a>.</p> </div> {% endif %}

 

Edited April 22, 2016 by VITAS

[kcs123]

Someone was really liquided off when he wrote this code
Judging just from variable names from that code

[tg626]

Indicates a certain mindset, tho I'm not sure what purpose that post serves beyond calling the coder's quality into question.

[godarklight]

To be honest I think we should bring up the edit screen as soon as someone creates a mod, as you always, without exception, have to hit that edit button before doing anything useful - rather than doing ?stupid_user=true

[VITAS]

To me its somewhat funyn how enraged a coder must be to use vars like that. We all have been there. Thats how Sysadmin from hell came to be

 

ATM im just porting the sturcture as is but i wanted to make some sort of wizzard/assistent/multiple step thing where you just click nex, next,next, finish.

I myself forgot to edit the description several times.

I need a better brain->computer interface. Just cant type fast enough :/