Kerbal Stuff, an open-source Space Port replacement

[SirCmpwn]

Wow, that seems like you had a pretty bad experience. I'm sorry there were so many errors, I was sure it was more stable than that. I'll look into it.

As for Imgur and YouTube ****, I added meager support due to popular demand. In the description, put [] to embed Imgur albums or YouTube videos.

I feel like your complaints about not being able to give it a zip file and then input details is petty. Mod creation does not take long.

[SirCmpwn]

Found and fixed your 500 errors. Sorry about that.

[Ippo]

I feel like your complaints about not being able to give it a zip file and then input details is petty. Mod creation does not take long.

Well... he is kinda right though... in all honestly it would be nicer to "reverse" the steps, especially since all the "customization" stuff like backgrounds and the rest is likely going to change anyway, and one might not have already finished all the images he wants. That's what I did by the way, I just re-used the screenshot for the background because I had still not made the background I have now.

[SirCmpwn]

Well... he is kinda right though... in all honestly it would be nicer to "reverse" the steps, especially since all the "customization" stuff like backgrounds and the rest is likely going to change anyway, and one might not have already finished all the images he wants. That's what I did by the way, I just re-used the screenshot for the background because I had still not made the background I have now.

Well, alright. I'll think about how that flow can be improved.

[Tiberion]

I also think this can be aided by our previous discussion about progress bars and such for the upload process - if the upload were managed differently you could have a upload failure state and roll back to the data entry area to alter things. Maybe eve have the upload running separately while you fill out the rest of the form

relatedly, I am unsure what currently happens if an upload fails - does the update notice still go out, prompting people to download a failed update?

[Greys]

Just uploaded another of my old mods and I noted some things about the process.

In no particular order:

1) There does not appear to be a way to remove images during the mod creation process, they can be removed afterwards.

1.a) There's no means to reorder images once uploaded.

2) There should be an option to use an image from the gallery as the header instead of uploading it twice.

2.a) When repositioning the header image you cannot let go of the image if the mouse is not over it; not sure if you can fix that.

3) The KSP Compatibility field will accept a value such as "0.20.0+" without error, but displays the current version of KSP on the page and only shows the entered value in the versions history.[1]

3.a) Many fields throughout the site feature no quantity of validation, allowing for the creation of invalid links or irrelevant values. [2]

3. The earliest publically available version of KSP was around 0.7, the text field allows for autocompleting of any value matching the x.y(.z) format starting with 0.0, but furthermore mods did not become practical until even later than that and for a time there were 'demo specific' mods. [3]

4) The header image is used for iconography in various places as well as at the top of the mod's page listing, but depending on the page and it's content what of the header gets shown varies, making it very difficult to ensure that a picture is visible at all on some pages (see: user profile with 2+ listings) and still looks good on others (see: mod listing, search results). [2]

4.a) On all lists of mods the image is presented as a long rectangle with a transparent white overlay featuring text that slides to the right onHover. If instead the overlay slid to the left to reveal the picture then these pictures would be much more visible. To match a previous suggestion I've made, another white overlay could slide in from the right side with a logo or more brief summary (just mod name maybe), perhaps both.

4. In any 'thin' (not full width) list of mods the text field available for the mod's name is quite short, any mods whose name has several words or large words have their name wordwrapped, which pushes information off the frame. [4][2]

4.c) The above also occurs if said mod has both a long name and a long brief-description on the mod's page. [5]

A potential fix would be to allow modders to enter a "short name", and have the pages use the short name if the long name is over a character length specified page by page or determined at page load.

4.d) Every time your own the user profile page is loaded there is a box stating that this is your profile and you should tell people about it. This box can be dismissed but will return on the next load. This should only show up the first time, or even be entirely removed.

5) In writing this post I discovered that you cannot link to other tabs of a mod's page, as such [1] does not correctly take you to the versions tab.

[1] http://beta.kerbalstuff.com/mod/33/Jebs_Big_Stick#versions

[2] http://beta.kerbalstuff.com/profile/Greys

[3] http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Version_history#v0.7.3

[4] http://beta.kerbalstuff.com/profile/jnrobinson

[5] http://beta.kerbalstuff.com/mod/13/Taurus_HCV_-_3.75_m_Stock-ish_Crew_Pod

Edited June 30, 2014 by Greys

[SirCmpwn]

I also think this can be aided by our previous discussion about progress bars and such for the upload process - if the upload were managed differently you could have a upload failure state and roll back to the data entry area to alter things. Maybe eve have the upload running separately while you fill out the rest of the form

relatedly, I am unsure what currently happens if an upload fails - does the update notice still go out, prompting people to download a failed update?

Hmm, I don't know of a scenario in which an update would fail, but for what it's worth the email doesn't go out until we're confident that everything's fine.

[SirCmpwn]

Just uploaded another of my old mods and I noted some things about the process.

In no particular order:

1) There does not appear to be a way to remove images during the mod creation process, they can be removed afterwards.

1.a) There's no means to reorder images once uploaded.

2) There should be an option to use an image from the gallery as the header instead of uploading it twice.

2.a) When repositioning the header image you cannot let go of the image if the mouse is not over it; not sure if you can fix that.

3) The KSP Compatibility field will accept a value such as "0.20.0+" without error, but displays the current version of KSP on the page and only shows the entered value in the versions history.[1]

3.a) Many fields throughout the site feature no quantity of validation, allowing for the creation of invalid links or irrelevant values. [2]

3. The earliest publically available version of KSP was around 0.7, the text field allows for autocompleting of any value matching the x.y(.z) format starting with 0.0, but furthermore mods did not become practical until even later than that and for a time there were 'demo specific' mods. [3]

4) The header image is used for iconography in various places as well as at the top of the mod's page listing, but depending on the page and it's content what of the header gets shown varies, making it very difficult to ensure that a picture is visible at all on some pages (see: user profile with 2+ listings) and still looks good on others (see: mod listing, search results). [2]

4.a) On all lists of mods the image is presented as a long rectangle with a transparent white overlay featuring text that slides to the right onHover. If instead the overlay slid to the left to reveal the picture then these pictures would be much more visible. To match a previous suggestion I've made, another white overlay could slide in from the right side with a logo or more brief summary (just mod name maybe), perhaps both.

4. In any 'thin' (not full width) list of mods the text field available for the mod's name is quite short, any mods whose name has several words or large words have their name wordwrapped, which pushes information off the frame. [4][2]

4.c) The above also occurs if said mod has both a long name and a long brief-description on the mod's page. [5]

A potential fix would be to allow modders to enter a "short name", and have the pages use the short name if the long name is over a character length specified page by page or determined at page load.

4.d) Every time your own the user profile page is loaded there is a box stating that this is your profile and you should tell people about it. This box can be dismissed but will return on the next load. This should only show up the first time, or even be entirely removed.

5) In writing this post I discovered that you cannot link to other tabs of a mod's page, as such [1] does not correctly take you to the versions tab.

[1] http://beta.kerbalstuff.com/mod/33/Jebs_Big_Stick#versions

[2] http://beta.kerbalstuff.com/profile/Greys

[3] http://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/Version_history#v0.7.3

[4] http://beta.kerbalstuff.com/profile/jnrobinson

[5] http://beta.kerbalstuff.com/mod/13/Taurus_HCV_-_3.75_m_Stock-ish_Crew_Pod

A lot of this is stuff that's going to be in the general polishing in the coming days. It's stuff that wasn't neccessary for beta but needs to be cleaned up before launch. The exception is #5, which I'm not going to change.

[Tiberion]

Hmm, I don't know of a scenario in which an update would fail, but for what it's worth the email doesn't go out until we're confident that everything's fine.

Could be anything really, since you can't make any assumptions about the quality of the uploader's internet connection, computer or the validity of the file itself. It's a problem you see with almost any file hosting service where you download a truncated zip file.

Perhaps just add another step at the end, a confirmation page where it says "you uploaded this file, which is this maybe bytes, and made these changes and additions to your mod page - with a "Confirm" or "Re-publish" button or an "Edit" button.

[Javster]

Very fancy design, I would like it to grow and get more users!

EDIT: Added some promotion for the site in my description! That will be K9999.99 per day, get 0.1% off if you use the code "totesnotEA"

Edited June 30, 2014 by Javster

[SirCmpwn]

I spent some time today refactoring Kerbal Stuff into smaller, more maintainable modules. You can see the code here. This almost surely introduced some bugs, though I did exhaustively test it myself. Please let me know if you noticed anything.

[kahlzun]

Got a bit of an error here, yeah..

"Create Account" leads to a

"

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application." page. You might want to look into that..

[Txzeenath]

Personally, i'll never use this site. The overall layout is unpleasant as everything is oversized with ridiculous CSS effects. There is no proper navigation and page space is wasted.

You should have very minimal vertical scrolling to display content that people want, which means maximizing space across the horizontal plane. Text should be large enough to read easily, but small enough to were you can read multiple sections at once. Which promotes skim-reading and improves usability.

CSS effects should be minimal and non-intrusive. The sliding bars are extremely distracting and add nothing, since the buttons are already massive.

[Ippo]

Personally, i'll never use this site.

Your choice not to use the site is obviously legitimate: do whatever you want.

Anyway, "it looks ugly" is not exactly a valid point to turn it down, especially in the light of what it means for the whole community. If you have a better design idea, I suggest you create a mockup of that and propose it to the author, who's being very open to suggestions so far.

[mythic_fci]

Personally, i'll never use this site.

As others have said, this is completely valid. No comments.

The overall layout is unpleasant as everything is oversized with ridiculous CSS effects. There is no proper navigation and page space is wasted.

You should have very minimal vertical scrolling to display content that people want, which means maximizing space across the horizontal plane. Text should be large enough to read easily, but small enough to were you can read multiple sections at once. Which promotes skim-reading and improves usability.

CSS effects should be minimal and non-intrusive. The sliding bars are extremely distracting and add nothing, since the buttons are already massive.

As others have said, you should try and code something that looks like what you want and propose it to the author. Coding is hard work, and this guy's already trying to maintain a repository. Even coding a measly website is difficult on it's own without any outside tools like a website creator; let alone adding something like a mod repository system with accounts and such.

[Ippo]

As others have said, you should try and code something that looks like what you want and propose it to the author.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that even a mockup done in InDesign, or even photoshop, would be just fine and quicker if the point is just discussing on the site's layout.

UPDATE: by the way, SirCmpwn, the site is currently throwing a 500 and can't be accessed, for me at least.

[mythic_fci]

Actually, I'm pretty sure that even a mockup done in InDesign, or even photoshop, would be just fine and quicker if the point is just discussing on the site's layout.

Agreed. I've even made some last-minute concepts in Paint before, and they've gotten the point across.

by the way, SirCmpwn, the sit is currently throwing a 500 and can't be accessed, for me at least.

I'm getting a 500 too. It says this:

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request. Either the server is overloaded or there is an error in the application.

I think since the servers are run by Majir, we need to ask him for help.

Edited July 1, 2014 by FCISuperGuy

[SirCmpwn]

Fixed. I did say I would probably break things with those recent changes

Apparently SQLAlchemy takes it upon itself to derail the entire application when a single error occurs.

[DMagic]

You might already be aware of this, but it seems that the stats graphs loop around at the start of the month.

[SirCmpwn]

Thanks DMagic, I'll look into it around the same time I do raw stats export.

[Falknir]

I will be frank. The current iteration of the mod browser section is impractical and will point out a few things:

• SCREEN SPACE WASTED
  
  • Mod Listing DIV containers unnecessarily large with little provided function
    
  • Overly large DIV container header size
    
  • Unnecessary empty space in mod listing container for a partial unobstructed image and sliding hover
    

  [*]NOT FULLY OPTIMIZED

  • ​Seemingly unrestricted image resolution and file size for mod listing DIV container backgrounds
    
  • Small listings of mods already pushing page sizes between 6-13MB for a simple-looking front-end, this will become obscene when you get a bunch of mods listed
    

  [*]FUNCTIONALITY

  • ​Lack of mod filters and-or categories
    
  • Listings do not display version of game the mod supports / date updated (one is found deeper, the other is completely absent)
    
  • Large DIV containers background image provided by mod author with useful portions out-of-view
    

[SirCmpwn]

Most of what you've said has already been said and is planned for improvement. Please read the thread before leaving your comments.

Listings do not display version of game the mod supports / date updated (one is found deeper, the other is completely absent)

Mod version is very easy to see. In fact, previous versions have a full history of which KSP version was supported by that version of the mod. Date updated is in the database, I suppose it'd be reasonable to show it on the site.

Your complaints on screen space wasted are petty and will not be addressed.

Large DIV containers background image provided by mod author with useful portions out-of-view

The mod author is given the opportunity to crop the photo however he or she pleases.

The rest of your comments have already been addressed. Read the thread.

[SirCmpwn]

Pushed another update that might introduce unforeseen bugs. This one prevents SQLAlchemy errors from bringing down the whole app, and it touches basically any code that writes to the database. Bugs may occur, please report them.

[Ippo]

There must be some glitch in the downloads counter / graph:

My mod wasn't available for download on june 2nd (note the 2 downloads at the beginning of last month)

Edited July 2, 2014 by Ippo

[SirCmpwn]

5 posts above this one is someone reporting the same bug.