Petition: Curse to Kerbal Stuff

[Guest]

I know that much of this is my opinion, but many agree.  Please DO NOT start a debate.  Simply vote on the poll and leave.  ONLY CONSTRUCTIVE discussion.

 

Why ditch something that we know works?

-Why stay with something that is littered with ads, and needy you to go through several pages to actually download something?

-Kerbal Stuff is much more user friendly.

 

Other reasons:

-Kerbal Stuff has abut twice the amount of mods as Curse.

-Kerbal Stuff has no ads.

-Kerbal Stuff is Open Source, meaning that you don't need to pay for it.

-The majority of mods on Curse are also on Kerbal Stuff.

-Many of the mods stated above are updated more often on K-Stuff than on Curse.

-RoverDude, and many other Squad developers use K-Stuff.

-K-Stuff automatically adds to CKAN.

-Curse has 559 mods, while K-Stuff has 1081.

-Curse is chock-full of external ads-they also advertise premium like a car salesman on caffeine

-Kerbal Stuff is much more likely to add/change features when asked by Squad than Curse.  To Kerbal Stuff, Squad is the only 'client.'  To Curse, there are several different companies, and Squad would be the single person in the crowd.

-Kerbal stuff can also be downloaded, and installed to multiple servers, so multiple websites can host it.

 

Possible Cons and Solutions:

-Kerbal Stuff can use some upgrades on the server.  This would be fixed very quickly if Squad endorsed it.

-There are still some very minor bugs.  Again, if Squad endorsed it, more work would be put into it.

 

Remember this: Squad is an indy company, and is using a service that is made by a big company which really doesn't care about anything but revenue.  Kerbal Stuff is open source, and has NO revenue.  Which is going to care more about quality and the users?

Edited December 4, 2015 by Guest
Fix autocorrect...I HATE AUTOCORRECT!!!!!!!

[SpaceplaneAddict]

Yeah, I stopped using Curse when I first found it for Minecraft, dang, I still hate it today. I agree w/ ya on the adds.

 

 

[wrcsubers]

As a mod user, I much prefer KerbalStuff.  They layout/design alone is worth the switch... So much nicer to look at and interface with.

As a mod publisher, I much prefer KerbalStuff lol.  Same reasons above, the layout is much easier to deal with.  Simple. Instant uploads, no waiting for an admin to verify your files. 

KerbalStuff all the way!

[Guest]

10 hours ago, wrcsubers said:

As a mod user, I much prefer KerbalStuff.  They layout/design alone is worth the switch... So much nicer to look at and interface with.

As a mod publisher, I much prefer KerbalStuff lol.  Same reasons above, the layout is much easier to deal with.  Simple. Instant uploads, no waiting for an admin to verify your files. 

KerbalStuff all the way!

Definitely.

[Red Iron Crown]

Unofficial, personal opinion:

Kerbalstuff's uptime and speed is unacceptably low for an official host. Curse links always work and provide decent download speeds, KS not so much. KS is one guy doing it in his free time, while Curse is a company whose livelihood is dependent on the site being up. 

Kerbalstuff's developer does not care about the KSP community, in fact he actually hates it. KS is meant as a thumb in the eye to Curse, which is fine, but don't kid yourself about why this is being done. (I'd link some IRC logs to support this but they don't comply with our forum rules because #kspmodders.)

Using kerbal.curseforge.com instead of the main page does away with the external ads and download timers, and has a generally cleaner layout than the main site.

Generally speaking, I don't really care where a mod is hosted. I don't use the host for discovering mods, that's best done on the forum. All I want from a host is a link that reliably works, Curse provides this, as does github (generally), dropbox or mediafire. Only mods hosted on KerbalStuff exclusively have put me in a position where I can't download the mod.

That's not to say that I have no complaints about Curse (where is the promised client support?), but IMO it's a better solution than KS with things as they are now.

[Gaarst]

I download most of my mods directly from GitHub, to actually know what I am downloading (espcially for version compatibility) and because it is usually the first place to be updated when changes are made, not to mention access to non-released mod versions.

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Gaarst said:

I download most of my mods directly from GitHub, to actually know what I am downloading (espcially for version compatibility) and because it is usually the first place to be updated when changes are made, not to mention access to non-released mod versions.

That is actually a good point.

[steve_v]

 

@Red Iron Crown Can't say I've ever had any issues with KS, thought as it is indeed one guy in his free time and it gets no official love, I would expect it to have some bandwidth/uptime issues. There's a simple solution to this: give it some official support, so it's no longer one guy on an effective budget of near-zero.

I did suspect it was intended as a "thumb in the eye" to curse (something I personally don't mind at all) but I'd sure love to see those logs, as I'm not sure how disliking curse equates to not caring about the community.

There are far more KSP mods on KerbalStuff than on Curse, that alone suggests that even if KS doesn't like the community, the community likes KS.

As for the cleaner link to curse, thanks, but no thanks - the fact that it has ads and download timers at all made it an instant addition to my "will not visit" list and that's unlikely to change.

Edited December 5, 2015 by steve_v

[Aivoh]

While I do not mind going directly to Github for a mod at all it does not quite provide a central location as KS and Curse do for multiple developers.

The forums are too fluid to keep up with Mod discussion, mod releases, mod development and constantly in motion as forums are.

I prefer KS over curse and media fire for the Ads as well as some of the features KS provides.

Now that's not to say there is a 3rd alternative not listed that I wouldn't vote for.

So in essence it is a vote against curse more than anything..

My .02

Edited December 5, 2015 by Aivoh
Correction

[Skalou]

honestly, i don't have any add or timer on Curse, maybe because of my adblocker?

[Kerbart]

On 12/3/2015, 7:20:12, CliftonM said:

Remember this: Squad is an indy company, and is using a service that is made by a big company which really doesn't care about anything but revenue.  Kerbal Stuff is open source, and has NO revenue.  Which is going to care more about quality and the users?

To say that Curse doesn't care about anything but their revenue is to claim that, say, Apple doesn't care about anything but revenue and therefore their hardware is by definition sub-par quality.

Let's rephrase the question and make it equally “unbiassed” as the original question*:

Do you want your mods to be hosted by a professionally ran company who has a vested interest in keeping the service running fast and reliably, or do you want your mods to be hosted by an amateur who'll keep things up as long as he's interested in this hobby?

Just to make clear, I have nothing against KerbalStuff, applaud the initiative and I'm happy that there's not a monopolist hosting the mods, but thinking that a commercially ran company should outsource the hosting of the mod library to an individual who has no business interest in keeping things running properly and for who, quite frankly, it is a bit unclear who they can continue to run bandwidth intense operations indefinitely.

Yes, there are advertisements on Curse. But they’re not page-invading flash monstrosities that cover the entire page, and somebody has to pay for hosting storage and bandwidth. And if that's advertisers, I'm fine with it. The moment Curse would start charging per mod, that’s where I would drop them. But they are not, are they?

So: I voted no: as a business, Squad should be using the services of a platform that offers a viable case of continuity, as opposed to the welcome and well-intended services of an amateur whose ability to continue this service for the lifetime of the product are, though proven sustainable in the past, is not as clear as the services offered by the commercial provider.

 

 

Entire books have been written about how a survey should no try to “lead” questions as it yields fairly useless survey results.

 

[DMagic]

1 hour ago, Skalou said:

honestly, i don't have any add or timer on Curse, maybe because of my adblocker?

That's because people continually manage to mix up Curse and CurseForge. The latter of which is what is actually linked to in most peoples' threads and by the mod link in the forum header. It is, I think, what is supposed to be intended for mod creators, but there is no reason why anyone should be using the main Curse site.

CurseForge doesn't have any adds, it has a big download button on the first page, and there is nothing beyond the mod description to cause slow downs while loading.

Curse is a terrible annoying site, but unless someone is directly linking to their mod there you really don't ever have to visit that side of the site.

 

Also, not really relevant to users, Curse's optional money sharing feature provides a not-insignificant amount of money to people with a decent amount of traffic (over 100k downloads per year).

Edited December 5, 2015 by DMagic

[Skalou]

 

1 hour ago, DMagic said:

 

That's because people continually manage to mix up Curse and CurseForge.

[...]

Also, not really relevant to users, Curse's optional money sharing feature provides a not-insignificant amount of money to people with a decent amount of traffic (over 100k downloads per year).

Ok! i made the mix myself,

and i'm not against a few add (non intrusive pop up, etc), specially if it helps to keep modder motivated to work on awesome mods!

[roarke]

I prefer KS. KS must have a version check as curse has on the main page. But what is beta.kerbalstuff ?

[Kerbal01]

I prefer KS, but often Curse has popular mods *cough*MechJeb*cough*. Squad should switch from curse to KS.

[Norpo]

I like KerbalStuff. I've used it on both sides (publishing and downloading) and I can't say it's bad. It's great. The only problem I had was when I was publishing a mod for the first time, and that was a PEBKAC error; I was uploading a .rar file when it said it wanted a .zip.

Curse has a bad interface (opinion) and the whole delay for downloads thing is annoying (opinion, though probably near-universally shared), I can't say what it's like for mod developers, though. I prefer KerbalStuff's user experience in general to Curse. I can't say what it's like publishing a mod through Curse; never done it through them, but on the downloading end I prefer KerbalStuff.

...But I don't dislike Curse enough to say SQUAD should switch. Who knows; maybe they made a deal where Curse has to be their "official" mod source, or they pull the plug. Not to mention KerbalStuff's long-term stability is shaky. Sure, it's open source so in theory any regular joe (with knowledge in web hosting, so not quite average joe) could pick it back up if the current KS owner decides to drop it, or can't host it anymore, but if that happens, then who knows, maybe nobody picks it up, and KerbalStuff goes offline forever. Curse probably won't do that, it's a large company so it has more stability. It wouldn't look very good if KerbalStuff was the official mod host and it suddenly went down...

That said, as a mod host, ignoring stability, I prefer KerbalStuff. A good no male bovine feces mod host. I can't personally vouch for it's download speeds being "slow", as with a 1 Mbit/s connection (that's 1 Mbit, around 128 kilobytes, not one megabyte) any advantages of the host having more bandwidth would be completely useless on my end.

Really, I can't make a yes/no decision without knowing exactly *what* deal SQUAD made with Curse. Both have pros/cons (most of Curse's pros are stability/from SQUAD's viewpoint, most of KerbalStuff's pros are from the interface/from the user's standpoint), so it's like comparing apples to oranges, except we don't know everything about the apple; it could be orange, and we don't know everything about the orange; it could be red.

Edited December 5, 2015 by Norpo
hedging my bet, maybe there's someone out there who LIKES download time delays. Maybe it gives them time to make a cup of tea or something. In 5 seconds though? Not likely. Wow, how long can this reason get? There has to be a limit, maybe it'll get cut of

[Mecripp]

I'm with Red Iron Crown 

On this one KS is to slow and has be down to many times and there browser set up isn't has good as Curse so far as just showing pods or launcher parts

I also download from Github before any of the others

 

 

[wrcsubers]

I think there are a couple points most of us could agree on:

• Up-time and Stability are more important than a slightly better UI.  I personally haven't seen any issues with KS, but it seems like they do exist.  Up-time and Stability are more important for the developers, users and community as a whole, as well as improvement of the game.  If higher availability of mods = more players = more $$ for Squad = better game, well we should all be on board with that.
• While Curse isn't great, it's honestly not terrible.  I really can't see the motivation to switch being based on 'People prefer KS to Curse'.  If it's like the old forums where there are security/stability risks, then that is another story, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Perhaps there is a third option.  Maybe KS can become more of a community involved site instead of just one person.  Who isn't to say we couldn't have a community of Admins who run it and get some community funding to help pay for server costs.  Hosting a site is really not that expensive...like at all.  I'm not sure what KS needs as far as that goes, but from a provider like Bluehost, we could have unlimited everything on a non-dedicated server for $7/month... That's nothing divided by 10 people, let alone hundreds or thousands.

[m4v]

Didn't we kill this horse back in 2014?

6 hours ago, steve_v said:

There's a simple solution to this: give it some official support, so it's no longer one guy on an effective budget of near-zero.

I wonder what is this "official support" thing people keep mentioning that seems to be a magical fix for everything. I'm pretty sure it didn't fix SpacePort nor the site that Nexis was making and never saw the light.

This ship already sailed, KerbalStuff should have come when we were stuck to SpacePort, not months after Squad partnered with Curse. Just use whatever service you like the most and carry on.

[steve_v]

22 minutes ago, m4v said:

I wonder what is this "official support" thing people keep mentioning that seems to be a magical fix for everything.

Er, a little time, endorsement acknowledgement of it's existence, and perhaps some monetary contribution to getting decent hosting, from the folks whose game this exists to enhance? Considering that it works as well as it does now, I dare say it wouldn't take much.
Or perhaps "thou shalt mention no other site but ours" is the only thing Squad contributes to this "partnership with curse"?

I do realise that this will likely never change, so consider this nothing more than a protest at the complete lack of acknowledgement on Squads part of the time and effort that goes into KS.

Edited December 6, 2015 by steve_v

[RoverDude]

Unofficial note, since my name is mentioned in vain on the OP.  I do not put stuff on KS because I endorse the product (and agree with some of the sentiments regarding long term stability).  I put stuff there because I put stuff in lots of places.  Only reason every mod I have is not (also) on Curse right now is because I need to write the automation code to hit their API.

At the end of the day, the official mod repo really does need to be a stable company, no one guy who may or may not be interested in long-term maintenance of his site.

Also, the OP is very misleading in this post (like equating OS with having to pay for something, referencing curse vs. the actual official mod repo, etc.)

Edited December 7, 2015 by RoverDude

[DuoDex]

Another Unofficial Opinion:

I really just haven't cared for about a year now, though I'm currently leaning slightly in favor of Curse (more on that later).

My person requirements for a mod host are pretty simple - stability and accessibility in order of importance, and I see three major hosts that the KSP community is using.

Kerbalstuff is a great idea, and nice community repository with great support for other networks like the forums and CKAN (+1 accessibility), but as Red Iron Crown said, the maintainer has already said that he is essentially maintaining Kerbalstuff as a poke in the eye at Curse. Combined with the fact that I can no longer obtain speeds above 40 kb/s when downloading mods and sometimes the site refuses to work at all, Kerbalstuff is currently in last place when compared to the other hosts.

Curse, if accessed from kerbal.curseforge.com is perfectly acceptable in terms of stability. My experiences with Curse in the past have been mixed, but Curse is able to fully utilize the bandwidth available to me and does not force me to wait 20 minutes for an 80MB download. If I have to look at some ads^{adblock, people!} or give up some CKAN functionality in order for acceptable download speeds, so be it.

This brings me to my third host, which is really an aggregation. Github, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Github is free, supports CKAN, and is very, very stable, so it's pretty much the perfect host for a lot of people. Dropbox is also free, but doesn't really support CKAN, but is stable. Google Drive, same as Dropbox. 

In conclusion, my ranking is as such, considering accessibility and stability.

1. Github
2. Curse
3. Dropbox/Drive/other file-sharing services
4. Kerbalstuff

I know that some people are going to say that a way of finding the mods is important, but I think the forums and CKAN are perfectly capable of providing links to Github or Curse downloads.

[Aerolfos]

On 5.12.2015, 18.58.03, Kerbart said:

Yes, there are advertisements on Curse. But they’re not page-invading flash monstrosities that cover the entire page, and somebody has to pay for hosting storage and bandwidth. And if that's advertisers, I'm fine with it. The moment Curse would start charging per mod, that’s where I would drop them. But they are not, are they?
 

Actually, I've had them there. Only there. Of all the sites I visit somewhat regularly, Curse has the most intrusive ads of all. Really, that is what convinced me to get adblocker...

But even then, their UI is extremely clunky and not user friendly at all. Kerbalstuff is intuitive and easy to use, both for the client and the mod creator.

[Aerolfos]

1 hour ago, DuoDex said:

Another Unofficial Opinion:

I really just haven't cared for about a year now, though I'm currently leaning slightly in favor of Curse (more on that later).

My person requirements for a mod host are pretty simple - stability and accessibility in order of importance, and I see three major hosts that the KSP community is using.

Kerbalstuff is a great idea, and nice community repository with great support for other networks like the forums and CKAN (+1 accessibility), but as Red Iron Crown said, the maintainer has already said that he is essentially maintaining Kerbalstuff as a poke in the eye at Curse. Combined with the fact that I can no longer obtain speeds above 40 kb/s when downloading mods and sometimes the site refuses to work at all, Kerbalstuff is currently in last place when compared to the other hosts.

Curse, if accessed from kerbal.curseforge.com is perfectly acceptable in terms of stability. My experiences with Curse in the past have been mixed, but Curse is able to fully utilize the bandwidth available to me and does not force me to wait 20 minutes for an 80MB download. If I have to look at some ads^{adblock, people!} or give up some CKAN functionality in order for acceptable download speeds, so be it.

This brings me to my third host, which is really an aggregation. Github, Dropbox, and Google Drive. Github is free, supports CKAN, and is very, very stable, so it's pretty much the perfect host for a lot of people. Dropbox is also free, but doesn't really support CKAN, but is stable. Google Drive, same as Dropbox. 

In conclusion, my ranking is as such, considering accessibility and stability.

1. Github
2. Curse
3. Dropbox/Drive/other file-sharing services
4. Kerbalstuff

I know that some people are going to say that a way of finding the mods is important, but I think the forums and CKAN are perfectly capable of providing links to Github or Curse downloads.

Github is great, mostly.. I've had serious issues with the UI as a client though. It may seem stupid to not be able to find downloads for stuff, but I've had to give up on several mods because I can't find the download. You may think it's easy, but if it's not obvious enough to immediately find it, that's already a problem.

(Also, with the releases system it does work great, but it seems 60-70% smaller, and even one or two really big, developers are just too lazy to use it. Which makes using the site and getting the mod way harder than it should be)

[sarbian]

34 minutes ago, Aerolfos said:

(Also, with the releases system it does work great, but it seems 60-70% smaller, and even one or two really big, developers are just too lazy to use it. Which makes using the site and getting the mod way harder than it should be)

Yeah, I am soooo lazy. All my code is written by the power of pure laziness.