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Our thoughts on KerbalStuff's closure


KasperVld

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4 minutes ago, mcirish3 said:

Since Every one keeps talking about SpaceDocks as if it were not operational.  It currently has 179 mods and 875 users.

Perhaps it would be best if they qualify that to 'registered users'.

I am already a user of the site, but I am not very likely to register for an actual account any time soon - the only reason I see for doing that is if I planned on uploading a mod. I am sure I'm not the only one using the site without registering.

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1 minute ago, sal_vager said:

Ckan, official or not, needs somewhere to get mods from, ckan doesn't have a repository of addons and has relied on KerbalStuff for the majority, can and does provide mods from elsewhere.

I, for one, am glad to see that one bite the dust.  CKAN was a good idea, bad implementation.  When it started allowing mods to be added without the involvement of the mod developer it became problematic.  I know several mod developers that will be relieved it is gone and hope that it stays that way.

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7 minutes ago, Alshain said:

I, for one, am glad to see that one bite the dust.  CKAN was a good idea, bad implementation.  When it started allowing mods to be added without the involvement of the mod developer it became problematic.  I know several mod developers that will be relieved it is gone and hope that it stays that way.

It's not gone.

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Here's my question: why Curse?

I don't mean, "why did Squad decide to outsource mod hosting instead of building their own Spaceport Mark 2." The reasons for that have been explained at length, and I don't entirely disagree with them. My question is, of all the sites or companies they could have outsourced the hosting business to, what posessed them to pick Curse(forge)? There are much less objectionable alternatives out there, the only one I know off the top of my head is Nexus (which does have ads but is nowhere near as awful as Curse) but I'm sure there are others. I can't believe Curse was the only option. So why did Squad go with them, and stick with them obstinately in the face of a constant stream of complaints from users?

Honestly, I'm baffled by the whole business. Curse is such a slap in the face to a community Squad has otherwise been extremely supportive of. And while Squad didn't completely ignore KerbalStuff as has been claimed, they did in my recollection make a point of avoiding mention of it when possible; all official links to modding sites point to Curse, with not even a hint that alternatives exist. I bet a lot of users not active on the forums think Curse is the only (or at least the definitive) modding site for KSP, which is a shame because a lot of good mods aren't available there. 

In any case though, I'm really excited to see the progress on Space Dock, which I think will be a worthy replacement to KerbalStuff. 

Edited by Hotaru
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6 minutes ago, Hotaru said:

why Curse?

As I understand it, SQUAD wants to provide a reliable host for mods.  Curseforge is a fine host for mods.  You can debate whether KS, Github, of Curseforge is better until the cows come home, but Curseforge has large servers, no ads, and free hosting and downloading. 

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9 minutes ago, Alshain said:

I, for one, am glad to see that one bite the dust.  CKAN was a good idea, bad implementation.  When it started allowing mods to be added without the involvement of the mod developer it became problematic.  I know several mod developers that will be relieved it is gone and hope that it stays that way.

Wait, you think CKAN is not operational and or not just as alive as ever?

 

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2 minutes ago, Nothalogh said:

Wait, you think CKAN is not operational and or not just as alive as ever?

 

What I think is you are a few posts behind the conversation. ;)

Edited by Alshain
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On 2/17/2016 at 0:49 PM, KasperVld said:

Curse provided, and still provides, a stable platform for uploading mods and other ingame content, and we have no reason to end our partnership with them.

 

Their Curse client does not support KSP.  They mention in this post that they hope to have it ready by "early 2015", but of course that has come and gone a year ago.

Is there an official position on this or why they haven't held up their end of the bargain?  Is that really the kind of effort you want from KSP's official mod repository?

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16 minutes ago, Hotaru said:

Here's my question: why Curse?

Why not Curse?

There's claims that Curse is ad and virus ridden, yet just taking a look at Curse shows no more ads than Nexus, there's an ad on Curse currently for oatmeal and another one for a hotel in Vegas, and on Nexus there's an ad for P&O cruises.

I don't like targeted ads, Nexus is passing my location to an ad server to serve me an ad for a product or service local to me, Curse isn't doing that.

CurseForge has no ads at all, as you can see here.

Spoiler

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From searching around there's no solid evidence of viruses from Curse, the ones that do exist are many years old, and the few recent ones have been debunked as coming from pirated Curse clients.

The few members here who have had an issue with Curse have been mostly concerned with uploading and approval of mods, which JadedCat has helped to resolve.

I doubt the situation would be different if Nexus were the official mod repository, it'd just mean a different support email and a different person here handling issues.

While Curse may have had a rocky beginning they clearly don't deserve that reputation any more.

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In my opinion it's not the matter of which provider they use - they should put some energy to build a "easy to use" and "conflictless" Modtool for importing mods - like CKAN - did. Whatever their soloution is - curse or nexus or others - and change the "Addons & Mods" Button at KSP start :wink:

 

please excuse my bad language :blush:

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45 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

Why not Curse?

Because we don't like it. By "we" I mean "a fairly large number of users, including me." Obviously everyone doesn't object to it, and it's risky to even say most users object to it, but I think it's safe to say many users prefer to avoid Curse for one reason or another. 

Honestly, my main objection to Curse is nothing to do with ads or malware, it's just that I just think it's a lousy website. Badly designed, badly laid out, unpleasant to use. Nexus is somewhat better, in my opinion, although I mentioned it more by way of an example of an alternative that wasn't Curse than an actual specific suggestion. Frankly I think KerbalStuff/Space Dock is orders of magnitude better than either of them. If the Curse(forge) KSP page looked more like the KS/SD home page--uncluttered, nice design, featured mods displayed prominently--a lot of my complaints about it would evaporate. As it is, the Curse page is littered with ads horribly cluttered, and the KSP Curse Forge page is basically one big ad for itself.  

 

PS. As Sal points out below, there aren't actually any ads on the Curse page he posted a screenshot of. It's just an awful page layout. 

Edited by Hotaru
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Not everyone likes Nexus, it's a pain to even find the download button.

And I see this is still a thing :/

Spoiler

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Oh and as I showed, the claims that the Curse page is littered with ads is just that , a claim, it doesn't actually have any truth to it.

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19 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

Not everyone likes Nexus, it's a pain to even find the download button.

And I see this is still a thing :/

 

I absolutely agree Nexus could do with improvement. I'm pretty used to it because I use it a lot for Skyrim, Fallout, etc. but it's not really that great a website (and I didn't know you had to register to download large files, that's kind of stupid). Again, I mentioned it only as an example of an alternative that wasn't Curse--I'm sure there are better alternatives to both of them out there. (I hope.) 

So I just went to KSP Curseforge and actually looked at it for a bit (which I haven't done in ages, since I usually avoid it like the plague), and I have to admit it's not quite as awful as I remembered. Not brilliant, but not unusable either. (Curse-not-forge, on the other hand, was even more awful than I remembered. I got a horrible massive pink T-Mobile popup ad covering the actual content, not to mention an Adobe "update Flash!" notice.) I still say there must be a better option out there. Of course as soon as I finished writing that, I decided to take a look at Curseforge again to check something and got an error. 

All in all, I think I'll stick with Space Dock. 

 

19 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

Oh and as I showed, the claims that the Curse page is littered with ads is just that , a claim, it doesn't actually have any truth to it.

What? I was referring specifically to the screenshot of the Curse home page you posted when I said it was littered with ads! (Admittedly the same is true of the one you posted of the Nexus site). 

And now I look at that screenshot more closely, I see they're not actually ads, but links to various sections of Curse. My mistake. But it's still such a horrible, cluttered layout I just assumed it was littered with ads and left so fast I didn't have time to realize my mistake. 

Edited by Hotaru
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5 minutes ago, sal_vager said:

People can still use ModDB and Nexus if they want to, but it's up to modders to put stuff there.

Modders can put stuff wherever they want, of course. My question is about Squad's choice of an official partner for mod hosting. 

Frankly I'm not all that bothered about it, I'll keep happily playing and modding KSP no matter who Squad decides to partner with. But I have to admit to being a little insulted by the whole Curse business. 

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@sal_vager I think most legitimate complaints revolve around the layout of Curseforge, and that fact that if you head to non-Curseforge part of the site i.e. Curse, you will get get a very different view.  A view littered with ads and junk.  I think what most are looking for is an acknowledgment at least that Curse is ugly and not as user freandly as Spacedocks, and that the possibility that you could stumble into the less savory parts of Curse make it less desirable to visit.

1 hour ago, Hotaru said:

If the Curse(forge) KSP page looked more like the KS/SD home page--uncluttered, nice design, featured mods displayed prominently--a lot of my complaints about it would evaporate.

Take this as an example and case in point.

Edited by mcirish3
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2 hours ago, sal_vager said:

Why not Curse?
There's claims that Curse is ad and virus ridden, yet just taking a look at Curse shows no more ads than Nexus, there's an ad on Curse currently for oatmeal and another one for a hotel in Vegas, and on Nexus there's an ad for P&O cruises. I don't like targeted ads, Nexus is passing my location to an ad server to serve me an ad for a product or service local to me, Curse isn't doing that.

CurseForge has no ads at all, as you can see here.

  Reveal hidden contents

Qmb6xq7KC9WYaveJV5SW4bjm7d13ZkgJCjSeCDLX

From searching around there's no solid evidence of viruses from Curse, the ones that do exist are many years old, and the few recent ones have been debunked as coming from pirated Curse clients.
The few members here who have had an issue with Curse have been mostly concerned with uploading and approval of mods, which JadedCat has helped to resolve.
I doubt the situation would be different if Nexus were the official mod repository, it'd just mean a different support email and a different person here handling issues.
While Curse may have had a rocky beginning they clearly don't deserve that reputation any more.

I think I see part of the problem. This has confused me for a while, but I finally noticed something. People, myself included, have been missing it for a while. There are two distinct Curse experiences.

 

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I'm sure for many of you, this is a "duh, of course Curse and Curseforge are different sites, and different experiences." 

I didn't know this, and I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who don't either. The KSP main menu itself directs to Curse, not Curseforge, so the majority of people are having the first, ad-ridden experience, and the minority of players, mainly mod-authors, and people who are a bit more in touch, are having the latter, ad-free experience. That's why no one is seeing eye-to-eye on Curse, and that's why there's confusion. Why are there two experiences? Why are there two sites? On KerbalStuff, users were having identical experiences. If you were an author, you were on the same site as your users. Not so with Curse. 

What is the functionality difference between the two sites? Why are there two sites?

Another problem I see, is no (seemingly no) interaction between the Curse people, and the forum people. They have no presence here. KSP is just one of their clients, and they have no ability to talk to players, and make changes, fix stuff, or provide support. They're just a faceless entity, with no personality, and that just works against them in terms of likability. 

Edit: @mcirish3 just pointed out what I pointed out in much fewer words.

 

Edited by curtquarquesso
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1 minute ago, sal_vager said:

Huh. That's the first I've even seen a Curse representative around on the forums, though I admit, since I used to rarely use Curse, I wasn't looking all that hard. That particular thread was started only started last Wednesday though. Based on their posting history, they only regularly post about once a month, with this last week, and the initial introduction of Curse being the obvious exceptions. 

I still think the disconnect between Curse and Curseforge is the strangest part. That could use some explanation, and clarification if @Jadedcat is around to provide that.

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It's nice to see another (i think this is now the third?) statement by Squad or one of their employees on the closure of KerbalStuff.  It strikes me that Squad are caught in a bit of a catch-22 when it comes to modding in general - watching this whole scene unfold over the last few days it's seems that no matter what they do or don't do, they're going to be blamed for the fallout either way.

 

On 18/2/2016 at 2:45 AM, NecroBones said:

Having said that, the thing is, while a simple "thanks" does indeed go a long way, the thing is, it's just reality that people are pretty quiet when everything works as expected. Working in the IT field, it's what some of us call the "IT Curse". When everything is working well, no one seems to notice or care. But then it's a huge crisis when things are not working right. If you've done your job well, you'll probably hear nothing. So you kinda have to learn to take silence as "silent praise". It sucks, but it's reality. If you're seeking praise, making a utility website isn't the way to go. ;)

As a fellow IT person, I can state that this is absolutely true.

 

On 18/2/2016 at 3:18 PM, John FX said:

Whatever happened to the idea of having a curse client for KSP?

That idea seems to have quietly run away to die in a shadowy corner...

I've been wondering about this too.  It wouldn't be an issue, except it was something that we were led to expect was happening in the near future.

 

I'm not overly keen on Curse, but I still prefer it's existence to there being no 'official' mod source.

On a more positive note, I applaud the efforts of the SpaceDock team, and look forward to using the site in the near future.

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14 minutes ago, curtquarquesso said:

What is the functionality difference between the two sites? Why are there two sites?

If I recall correctly, back when the Curse partnership was first announced, the community response to Curse was pretty scathing.  The second site was produced as a direct response to the criticism levelled at the design of the default curse site.

Say what you will about the partnership, but I doubt that second version of the site came without some prodding from Squad's side.

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4 minutes ago, pxi said:

If I recall correctly, back when the Curse partnership was first announced, the community response to Curse was pretty scathing.  The second site was produced as a direct response to the criticism levelled at the design of the default curse site.

Say what you will about the partnership, but I doubt that second version of the site came without some prodding from Squad's side.

CurseForge existed before this, so you're rather incorrect here.

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