SpaceDock.info (Mod Hosting Site)

[VITAS]

Its basicly using the Spacedock api. Im open to others using the API to make great new Services but theres a button " SUBMIT YOUR MOD & GET PAID ".

What ive done:

• Firewalled all IPs related to the Site on the Servers.
• Written a Mail to the Domain Registrar demanding Contact information
• Written a mail to "support" as listed in the sites terms

Im unsure about the DCMA takedown because i dont know the location of the owner and Spacedock itself isnt under US jurestiction.

From the Spacedock Terms of Service:

Quote

Copyright
Our web pages and their contents are subject to German copyright law. Unless expressly permitted by law (§ 44a et seq. of the copyright law), every form of utilizing, reproducing or processing works subject to copyright protection on our web pages requires the prior consent of the respective owner of the rights. Individual reproductions of a work are allowed only for private use, so must not serve either directly or indirectly for earnings. Unauthorized utilization of copyrighted works is punishable (§ 106 of the copyright law).

 

He/they copied all data so blocking will only apply to future changes to spacedocks content.

 

 

Update:

got this:

please send me link of dublicate content

Vào Thứ Hai, ngày 29 tháng 8 năm 2016, Spacedock <[email protected]> đã viết:

Name: Spacedock

Email: [email protected]

Comment: Dear Sirs,
we where made aware that kspmods net contains content from spacedock.info.
We demand its removal within the next 24h.

Time: August 29, 2016 at 2:33 pm
IP Address: 46.59.145.167
Contact Form URL: http://stardewvalleymods.net/contact-us/
Sent by an unverified visitor to your site.

--

_____________________________

HOANG ANH LAM / Project Advisor 
[email protected] / 01256728897

INET 
01256728897 
15 Floors - 250 Minh KhaiHai Ba Trung - Ha Noi 
hivietnam.vn

 

Replied with

link to disclamer, browse all mods links

And info that ive logs prooving him scraping the site.

 

 mod authors can feel free to write some complaint mails to him.

(My excursion into the stardew vally forums brought me the info, that his business model is stealing mods from other sites trying to become the defacto goto site for game mods for a certain game. Worked with stardew valley)

 

Edited August 29, 2016 by VITAS

[technicalfool]

@VITAS

Well this is interesting. Seems they're scraping Curse as well. A bunch of my little modlets are on there, with incorrect descriptions and vastly inflated feature lists. Click download and it goes directly to the Curseforge download page.

Wonder if CursorDeleter will appear twice soon, now I've thrown it up on SpaceDock/CKAN?

<edit>

>tfw didn't even read the last post

</edit>

[Stone Blue]

@VITAS I know nothing about website hosting, but I was a member of a hugely popular website, that was based on sharing/hosting HUGE amounts of data for its users... They soon had issues with copycat sites scraping their databases... Somehow they implemented blocking for these mass requests/scraping, in addition to IP blocking... Since offenders can just use different IPs, it would be like Whack-a-Mole, by only blocking IPs... And the legit users would never need the ability to make such large data requests all at once...

Can I assume you have/will implement something similar?...??

[VITAS]

they worked arround that by making a sane amount of req. each day.

i hope i found a temporary fix but i doubt they care. KSP isnt the only game targeted.

What makes me mad is, that they started with Stardew vally and everbody over at that community is cool with them doing it. So they think its ok.

After asking them to delete ALL mods they copied from Spacedock they stopped responding (for now?).

 

Update:

i wrote curse an email making them aware of the site stating that it would be in spacedocks and their interrest to get this site shut down. I hope they are able to throw more time and money at the problem than iam able to.

Speaking of money:

*Pointing at donation button in signature*

Edited August 29, 2016 by VITAS

[TiktaalikDreaming]

On 30/08/2016 at 1:24 AM, VITAS said:

Update:

i wrote curse an email making them aware of the site stating that it would be in spacedocks and their interrest to get this site shut down. I hope they are able to throw more time and money at the problem than iam able to.

That there talking to curse may help more than all our noise.  Never thought of that.  :-)  I too received zero feedback from my email asking them to remove a mod.
 

Quote

 

Speaking of money:

*Pointing at donation button in signature*

 

Done.  Actually, done a while ago.  I have no idea what name it's under.  But Johnny Winston's sent me 6 emails thanking me for my tuppence.  How close are we to cost recovery?  I'm assuming the community is too poor to manage actual paying for time just yet.

[ShotgunNinja]

User "Warsoul" on spacedock has uploaded mods, but these are in his own words "donators exclusive", and the zip only contain a text file with a link to some crap where you have to pay to actually get the mod. I don't know if this is legit, but I just wanted to make spacedock maintainers aware of it.

 

[Andem]

3 hours ago, ShotgunNinja said:

User "Warsoul" on spacedock has uploaded mods, but these are in his own words "donators exclusive", and the zip only contain a text file with a link to some crap where you have to pay to actually get the mod. I don't know if this is legit, but I just wanted to make spacedock maintainers aware of it.

 

By any chance This:

Warsoul?

[linuxgurugamer]

2 hours ago, Andem said:

By any chance This:

Warsoul?

It's a 320 meg download, seems like more than a text file

4 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

It's a 320 meg download, seems like more than a text file

Oh, the beta is a 320 meg download, the other two are not.

Offhand, I'd say this shouldn't be allowed

[JPLRepo]

5 hours ago, Andem said:

By any chance This:

Warsoul?

No I believe the one in question is no longer available.

[Guest]

@VITAS I hope it turns out successfully.  I remember them operating with Kerbal Stuff about a year ago.  I had to delete all of the old versions of my mods to break the links.  I don't think it updates them at all.  I did an extensive amount of research into what exactly was happening, and how the bot running the site was doing its thing.  It pulls the name of the mod + "ksp mod" and enters that into a google search.  That's at least how the images are found.  The descriptions might be hand edited, but I can't really tell.  I think that some are, and some are pulled from random internet data.  Again, this is still mostly speculation, but it would explain how it's able to pull so much content.

[Stone Blue]

Yeah, I hope something gets done, because unfortunately, that site is showing up in the Top 5 to 10 items in almost ANY and ALL, ksp mod google searches that I do...
So unfortunately, whatever they are doing seems to be working well, and likely to suck in new players... If not in getting $ from them, at least getting tons of click-traffic

[linuxgurugamer]

On 8/26/2016 at 7:43 AM, katateochi said:

Not sure how useful this is, but WHOIS (https://who.is/whois/google.com) doesn't yield much info for the site, but it does refer to https://www.privacyguardian.org/ which appears to have a mechanisum to contact a domain owner (without actually exposing the domain owner) and there is a form to report abuse.

It also seems associated with a couple other mod sites for other games and on one of them (which has a similar style) there is a more complete contact us page (that also has an email address, unsecurely splotched in a p tag, so if it's any good I don't know) - http://stardewvalleymods.net/contact-us/ 

I've sent them a message via Privacyguardian.org, and through the Stardewvalleymods.net link listed above.  when I sent to the contact form, I also listed all the links i could find

I also sent to Privacy guardian an abuse report re. charging for mods against license terms

will post updates if I get any response.

FYI, it appears that the form sends messages to:    [email protected]

 

Edited September 1, 2016 by linuxgurugamer

[TiktaalikDreaming]

7 hours ago, CliftonM said:

@VITAS I hope it turns out successfully.  I remember them operating with Kerbal Stuff about a year ago.  I had to delete all of the old versions of my mods to break the links.  I don't think it updates them at all.  I did an extensive amount of research into what exactly was happening, and how the bot running the site was doing its thing.  It pulls the name of the mod + "ksp mod" and enters that into a google search.  That's at least how the images are found.  The descriptions might be hand edited, but I can't really tell.  I think that some are, and some are pulled from random internet data.  Again, this is still mostly speculation, but it would explain how it's able to pull so much content.

That helps explain the not quite unrelated images on a couple of mine.  Might be time for a trojan Kerbal Industries Decisive Decouplers Integrated Experiment - Parts, Observations, Revisions & Nomenclature  (running out of ideas at the end there)...  Shortened of course, in the mod name.   Content via script is a very bad idea, IMHO.

[VITAS]

Hi,

thank you for the heads up.

My position on this is:

I dont want anyone using the Page to offer anything for sale (Donations are an invite not a must).

Futhermore i dont want the page to be used as Link farm.

I take these two things very seriously because i myself decided against ads, selling of userdata (or even leaking them to google and such via analytics, fonts, js lib hosting).

On 31.8.2016 at 8:40 PM, JPLRepo said:

No I believe the one in question is no longer available.

Donations:

I also want to make you guys aware, that donations have gone down a fair bit (115€/Month atm).

The Servers are pushing arround 200Mbit/s 24/7 (thats about 50TB/month)

It would be nice if the word could be spread that spacedock purely lifes from donations and
that it not only provides a nice webpage but the majority of all CKAN downloads.

If each of the regular users would donate 1€/month it would help out a lot.

 

[TiktaalikDreaming]

2 hours ago, VITAS said:

Donations:

I also want to make you guys aware, that donations have gone down a fair bit (115€/Month atm).

The Servers are pushing arround 200Mbit/s 24/7 (thats about 50TB/month)

It would be nice if the word could be spread that spacedock purely lifes from donations and
that it not only provides a nice webpage but the majority of all CKAN downloads.

If each of the regular users would donate 1€/month it would help out a lot.

I wasn't going to mention upping my payment, but by gawd, Patreon makes it damned hard to find how.  So, if anyone thinks, "I'll throw an extra few dollars/euro/pounds/rubbles Vitas' way" and then gets stuck finding how; the path starts with attempting to get your "reward".  Then you can choose not to get Darklight's address or email unlock, but to just change your donation. 

[VITAS]

Thank you @TiktaalikDreaming

but i was hoping to spread the burden more widely by getting more ppl to donate.

Im always open to other ways for you to throw money at spacedocks infrastructure.

please suggest some

(i could offer bitcoins but getting them back to euro isnt that easy)

 

Edited September 5, 2016 by VITAS

[linuxgurugamer]

On 9/1/2016 at 11:13 AM, linuxgurugamer said:

I've sent them a message via Privacyguardian.org, and through the Stardewvalleymods.net link listed above.  when I sent to the contact form, I also listed all the links i could find

I also sent to Privacy guardian an abuse report re. charging for mods against license terms

will post updates if I get any response.

FYI, it appears that the form sends messages to:    [email protected]

 

FYI, I received a courteous message back, stating that they were removing my mods.  I checked, and all the ones I listed were gone.  I replied asking that a few more be removed.

So, I suggest that individual authors write a nice note to the email address I list above, requesting that their mods be removed.  Include links to all the mods, and hopefully they will respond

[TiktaalikDreaming]

12 minutes ago, VITAS said:

Thank you @TiktaalikDreaming

but i was hoping to spread the burden more widely by getting more ppl to donate.

Im always open to other ways for you to throw money at spacedocks infrastructure.

please suggest some

(i could offer bitcoins but getting them back to euro isnt that easy)

 

I think Patreon works fine for this sort of thing.  I'm just a bit baffled by the way handing over extra money was so hard to find.  Usually sites make that the easiest thing ever.  :-)

Maybe they're trapped a bit in the subscription for rewards model.  Dunno.  But the general ongoing subscription system works nicely for webhosting.

[VITAS]

Yes theyre about making videos and other one time proj. Continiously runnign things with ecpenses seem like an aftertought
.

good going @linuxgurugamer. problem is: with most licenses its simply allowed for them to rehost  the files.

[TiktaalikDreaming]

8 hours ago, VITAS said:

Yes theyre about making videos and other one time proj. Continiously runnign things with ecpenses seem like an aftertought
.

good going @linuxgurugamer. problem is: with most licenses its simply allowed for them to rehost  the files.

Yar, the licenses are generally there to encourage sharing and so on.  The main issue with copies floating about is they won't be updated.  And of course, this particular site is a parasitic ad engine.  but the licenses in general don't stop that.  I'm going to start including README.txt telling people where the core uploads are (spacedock) so they can get updated versions IF they got the mod from elsewhere.  That way, even if users do get mods from these <redacted> then there's a chance they'll read the README and direct further traffic to spacedock.

 

Something like;

SPACEDOCK.INFO hosted mod

This mod is uploaded to http://spacedock.info as a primary source.  If you downloaded this mod from another source, be aware it may be out of date.  I highly recommend redownloading from spacedock as a guaranteed original file and updating any saved links/favourites/bookmarks you may have.
NOTE: CKAN is basically a list of where to get mods and a tool for doing so, so it should usually collect mods from their original sources, and, although it's not guaranteed to be up to date, is usually.

[legoclone09]

I threw a $1/month donation to you guys because you deserve it.

[VITAS]

7 hours ago, legoclone09 said:

I threw a $1/month donation to you guys because you deserve it.

And you deserve a thank you:

Thank you! <sadly there is no glitter button (sorry)

 

@TiktaalikDreaming Inclunding a Readme in your mods zip is a good idea. Maybe we could offer a template for it.

it should include the license, author, way of contact,  site the file origionaly was intended for and some info that the author doesnt support outdated mods (and optionaly some text that amounts to "i do it for free so i dont aprove of others making money off it").

Edited September 6, 2016 by VITAS

[Stone Blue]

14 hours ago, TiktaalikDreaming said:

I'm going to start including README.txt telling people where the core uploads are (spacedock) so they can get updated versions IF they got the mod from elsewhere.  That way, even if users do get mods from these <redacted> then there's a chance they'll read the README and direct further traffic to spacedock.

Excellent idea...

And illustrates another good reason to use/support KSP-Addon Version Checker (KSP-AVC), and/or CKAN... 

Edited September 6, 2016 by Stone Blue

[Guest]

I'm going to see about getting a donation on there.  I just need to sort out a few technical things first.

[VITAS]

i could also offer the option of wiering money to my bank account if desired. (Individual requests via PM/ spacedock support only)

Its the same bank account the server stuff is paied from and it can cut down on transfer fees (the x % patreon takes etc.)