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Community Mod Repository and The Majiir Challenge

Majiir

By Majiir
in KSP1 Mods Discussions

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John FX

John FX

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When it came down to SP2, ultimately we didn't have the bandwidth and resources available to present an experience with a quality as initially conceived. Going with Curse allows for a better organized experience with greater stability, run by a team with the resources to properly handle community mod hosting needs.

Curse is well aware of the fact that they're not the only game in town when it comes to KSP mods. They are the official repository, but not the only one. I, of course, encourage everyone to give it a try if they'd not done so, but if you're not into it, that's fine. The forums will continue to be available for use and if Majiir or anyone else steps up with an unofficial community one, I'll gladly shine a spotlight on that, too.

Thank you for that. Bandwidth is a single word that explains a lot of the decision. That and the costs would get balanced by ads (always attractive for a business)

I must say a lot of my rejection was previous experience with curse.com and the client. As a place to download a file without logging in there are worse options. I`ve yet to see it from the uploading side but so far curseforge.com doesn`t seem as bad as original recipe curse...

I`d still prefer a community mod repository though.

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Ignath

Ignath

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When it came down to SP2, ultimately we didn't have the bandwidth and resources available to present an experience with a quality as initially conceived. Going with Curse allows for a better organized experience with greater stability, run by a team with the resources to properly handle community mod hosting needs.

Curse is well aware of the fact that they're not the only game in town when it comes to KSP mods. They are the official repository, but not the only one. I, of course, encourage everyone to give it a try if they'd not done so, but if you're not into it, that's fine. The forums will continue to be available for use and if Majiir or anyone else steps up with an unofficial community one, I'll gladly shine a spotlight on that, too.

Thanks for the response Rowsdower, and my apologies for my ranting today. I understand the bandwith and logistics concerns, as I'm sure the Spaceport will need some major bandwith (as Google Drive and Mediafire are probably also figuring out due to the current distribution models) and moderation which is likely currently beyond SQUADs capabilities.

My concerns on this matter are twofold, however:

1. I have very valid (and you are likely aware of them, as you read threads) reasons for my dislike of Curse, only some being the viruses and malware that was injected onto my PC by their Curse client's (the standalone GUI) advertisements.

2. My other concern, however, is the complete lack of transparency and/or communication regarding this decision. It concerns me that no input at all (at least transparently) was sought from the community on this decision. Who, other than modders (whom from my understanding weren't sought for much input), will be using the service? Should we as the end-users have any say in where we are forced to go for an "official" download? As you've seen today in the community, the decision of whom to choose to distribute mods as the "official" source is a fairly hot topic. I've seen many mod creators and active forum users (as well as many forum lurkers like myself) rise to action today over this issue, many of us with VERY relevant concerns and complaints about Curse and with other alternatives to this choice.

In closing, my initial reaction to the announcement of Curse was disappointment and anger, which I'm sure will cool to just disappointment, then annoyance and finally acceptance...but I'm not sure I'll ever go back to Curse, they've (or issues caused by their product have) been too much hassle thus far for me. I'm sorry for all the grief this (myself included) has caused you today. Go out and get a beverage or something tonight, or maybe just crash some rockets! I'm sure this too will pass but Curse was "officially" the worst choice of mod distribution channels in my opinion.

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godefroi

godefroi

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I'd be happy to provide the search capabilities, as my day job has made me VERY familiar with the Lucene search backend, but it would all be implemented in C#.

If you implement search in your database backend, you will be sorry (and it won't work well).

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O-Doc

O-Doc

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OK, I'm in. I'll push out a basic front-end API and model scaffold today. Then we'll have something to look at. I'm not in favour of doing something over-engineered in the first iteration. Lucene looks like a reasonable solution but, we'll need to figure out what the top layer will be written in and create an interface class to drop into the request API script.

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Garek

Garek

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I really like what you're doing here. Most things I (as a mod user) would want were already mentioned, there's just one thing I want to add about filenames: Spaceport puts upload-timestamp-... at the beginning of every downloaded file. I dislike that because with that format, ordering by name orders by the timestamp first and mod name second. And similarly annoying things happen to e.g. autocompletion in a bash-shell. It just gets very annoying if you download lots of mods without deleting the zip everytime.

So please don't do this. I'm not generally against adding the upload date or stuff like that to the download file name, but please put the Mod name first!

I would like to offer help, but I don't really know that much about webdevelopment or databases, I'm mostly used to backend development in C++ and some basic java stuff. So there's propably not that much I could actually help with.

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medavox

medavox

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This is great. I don't how many other people are tied up with exams (or finals etc) at the moment, but I fully support this decision.

Like Majir said, can we just build something super-simple and design it iteratively while it gains momentum? I'm thinking a database table and a capture form (mod upload). Followed by a mod page and a search feature. Everything else could come later, surely?

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godefroi

godefroi

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I can implement the search as a REST service easily enough. Basically, it'd take in everything about the mod, and searches would return a list of matching mod IDs, along with (optionally) scores. All I need to know is what the data would look like.

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NeoMorph

NeoMorph

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I'm so glad that this is still going ahead. I had a look at Curse and realised just why they named it Curse in a few seconds.

I mean, wait to download may be short now but I can see the time going up after a while trying to get you to buy prime. Would I ever do that? OOOH...FLYING SWINE.

A community based one that can chop out the chaff AND have a good search engine (I am soooooo peeved with this forum search for example) that supports TLA's (that's three letter acronyms) that are abundant in KSP (hell, even the game acronym is a TLA) would be heaven.

Curse is cursed. End of Story!

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O-Doc

O-Doc

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I can implement the search as a REST service easily enough. Basically, it'd take in everything about the mod, and searches would return a list of matching mod IDs, along with (optionally) scores. All I need to know is what the data would look like.

I can help you out there, I have documents inbound in a few hours. I have designed an architecture which is very RESTful and allows switching between RDBM and ODBM should that need arise. I have a defined RDB spec in the docs. I think a simple DB access layer with basic routing(using mod_rewrite) is the best way to go.

I'm an old greybread at PHP so that's one of things I'll be moving on if no-one else puts up their hand.

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Majiir

Majiir

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I have designed an architecture which is very RESTful and allows switching between RDBM and ODBM should that need arise. I have a defined RDB spec in the docs. I think a simple DB access layer with basic routing(using mod_rewrite) is the best way to go.

Flexibility is great. Being able to completely swap out a front-end or back-end while keeping the rest will help the project grow with competing solutions. In that spirit, don't get too attached to any particular technologyâ€â€mod_rewrite is specific to Apache. There are a lot of ways to do routing (mod_rewrite, nginx rewrite, framework routing modules, etc).

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czokletmuss

czokletmuss

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I just found this on reddit: http://www.kerbalstation.org/

I built a mod community website a while back called Kerbal Space Station due to not having a good experience with Kerbal Space Port. I didn't see any movement on the things I cared about (search, versioning, api, etc), so I built the tool that I wanted.

I didn't have any success in getting any mods specifically hosted on KSS and only a passing interest from Squad themselves. That was quite a while ago and I hate projects that languish (especially finished ones) so I'm giving away the domain names and willing to help transition anyone with the code. Here are the details:

The website is running currently on Heroku on these domains: http://www.kss.io and http://www.kerbalstation.org. Sadly http://kerbalspacestation.com was taken.

The code is open source organization holding my work is here (https://github.com/kerbalspaceprogram), though someone should probably rename the org to kss or similar.

The site is functional with some minor bugs uploading here or there and it costs me about $10/mth to host.

I don't want anything in return, I am not selling this.

http://www.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/comments/24yufz/a_bit_ago_i_built_kerbal_space_station_a_quick/

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Majiir

Majiir

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I don't know enough about Ruby to comment on code quality, but even the domains alone would be very useful. Besides, it has the best TOS of any mod hosting site we've seen: http://www.kerbalstation.org/tos.html

I'm really liking that there are multiple projects working in parallel. It doesn't much matter that some are more finished than others; we can always migrate from one to another if a higher-quality project arises. So, consider this my word of encouragement to everyone.

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