Sayonara Curse

[sarbian]

Well well well ...

The last Devnote Tuesdays thread is now closed (way to go) and the last few post got me in a really bad mood. To bad I was not on IRC while that took place.

I removed all my mods from curse (I m still listed for MJ, but that not my mod). It's stupid because I was one of those that found Curse a "not bad" choice. It worked and there may be a proper install/update tool later. But the modding monday thing is too much for me.

I'll most likely host them on Kerbal Stuff as soon as I can automate it.

[blizzy78]

Same here. calisker's last post in the thread made me kind of sad. And then to just close the thread to cut off any discussion, that's not a good move at all.

[Justin Kerbice]

things became bad with time here... what's the point ? Displease the most ? "Remove" (by pushing them away) some people no longer welcomed here ?

Jeb and his friends really need to put some "lovetrails" devices on their planes and rockets and spread love all around Kerbin .

[Alshain]

Funny, I would never use KerbalStuff because SirCmpwn admitted he deletes mods that he doesn't like.

[sarbian]

Feel free to post your mods anywhere Alshain.

[Majiir]

Funny, I would never use KerbalStuff because SirCmpwn admitted he deletes mods that he doesn't like.

Please report any specific issues to me.

While SirCmpwn is the developer behind KerbalStuff, I am the operator and I determine policy on my server. I don't intend to filter the content on KerbalStuff aside from ensuring mod copyrights are respected. (And, y'know, uploads should be KSP-related.)

[Alshain]

Please report any specific issues to me.

While SirCmpwn is the developer behind KerbalStuff, I am the operator and I determine policy on my server. I don't intend to filter the content on KerbalStuff aside from ensuring mod copyrights are respected. (And, y'know, uploads should be KSP-related.)

Well I was specifically referring to this. Though I will grant that maybe he just spoke badly, perhaps referring to mods that had malicious code or something. But the way I read it, his opinion was that they were crappy so he deleted them. That made me very nervous about wanting to post my upcoming mod there, because it is small and to the point and does only one little thing, but would that make it "crappy"?

[blizzy78]

Obviously there should be rules

[SirCmpwn]

Funny, I would never use KerbalStuff because SirCmpwn admitted he deletes mods that he doesn't like.

I delete things that aren't mods (i.e. people have tried uploading crafts) and abusive mods (i.e. people don't own the copyright).

[Borklund]

Point for Curse. They're a business, not forum dwellers who might (read: probably will) have a spat and then there's no more alternative community-driven mod repository.

[Alshain]

I delete things that aren't mods (i.e. people have tried uploading crafts) and abusive mods (i.e. people don't own the copyright).

I see. Well then I apologize, I misunderstood.

[TMS]

Same here. calisker's last post in the thread made me kind of sad. And then to just close the thread to cut off any discussion, that's not a good move at all.

Yep. That whole thread gave me the creeps.

For a PR company, they really suck at PR.

[biohazard15]

I did refrain from using Curse as a place to get mods before that - I don't like that "premium accounts" in-my-face from some third-grade site (Sure, you may get a direct link by going to project site, but still...). Actually, I've never heard of Curse before they happened to be affiliated with Squad - and I wish I've never heard of them at all.

Calisker's posts and Maxmaps' posts in that IRC log sure gave me creeps. "I KNOW THESE GUYS" © Maxmaps - in Russia, we call that "kumovschina", which means "helping your friends or relatives to promote their businness just because they're your friends or relatives", and, as you may guess, this is bad for PR.

[sarbian]

Can we keep the curse hating and the tinfoil hats away for that thread ? My post has nothing to do with the curse choice.

[Borklund]

I did refrain from using Curse as a place to get mods before that - I don't like that "premium accounts" in-my-face from some third-grade site (Sure, you may get a direct link by going to project site, but still...). Actually, I've never heard of Curse before they happened to be affiliated with Squad - and I wish I've never heard of them at all.

Calisker's posts and Maxmaps' posts in that IRC log sure gave me creeps. "I KNOW THESE GUYS" © Maxmaps - in Russia, we call that "kumovschina", which means "helping your friends or relatives to promote their businness just because they're your friends or relatives", and, as you may guess, this is bad for PR.

Sorry to burst your bubble but

1) You're not forced to get a premium account. KSP Curseforge is completely free for everyone to use.

2) Curse is a huge site. It has over 20 million unique monthly visitors and has long been a very popular mod repository for WoW and Skyrim.

3) Why would Max having a personal or professional relationship with someone or some people who works at Curse have anything to do with anything? It's still a great mod repository and a damn sight better than SpacePort.

[Jimmifett]

I've read the irc logs, I've read the dev tuesday forum. I've used curse 'back in the day' for other games, and have looked over kerball stuff. I've run my own sites i've built from scratch to host community content for various things.

I don't come on the forums often, am relatively new to these forums, and don't post often, nor am I an apologist for anyone, so I like to think I might have an outside perspective.

My take on dev tuesday: total derailment of conversation that served no purpose to the casual reader. Calisker ended it in a fair enough manner.

Take on curse: I liked the spaceport better, but curse is something i've used before for skyrim with great regularity and ease of use. For me, ranks well with steam workshop, better in some cases. Some people don't like being tracked, and that's their prerogative (I personally feel it's borderline paranoia, and as a professional web dev, I feel DNT is currently a mess with no clear solution IHMO. Log files often don't cut it when I need to find trends regarding my users, header data collection offers decent enough metrics that I can customize).

I don't like the whole "premium member" thing, but they are a business and it's never prevented me from getting mods in the past.

Take on Kerbalstuff:

What I like: The pages for the individual projects above the fold. The version supported is very prominent in the sidebar, the changelog is VERY handy, as is the links to previous versions. Very Very nice.

What I don't like: The front page. Looks amateur, unlike the individual pages. With no way to break mods into categories, i can't easily browse what I may be interested in. Featured, newest, and top mods all in a vertical column is bad. Granted, I'm by far not a hipster designer, i'm a developer, if I think something is bad UI design, it's pretty darn bad. From my perspective, I see a 7.xx meg download on the front page, and a 9.xx meg download on the browse page. I understand it's for the big images so the scrolling parallax effect looks nifty, and it does look rather nifty, but if the site grows, that's 7-9 megs of bandwidth per unique user MINIMUM, more when the images change or are no longer in cache. While at first, this may seem wise to cut bandwidth costs significantly by offloading the images to mediacrush, I'm not sure how they like being used as a cdn. Perhaps they are perfectly fine with it. But now kerbalstuff has the problem of significant exposure to outage if mediacrush is unavailable to the enduser.

There are no comments either for the downloads. Before I grab a mod, I read through mod comments area to make sure it truly is working correctly for the current version or if there is anything I should know. Yes, there is a link to the forums, but do I need to open a new browser window? I shouldn't need to as an enduser.

The parallax effect also means mod entries on the 2 main pages are filled with 30-50% wasted empty space. I have to scroll further, which is not too bad on a desktop, a pain on a tablet and phone (it also looks just horrible on phone).

I could go into database design faux pas I see in the code, the opening of the source to random strangers, and other things, but I'm not here to vent the solid waste storage tanks on Kerbalstuff (truly, I'm not!).

Finally, the name "Kerbal Stuff". Serisouly? Did no one consider IP implications in choosing a name and domain? Let's be realistic here. Expect a name change in the future. I recommend the sooner the better for everyone to prevent future butthurt. I can't go create a site called ghostbustershq.com or illithidgamingaids.com and not expect to run afoul of someone's IP. I think how this has been addressed by squad has been quite reasonable, others disagree.

-Jim

[Vanamonde]

My post has nothing to do with the curse choice.

Yes, please keep the discussion on-topic, folks.

[AlphaAsh]

I suppose the elephant in the room is this then. Why's Squad reserving Modding Mondays for mods only hosted on Curse? Or is that hosted on Curse and anywhere else? The distinction probably matters.

[SirCmpwn]

I suppose the elephant in the room is this then. Why's Squad reserving Modding Mondays for mods only hosted on Curse? Or is that hosted on Curse and anywhere else? The distinction probably matters.

This was heavily discussed on IRC the other day. Modding Mondays is not affected by any relationship between Squad and Curse, Rows can continue posting whatever he likes for those.

[SirCmpwn]

I received an email notification about a reply to this post that I'm rather interested in responding to. Does anyone know where it went?

[Padishar]

Yes, please keep the discussion on-topic, folks.

Well, if it isn't about that then would you (or, more helpfully, Sarbian) like to more clearly explain what it is about...?

Edit: And possibly change the title as well...

[SirCmpwn]

Take on Kerbalstuff:

Oh boy, I have a lot to say about this. I wrote Kerbal Stuff, for those who don't know.

What I like: The pages for the individual projects above the fold. The version supported is very prominent in the sidebar, the changelog is VERY handy, as is the links to previous versions. Very Very nice.

What I don't like: The front page. Looks amateur, unlike the individual pages. With no way to break mods into categories, i can't easily browse what I may be interested in. Featured, newest, and top mods all in a vertical column is bad. Granted, I'm by far not a hipster designer, i'm a developer, if I think something is bad UI design, it's pretty darn bad. From my perspective, I see a 7.xx meg download on the front page, and a 9.xx meg download on the browse page. I understand it's for the big images so the scrolling parallax effect looks nifty, and it does look rather nifty, but if the site grows, that's 7-9 megs of bandwidth per unique user MINIMUM, more when the images change or are no longer in cache. While at first, this may seem wise to cut bandwidth costs significantly by offloading the images to mediacrush, I'm not sure how they like being used as a cdn. Perhaps they are perfectly fine with it. But now kerbalstuff has the problem of significant exposure to outage if mediacrush is unavailable to the enduser.

Thanks for mentioning the things you like, I like them too As for the things you don't like, many of them can be excused away by mentioning that a redesign is underway. It looks sort of like this. The first priority with Kerbal Stuff is to make a site that works. Now that most of the functionality is in place, I'm working on making it prettier with the help of some people who are better at that than me. Also, I am one of the owners of MediaCrush, and I assure you we're fine with Kerbal Stuff making use of it MediaCrush is a stable site that is far bigger than Kerbal Stuff and I wouldn't worry about outages if I were you.

There are no comments either for the downloads. Before I grab a mod, I read through mod comments area to make sure it truly is working correctly for the current version or if there is anything I should know. Yes, there is a link to the forums, but do I need to open a new browser window? I shouldn't need to as an enduser.

Comments are intentionally omitted for two reasons. Firstly, because comments suck. There are loads of people who will leave stupid comments. It also makes it harder on the modder, who now has to look to more places to receive feedback. The response from modders when asked about comments is overwhelmingly in agreement: no. The second reason is that even if we did have comments, no one wants to moderate them.

The parallax effect also means mod entries on the 2 main pages are filled with 30-50% wasted empty space. I have to scroll further, which is not too bad on a desktop, a pain on a tablet and phone (it also looks just horrible on phone).

This is addressed by the redesign, I believe.

I could go into database design faux pas I see in the code, the opening of the source to random strangers, and other things, but I'm not here to vent the solid waste storage tanks on Kerbalstuff (truly, I'm not!).

Please do vent your solid waste storage tanks on Kerbal Stuff in the appropriate thread. I'm very open to feedback. I will say that you're completely wrong about open source, though.

Finally, the name "Kerbal Stuff". Serisouly? Did no one consider IP implications in choosing a name and domain? Let's be realistic here. Expect a name change in the future. I recommend the sooner the better for everyone to prevent future butthurt. I can't go create a site called ghostbustershq.com or illithidgamingaids.com and not expect to run afoul of someone's IP. I think how this has been addressed by squad has been quite reasonable, others disagree.

The name has been discussed with Squad, it's fine. Fan sites for many games have a long history of being named after the game they're built for.

Edited July 31, 2014 by SirCmpwn

[KasperVld]

Well, if it isn't about that then would you (or, more helpfully, Sarbian) like to more clearly explain what it is about...?

Edit: And possibly change the title as well...

This thread (if I interpret things right) is about Squad's policy regarding Modding Mondays and their communication about their modding policy in general.

[Vendan]

On that subject, I was not told that I had to host DebRefund on CurseForge, nor did I. I was asked to put DebRefund on an alternate site, anything other then KerbalStuff. I chose Dropbox for that. I ended up removing it from there cause KerbalStuff offered many advantages and was easier to deal with then Dropbox. Note, I don't know why I was asked for an alternate download. It may have been a "oh, we're not sure about kerbalstuff because we are still talking with them about name issues", it may have been desire for reliability, I'm really just guessing at this point. But it never was "CurseForge or we won't highlight your mod!"

[Tiberion]

So I spent a great deal of yesterday dealing with the aftermath of that thread.

There were a series of discussion/arguments in IRC again yesterday with Maxmaps, Rowsdower and calisker involved. They were, at times, somewhat contentious.

In the end Squad clarified and/or relented on what we discussed;

1: Rowsdower is free to choose any mods he likes to feature on Modding Mondays. He wasn't actively in the discussion when calisker finally announced this so he wasn't able to confirm he'd source mods from anywhere, but I'm pretty sure he will. Outside of that, Squad "firmly committed to supporting their official partner Curse" and reiterated that many, many, many times. So any support of promotion of community-ran mod sites such as KerbalStuff is not likely.

2: The use of "Kerbal" is going to be moderated due to their need to protect their trademark or whatever. We'll have to wait for their future announcements for specifics, but KerbalStuff was given the all-clear to continue using the name.

As is so often the case with KSP-related drama, this came down to poor communication again, especially it's one-way nature. I suggested a few times that they could avoid this if they gathered feedback on potentially hot topics before they issue a statement or tease changes. I am somewhat hopeful this may happen. I also want to personally thank Rowsdower; he was very patient and listened to what we had to say, and took some additional feedback from me personally. He was very helpful and I have zero problems with anything he did.

I can promise you no one was angrier than I was with calisker's final post in that thread. I did let him know that I found it both condescending and insulting and tried to explain why. I won't quote him or speak for him (maybe someone will post the day's log again) but I will say I was not satisfied with what I heard on this subject and I can only let that knowledge guide me going forward. I guess the only warning I could give would be to take care when entering a discussion that your own viewpoints not come across as hostile or dismissive and hope for the best in response.

So in the end, I'd say things were resolved well enough that we don't need to cause more drama. As a mod community we absolutely should continue to (politely) ask Squad to communicate with us more directly and constructively.