The mod portal was a nice experiment... end it please?

[featherwinglove]

I dunno... ...Github might not be around much longer.

Are you sure a Breitbart article is what you want to go off of?

It's just what I happened to find handy as a link, I did not learn of this situation via Breitbart. I learned of it via a blog comment from someone in a project that pulled off Github in response to their new SJW behaviour threatening to compromise the integrity of their service. As far as what to "go off of", even a broken clock is right twice a day and Alex Jones occasionally gets things right. I had about thirty links to choose from, and the internet being what it is, Breitbart happened to have the most concise summary of the situation of those thirty links. That's probably a statement about how shoddy the coverage of these issues is in the news industry. That doesn't mean the issues are not real and quite serious.

[sparr]

a project that pulled off Github in response to their new SJW behaviour threatening to compromise the integrity of their service [...] Breitbart happened to have the most concise summary of the situation

It looks like the subject of that breitbart article is a thing that a bunch of separate projects/repositories have opted into, nothing to do with any github policies.

[Koub]

This is highly off topic. Stay on topic please, or I'll just plain remove the off-topic posts.

[featherwinglove]

This is highly off topic. Stay on topic please, or I'll just plain remove the off-topic posts.

Can't they be moved to Off-Topic instead? I thought phpBB had that capability.

[sparr]

Can't they be moved to Off-Topic instead? I thought phpBB had that capability.

Moving individual replies to their own posts in another forum is a lot more labor intensive for the mods than just deleting them.

[featherwinglove]

Since I've never moderated phpBB, I can only take your word for it, but it appears the conversation was worthwhile. I located my original link for you; I hope you got to see it before it got deleted.

Back on topic: IIRC we were talking about a mod portal with certain source control features enabled. I actually like that idea, but I like the idea of opting in to them, so that really big modders like bobingabout and YoukiTani can take advantage of them, but for little modders like me who occasionaly do a crufty hack and figure our 2-5 hours of work that expert modders could probably do in ten minutes might help some newbie. Tickets and pull requests are of little use there.

A good compromise (for forums as well) would be the branching and voting Reddit/Voat comment system whereby a branch for a particular bug can be voted on so modders don't have to rely on comment counts and duplicate reports to see the importance of a bug to people who don't have the ability or time to do enough research on a bug to add to the existing reportage. Reddit can't be used directly because high level moderators have disproved the Dey Theory (to such an extent that, before abandoning Reddit, I pushed /r/factorio comments off the first page of my user overview to reduce the likelihood of the stalkers I picked up following it to the only part of Reddit that I still liked and causing trouble there.)

I think the best system would be either phpBB or Atlassian (ticket system used by Minecraft and/or KSP; I haven't been on either in a long time so I don't remember which if not both and if it is still in use by either) with the ability for Joe Public to upvote a bug report. I actually would like two types of votes: one for confirmation (i.e. a user confirms that he has reproduced and/or experienced the bug; I would enable this on a bug-by-bug basis as to whether a bug report has a sufficient reproduction procedure) and one for importance (i.e. a user confirms that he wants to see that bug squashed.) ...I think I'm getting off topic again as this is more applicable to full-blown software than Factorio mods. Granted that many a Factorio mod are bigger than some games (e.g. I'm pretty sure Bob's pack is bigger than NMS at release ...and there's a guy who wants to charge four euros for a game I finished in three hours back when it was free.)

[sparr]

Proposal:

Mods are still listed and described on the mod portal.

Every mod gets a forum thread in a "mod portal mods" forum, linked from the portal, and the top post in the thread is dynamically updated from the mod portal info for the mod.

When a mod thread gets more than X comments (total or in a month?) then that mod gets promoted to its own subforum.

Forum devs can manually intervene if a mod subforum needs to be moved under another subforum (like bobs mods), etc.

Mod portal page link to the forum is "discussion", and any mod with a "source code" link to github also gets a direct link for "bug reports" that goes to github issues.

[featherwinglove]

I kinda like it but for two things:

Mod getting it's own subforum: To the best of my knowledge the only mods that currently have their own subforum are massive packs. It seems most reasonable to me that mods should get their own subforum if modders and forum moderators think it's appropriate.

Any mod with a source code link to Github: Make that any mod with a source code link to a GIT repository anywhere. There is no good reason to favour Github (which is not the only place you can have GIT repositories. If they go through the trouble of making the portal able to post bug reports in GIT, they might as well allow it to post anywhere on the Internet that can take it.)

[sparr]

Any mod with a source code link to Github: Make that any mod with a source code link to a GIT repository anywhere. There is no good reason to favour Github (which is not the only place you can have GIT repositories. If they go through the trouble of making the portal able to post bug reports in GIT, they might as well allow it to post anywhere on the Internet that can take it.)

Most git repository hosts don't have pull requests and issues. They could support github and gitlab and... maybe gitorious?

[featherwinglove]

I'm not too familiar with GIT, but I know there are more GIT sites even than that. I'm also pretty sure that, like phpBB, GIT can be implemented on any website that desires it. I know of one guy who hates CVS so badly that he built high four-figure US$ rig for nothing other than converting CVS to GIT with software he wrote himself. So, in the hilariously unlikely event someone reading this has a CVS repository they want converted to GIT, look up Eric S. Raymond (lmao!)

Of course most of the point is that the majority of Factorio modders don't even need GIT functionality, so whatever we build into the mod portal for issue tracking should be relatively simple and optional.

[sparr]

I'm not too familiar with GIT, but I know there are more GIT sites even than that. I'm also pretty sure that, like phpBB, GIT can be implemented on any website that desires it.

Yes, git can be hosted anywhere that wants to. And git has none of that functionality. Anywhere you see issues / pull requests / etc, that is not part of git.

Maybe make it all more generic? Don't intentionally integrate with the forum or github at all. Give the mod author separate fields for "discussion url" "source code url" "bug report url"? For a really small mod, all three could be links to the same forum thread. For a huge mod pack, discussion could be a subforum or even a forum on their own website, source code could be to github/gitlab/sourceforge/etc, and bug report could go to their own JIRA or MantisBT.

[featherwinglove]

I don't think the portal should have its own forum system; one thing is my account is disabled for both uploading mods and posting portal comments (not the faintest idea why; no sense to it at all.) The portal comments are often not where the modder wants his discussions. I like sparr's idea best. There are plenty of free source repositories that can be used if a modder wants one, and if I need to do anything to a mod, I usually just jump into the download files. I haven't yet done any modifications I really trust as public submissions. Closest.

One idea I like is the option to set up a bug report to an email address, but when somebody clicks on it, they get a generic form CGI so they can't see what the modder's email address is. This should cut down on email harvesting for spam and make it easier for users to email the modder a bug report because they won't have to boot up an email client.

[abordoli]

Note: Everything I talk about relates to https://mods.factorio.com/ , not this forum...

Caveat: I had ZERO involvement in making the "Mod Portal"...lol

Even with it's obvious faults (which I shall name below), I prefer it over the in-game mod importation module.

These are the things, from a web-developer standpoint that I see that need to be fixed added to make the site more useful.

-A 'subscribe' button so that you can see replies for your post (and as the author, all replies). Put an indicator at the top that there are pending posts
-Actually make the rating system functional
-When you go back to the list of mods, let it place you back in the place you clicked, not all the way back up to the top
-Allow deeper jumping from page to page over than 2 ahead at a time
-Put an indicator on mods where there has been some added conversation
EDIT:
-A deeper search function that doesn't just search for mod names, but things in the description (sometimes I have scan 1,000 mods to hunt down the one(s) that I need more info about).

The first one, I feel, is the priority. The other ones, imo, would be nice, but should take the back-burner to the first.

Regards,
~B

P.S. I have heard of some pending "overhaul" so I'm sure things will be better, but if those were just words, allow a web-developer such as myself to install some immediate fixes. No Charge.

[featherwinglove]

PSA: There is a "View your posts" link on the second line of the header when you're logged in. This is how I found your comment on this thread. I poke around in the bugs forums every now and then, and discovered that one of the high-brass devs had missed it for years. Just about broke my chair laughing.

As for the actual mod portal, I'd love to have a feature where I get a notification if a mod I'm following gets updated and the ability to subscribe to such notifications for both individual mods and modders. (E.g. Klonan and binbinhfr mods are consistently interesting for me.)

I'd also love to have my account enabled so that the features already in the mod portal work for me. Guys?

[abordoli]

PSA: There is a "View your posts" link on the second line of the header when you're logged in.

Can you give a picture showing that because I don't see that (and I am logged in more often than not). We are talking about https://mods.factorio.com/ , right?

Regards,
~B

P.S. Just to avoid confusion, who were you talking to in your last comment? Just checking...

[featherwinglove]

"PSA" means I was talking to everyone, but it was inspired by "A 'subscribe' button so that you can see replies for your post". And I was talking about the forums; I really have no idea how I could have been more clear about that, especially since I switch to "As for the actual mod portal..."

[abordoli]

No worries. I wasn't sure because your second sentence said "This is how I found your comment on this thread." and my comment was the one before yours...lol.
Hey, you put out great mods. Lot's of respect, a'ight...

[featherwinglove]

Hey, you put out great mods. Lot's of respect, a'ight...

News to me, lol. I've only published one mod, and, since it practically defeats the purpose of Factorio probably not a great mod, lol!

[abordoli]

Hey, you put out great mods. Lot's of respect, a'ight...

News to me, lol. I've only published one mod, and, since it practically defeats the purpose of Factorio probably not a great mod, lol!

Aw,...busted on my attempt to be nice!

[ajosak]

I am still getting a forbidden message when attempting to upload my tiny, tiny Pollution Damage mod. Why?

I met the same problem as you.
Really do not know what kind of wrong,so that the MOD port account is equivalent to useless.
And a notice did not really feel very disappointed.