Factorio Forums

I saw a mod on the portal that looks suspicious:
https://mods.factorio.com/mod/91C653F6- ... 613605B31A
According to its license, nobody is allowed to use it in any way. Therefore there is no point in having it on the mod portal, otherwise people might accidentally download and activate the mod, thus violating its license.
This is either a bad hack abusing the mod portal or a troll mod upload to make fun of people taking licenses too serious.

I don't know what this is about, but Wube might want to contact the mod author and clarify if you may want to take down the mod since it has obviously no place on the mod portal.

License doesn't mean anything when it goes against our ToS:

By uploading a mod to the mod portal, you grant us the irrevocable right to reproduce, adapt and distribute the mod and its content as necessary to operate the mod portal and provide the service to our users.

https://factorio.com/terms-of-service

So the 'don't download this' is not correct, and will not be enforceable or anything
The mod author can delete the mod if they don't wish players to download it

It would seem the whole purpose of the "mod" is to firstly tempt people to download it. By doing so, it will download all of the author's other mods as dependencies. Seems like a cheap self promotion attempt to me, ergo, an abuse of the mod portal, but I might be wrong.

If the author has another valid reason for the upload, then I respectfully ask them to state the reasons if they are other than my speculation? So far the discussion answers have been ambiguous at best. I'd be happy to apologise if I have made a wrong assumption.

I saw it the other day and had a laugh, but i don't see anything inheritely suspicious about it. There's tons of "private", "for my private server", "don't download" mods on the portal. But most of them don't bother using a weird name or license. (Or to shout "I will sue you!" at the first portal-discussion poster just to delete the thread a bit later like @kuxynator did here.)

Klonan wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 19, 2020 7:17 pm

License doesn't mean anything when it goes against our ToS:

By uploading a mod to the mod portal, you grant us the irrevocable right to reproduce, adapt and distribute the mod and its content as necessary to operate the mod portal and provide the service to our users.

https://factorio.com/terms-of-service

So the 'don't download this' is not correct, and will not be enforceable or anything
The mod author can delete the mod if they don't wish players to download it

As far as i understand the ToS of Wube only grants rights to Wube. It's basically an additional license that the author implicitly grants Wube, and Wube gets to freely choose which license they use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-license

Thus all licenses of all mods on the portal really only apply to the users of that mod, and thus *if* the "Forbidden License" that the mod uses is legally binding, then it applies to users just fine. Same as he can grant whatever license he wants to people who he actually wants to use the mod.

I have my doubts about the legallity of said license though because as the mod portal works the "accepting" of the license happens when you download the mod, and thus it is impossible to "accept" the license without also instantly violating it.

I'll take my accusation back upon further reflection.

The strange name is probably the result of unicode (Chinese?)

eradicator wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 20, 2020 12:14 am

There's tons of "private", "for my private server", "don't download" mods on the portal.

Sounds plausible

But most of them don't bother using a weird name or license. (Or to shout "I will sue you!" at the first portal-discussion poster just to delete the thread a bit later like @kuxynator did here.)

That is a bit... odd, but in light of your reasoning, and taking it with a pinch of salt or intended humour, I can see how it might have been misinterpreted.

It does seem a bit wasteful of the mod portal resource if server hosts need to use it like this. Maybe there could be a separate resource or classification on the mod portal that allows for mod synchronisation without cluttering the lists? Preferably mod synchronisation should be initiated via referencing the server's mod-list.json as a first step to joining a server in a similar way to synchronising mods on a single player savegame.

Squelch wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 20, 2020 12:39 am

The strange name is probably the result of unicode (Chinese?)

Name is not strange at all. It is just a universally unique identifyer (UUID)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal ... identifier

valneq wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 20, 2020 1:27 am

Name is not strange at all. It is just a universally unique identifyer (UUID)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal ... identifier

You are of course correct. Thank you, I should have recognised that.

eradicator wrote: ↑

Tue Oct 20, 2020 12:14 am

As far as i understand the ToS of Wube only grants rights to Wube. It's basically an additional license that the author implicitly grants Wube, and Wube gets to freely choose which license they use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-license

Thus all licenses of all mods on the portal really only apply to the users of that mod, and thus *if* the "Forbidden License" that the mod uses is legally binding, then it applies to users just fine. Same as he can grant whatever license he wants to people who he actually wants to use the mod.

I have my doubts about the legallity of said license though because as the mod portal works the "accepting" of the license happens when you download the mod, and thus it is impossible to "accept" the license without also instantly violating it.

Does the mod portal not count as WUBE distributing it?

Squelch wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 19, 2020 7:32 pm

It would seem the whole purpose of the "mod" is to firstly tempt people to download it. By doing so, it will download all of the author's other mods as dependencies. Seems like a cheap self promotion attempt to me, ergo, an abuse of the mod portal, but I might be wrong.

While the mod has dependencies on (some? all?) of the author's other mods, it's not purely self promotion. There are dependencies on a couple of Deadlock's mods, Krastorio, LTN … I've even found two of the mods I'm working on in the list.
(Just noticed that you posted this a while ago already -- so perhaps the dependencies have been updated in the meantime.)

Pi-C wrote: ↑

Sat Nov 07, 2020 12:58 pm

Squelch wrote: ↑

Mon Oct 19, 2020 7:32 pm

It would seem the whole purpose of the "mod" is to firstly tempt people to download it. By doing so, it will download all of the author's other mods as dependencies. Seems like a cheap self promotion attempt to me, ergo, an abuse of the mod portal, but I might be wrong.

While the mod has dependencies on (some? all?) of the author's other mods, it's not purely self promotion. There are dependencies on a couple of Deadlock's mods, Krastorio, LTN … I've even found two of the mods I'm working on in the list.
(Just noticed that you posted this a while ago already -- so perhaps the dependencies have been updated in the meantime.)

Looks like a personal mod pack someone made just so they could have it available readily while trolling people.