I don’t want to divide, I realise I can be more productive by working together. I don’t know why I’m being perceived as a threat.
One of the reasons is that you dragged what was a
private discussion started via
@Xyon's direct message to you into your public thread here rather than discuss the matter further with the O-F Staff.
Private messages, whether from staff or not, are just that,
private, and posting them in a public thread without the consent of the other parties is not a good way to have honest discussions, because it demonstrates a lack of good faith. It is also a violation of O-F rules about discussing staff action in public, but that ship has sailed now.
Beyond that, the major issues that staff have is that you have stated publicly in this thread that your intention is (or
was, now?) to create a repository where users could
upload add-ons in addition to listing all the addons from the forum's resource section, and that is the source of the concern with the staff here for the reasons laid out earlier.
Here is a simple example of our concerns with that approach -- I am copying this from a post I made in the private O-F staff discussion thread about this yesterday:
So there's yet another key reason to prohibit allowing other repos to scrape the official O-F addon repository, and that is
user verification and security. Here's a simple example of what could easily happen if we would allow other repos to scrape O-F. I'll use Computerex's site, Woo482's Themis add-on, and our legendary troll PAX as an example:
- Computerex's site continues to scrape the O-F Resources section.
- PAX or some other malicious user discovers Computerex's new repo. They download Woo482's Themis and deliberately infect the DLL(s) with malware.
- PAX then creates a new account on Computerex's repo named "Woo482". Since Computerex's repo does not have access to O-F authentication, that site has no way to verify that the "Woo482" who just registered is the real Woo482.
- PAX logs in to Computerex's repo as the fake Woo482 and uploads the malware-infected Themis, naming it "THEMIS 2.0".
- Hapless users come along and believe that Computerex's repo is the official repo, since it apparently has all the addons on it, INCLUDING what appears to be a new THEMIS 2.0 release from what appears to be Woo482 himself listed right next to the original Themis release.
- The users download and run the malware-infected "Themis 2.0" version.
- Chaos and recriminations ensue, and Woo482 has to clean up the mess.
That's just one simple example.
So to sum up, if your intention now is to
only have a
read-only site that indexes add-on metadata and links scraped from the Addon Repository here on Orbiter-Forum and does not allow
uploads of new add-ons, then the staff have no issues with that. If, however, your site will allow
uploading of add-ons in addition to showing add-ons scraped from the Addon Repository here, that would be a forum TOS violation.
If you would be willing to take these discussions private, which IMO would be more conducive to good-faith discussion, the O-F staff would welcome that. We have some other functionality that we would like to have, such as addon
collections, that the forum's resources section currently does not support. This is where a separate, read-only indexing site could help, and it would complement the addon ecosystem rather than fragment it.
