Xyon
Puts the Fun in Dysfunctional
- Joined
- Aug 9, 2009
- Messages
- 6,898
- Reaction score
- 738
- Points
- 203
- Location
- 10.0.0.1
- Website
- www.orbiter-radio.co.uk
- Preferred Pronouns
- she/her
Hello Orbinauts,
It's now been a little over a month since we completed the migration of Addons over from OHM into the forum itself. In the intervening time, we've had chance to reflect on our approach to this migration, and our handling of developer content since, and we've been looking at the pain points that we still have left when it comes to the experience of uploading, viewing, browsing and downloading Addons from the system.
Firstly, I do want to note that we have some leftover issues still outstanding from the migration. Most pressing among those issues is that Addons which contained multiple files on OHM now only have a single file available for download - this is a facet of how they had to be imported, due to some differences in the way the two systems handle files; this is something we're looking to fix. Additionally, a lot of the Addon descriptions ended up with some odd characters in them - the OHM fields were encoded differently, and the import ran them through a unicode conversion process, which has left some artifacts in some cases. Those aren't so problematic, but can be edited back out of the description field using the UI here on OF to resolve the problem.
We've also noted that the search function, when it comes to Addons, originally excluded any search term with three characters in it. This is a bit of an issue if you want to search for every "ESA" Addon, for instance. That constraint was relaxed pretty quickly. We do have some improvements to the search system in general in our pipeline of works, which will improve the search system across the entire forum. The 100MB upload limit will also be addressed soon.
Many of you will have noted that it's become more difficult to access the resources section, and that certain protections put in place on the forum site as a whole have limited or prevented the use of privacy tooling such as VPNs. These protections were laid in place in order to enforce this section of our Terms of Service;
While these policies have been in place, we have monitored and evaluated the system on a routine basis and have applied additional protections where it's been deemed necessary to protect the software we've been entrusted with. In particular, we initially saw some worrying patterns of behaviour emerge around the practice of indexing the entire downloads section of the site and moved to curtail those kinds of activities.
Our review and internal conversations around those concerns have now lead us to the point where we're more comfortable lifting the restrictions preventing access to this section of the site, so we'll be looking to do that in the near future. One of the main changes which we will be rolling out soon that allows us to do this is the signing of Addon packages to verify to end-users and downloaders that their content is unmodified and has originated from Orbiter-Forum. We'll talk more about this feature and how it works, along with how those signatures can be validated at download-time, in a future post on the specific feature itself. This allows us to be more comfortable with the idea of Addons appearing as links from other places, as delivering a signed payload offers a guarantee to the end-user, which isn't currently present. As a result, we'll also subsequently be able to revise this protective clause in our Terms of Service once that guarantee is in place.
With those aspects in place, we'll then be able to look deeper at the offering we're providing, and look to make changes that support the idea of download clients, by means of an API to interact with the system. We'd like to make it easier to obtain Addons, and to understand the sometimes complicated relationships that can exist between them, which should allow you to build up a collection of Addons that work together more easily. To safeguard the interests of add-on developers who would prefer their content not be retrieved in this manner, we're also introducing a separate section for add-ons which require users to be logged into their Orbiter-Forum accounts to browse. Content moved into these subcategories will therefore not feature in any such API; only add-ons left deliberately in the "public" categories will be able to be viewed without an OF account. We believe this approach allows individual content creators to make their own choices about how their content is handled.
I'd like to thank the users and developers who've already started taking advantage of the system in its current form and who've helped us to identify where the offering is stronger than it was before, and where it can be improved. We're keen to make the experience the best it can be, so if you do have suggestions, ideas, or complaints, please do let us know about them so we can address them.
Many thanks,
OF Staff
It's now been a little over a month since we completed the migration of Addons over from OHM into the forum itself. In the intervening time, we've had chance to reflect on our approach to this migration, and our handling of developer content since, and we've been looking at the pain points that we still have left when it comes to the experience of uploading, viewing, browsing and downloading Addons from the system.
Firstly, I do want to note that we have some leftover issues still outstanding from the migration. Most pressing among those issues is that Addons which contained multiple files on OHM now only have a single file available for download - this is a facet of how they had to be imported, due to some differences in the way the two systems handle files; this is something we're looking to fix. Additionally, a lot of the Addon descriptions ended up with some odd characters in them - the OHM fields were encoded differently, and the import ran them through a unicode conversion process, which has left some artifacts in some cases. Those aren't so problematic, but can be edited back out of the description field using the UI here on OF to resolve the problem.
We've also noted that the search function, when it comes to Addons, originally excluded any search term with three characters in it. This is a bit of an issue if you want to search for every "ESA" Addon, for instance. That constraint was relaxed pretty quickly. We do have some improvements to the search system in general in our pipeline of works, which will improve the search system across the entire forum. The 100MB upload limit will also be addressed soon.
Many of you will have noted that it's become more difficult to access the resources section, and that certain protections put in place on the forum site as a whole have limited or prevented the use of privacy tooling such as VPNs. These protections were laid in place in order to enforce this section of our Terms of Service;
While these policies have been in place, we have monitored and evaluated the system on a routine basis and have applied additional protections where it's been deemed necessary to protect the software we've been entrusted with. In particular, we initially saw some worrying patterns of behaviour emerge around the practice of indexing the entire downloads section of the site and moved to curtail those kinds of activities.
Our review and internal conversations around those concerns have now lead us to the point where we're more comfortable lifting the restrictions preventing access to this section of the site, so we'll be looking to do that in the near future. One of the main changes which we will be rolling out soon that allows us to do this is the signing of Addon packages to verify to end-users and downloaders that their content is unmodified and has originated from Orbiter-Forum. We'll talk more about this feature and how it works, along with how those signatures can be validated at download-time, in a future post on the specific feature itself. This allows us to be more comfortable with the idea of Addons appearing as links from other places, as delivering a signed payload offers a guarantee to the end-user, which isn't currently present. As a result, we'll also subsequently be able to revise this protective clause in our Terms of Service once that guarantee is in place.
With those aspects in place, we'll then be able to look deeper at the offering we're providing, and look to make changes that support the idea of download clients, by means of an API to interact with the system. We'd like to make it easier to obtain Addons, and to understand the sometimes complicated relationships that can exist between them, which should allow you to build up a collection of Addons that work together more easily. To safeguard the interests of add-on developers who would prefer their content not be retrieved in this manner, we're also introducing a separate section for add-ons which require users to be logged into their Orbiter-Forum accounts to browse. Content moved into these subcategories will therefore not feature in any such API; only add-ons left deliberately in the "public" categories will be able to be viewed without an OF account. We believe this approach allows individual content creators to make their own choices about how their content is handled.
I'd like to thank the users and developers who've already started taking advantage of the system in its current form and who've helped us to identify where the offering is stronger than it was before, and where it can be improved. We're keen to make the experience the best it can be, so if you do have suggestions, ideas, or complaints, please do let us know about them so we can address them.
Many thanks,
OF Staff
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