Why? Where do you think you are going sir? I don't believe your work here is done just yet *crack whip* :chaos:

Sadly, the thing with re-uploading is that the people that will take your stuff and put it in some sort of compilation (torrents for example) likely won't give two hoots about your legal notice. Sad, really, but at least we know where you stand.

Absolutely agreed on all points.


And again, I agree. This is precisely what I mean.

There certainly are a number of modders who are careful to make sure their work remains available, as well as to specify how they want their work treated (yes/no on reuploading, etc), and unsurprisingly (to me, anyway), they also tend to be the best and most serious modders. But far too many modders, including quite good ones, do not.


Heh, your memory of the sites (unsurprisingly!) is better than mine. I'm trying to remember which one I'm thinking of...

But I don't remember Bethesda funding or supporting any mod host site; that may have been before my time (Morrowind modding was a year plus old when I joined). I remember a cloudy blue PHP Nuke site, though, that died not long after I joined, and I remember both the Summit and Euro RPG. Good times. I really do have a lot of nostalgia for those days; I still like that community better than Oblivion's, though that, I think, is purely the vague history rewriting that happens when nostalgia replaces actual memory.

Heh, I always reply to threads like this saying "My mods should not vanish or die just because I've done likewise," but I never remember to address that in readmes. It just seems so obvious to me in the first place; legally they're Bethesda's property, the license makes them effectively public domain, and the community is pretty good good about preventing the issue of "I don't care who released this fork, you're the author, help me!" so thoughts of distribution control aren't in my mind as I'm battling my ancient nemesis, Documentation.

Pretty sure I won't be kicking off any time soon, and my email address is stable, and I've got local backups of everything (including a reasonable archive of old versions). But, putting it out there once again: I want credit for the work I've done, but I don't pretend the product is mine once it's in the wild. Learning to script was a process which involved reading, and frequently copying, the work of others; I have no problem with others doing the same in turn. All I ask is: don't pretend my work is yours (I don't even care about direct readme credit, just don't lie), and don't release a mod which isn't mine with any implication that I'm responsible for it. Frankly, the latter is more important to me than the former.


ElricM?

OK, I'm going to try to jump into the fray for a sec...

This is exactly what a lot of us in the software world are trying to address. Information is lost every day, and in this "information age" there is not really a good reason for that to still be happening. There are so many technologies out there that offer not replacements of existing ones, but rather parallel avenues to increase redundancy and and to distribute info via channels that are more appropriate. I've made the argument here before that forums are really a bad way to store and retrieve information. And naturally, I was met with resistance. I say "naturally" because that's human nature: resist change. But the fact of the matter is that the sooner new ways of doing things are embraced, the sooner questions and concerns like this can become a thing of the past.

OK, that's all I have on that... for now!
veg

Pretty much agreed, including the bit about not having been exactly vigilant about doing this myself. Ah well; at least NifSE's already open source - that's a step in the right direction. Now with source code that's actually read-able for anyone but me!


Nope, the place I'm thinking of is long gone; Elric's still around. They are one of my favorite hosting sites, though.


The CS Wiki team (read: at the time, Haama, Qazaaq, and I) has tried quite a few times to do the same for threads on the CS forum, so I feel your pain. Though I do think a lot of mod-related threads (as opposed to modding-related threads) are probably best being temporary; you don't really want someone finding a two year old thread about FCOM via Google search and trying to install FCOM that way...

...the horror... It is bad enough when I go browsing through Nexus Uploaded Files threads and read some of the posts in the threads for the old versions of MMM and OOO. I want to say, "Why are you trying to install the 2-year-old version of the mod, anyway" but I do not...not like that, anyway...

Speaking of lost sites, I basically have a complete backup of MW Summit as of 12/10/2005. 3 DVDs of files including the short descriptions with the notes posted by the Summit staff. I was moving at the time, and wasn't going to have 'net access for about a year, so I pretty much mirrored the site over the course of a couple months. I had lost it for a while, but found it a couple months ago. Don't know what I should do with it, or even if anyone would be interested in it :shrug:

Ahh the old days those were the best.

Upload it quickly.

Regarding loss of mods when modders disappear, I think it is important to have a plan for such a situation, because you never know when you could just be hit by a bus, or get an anvil dropped on you, etc. I've seen a lot of good people and their work be lost forever thanks to the dumb luck of RL getting in the way, and they just disappear, their site DNS payment runs out, or their work is simply left to be forgotten, so when it does go, very few realise it.

In regards to modders and their mods, I've always thought that having a timer on activity being a good way to sort this out: have a section in the readme of your mod that details what freedoms of usage you would like the mod to have, kinda like the software licenses people use, but a lot simpler obviously. I think the main one for modders is redistribution, and in general I see it's a case of "don't redistribute if you've modified it" and "before redistributing, get permission", though the latter isn't asked a sizeable part of the time, being replaced with "when distributing, give proper credit, and keep the distro updated" as in translations. In the case of permission being required, a useful clause to be add would be a cooldown timer of those restrictions, like "if I haven't posted in the gamesas forums for 6 months, consider these restrictions lifted".

If I ever released anything original, I'd probably combine requiring permission with the "cooldown clause", since that makes it easy to provide support via an official channel, but makes provisions in case of untimely death, literal or otherwise. I don't think that I'd go without posting for 6 months and still be interested in my work, so that makes a lot of sense to me.

The real issue, as vegtabill brought up, is one of information loss and storage. There's no reason why we have to lose any meaningful information nowadays, but the internet in general lacks the archiving capabilities and infrastructure, combined with the difficulty of deciding what should be stored and what not. It would be easiest to say "keep everything", but that raises privacy, etc. concerns, and would lead to a system that would be largely junk (not rubbish stuff, that's subjective, but actual meaningless bits and bytes). Maybe turning the moon into a giant array of hard drives, with several high-bandwidth lasers beaming info to and from the Earth's surface. That would be good, since the moon is pretty sterile, and is moving away from the earth, so we can afford to add more mass before it falls on us, and it's relatively close, but outside the range of any natural disasters besides meteorite impact, which can be taken into account easily enough. Though cooling might be a problem, but I'll leave that one for the thermodynamics experts. It would be better to use Pluto or one of the outer planets, but the latency you'd get with that would be horrible.

OK, so I got a bit sidtracked there... Evidently, nobody is going to come up with a universal solution, so it's up to the individual to have backups on and offline, and to make them available for moving to new sites when old sites go down.