New forum guide for modders?

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Riamus said:
I'd say yes and no... you'd then have to edit both the original post and the new Mods submission with any updated information so that it appears in both the first post and in the new Mods section. If you only update one, then you'll only see the updated information in one location. That isn't horrible if people want to do that, but it isn't ideal. I assume it's not possible to edit the date of a post so you could set an old date on the new Mods submission so it'll appear first in the discussion? I know it could be done on the back end, but probably not something a moderator can do and I doubt the people who work with the back end will want to deal with that.
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No cannot mess with posts in that regard that I am aware of. And truly it would require a lot of dedicated work to update that for all the new mod resources that would get posted. Even just doing the merge I tinkered with yesterday would be a big lift for forum moderators.

IMHO the best solution is for y'all to just post a link to your old thread in the "description" when creating the resource, or in the "additional information" url.
 
Riamus said:
Yes. However, that is not what you see if you open the discussion thread directly from the forum rather than from Mods. And a lot of users who aren't posting mods aren't going to even notice that Overview. They'll still see the discussion by clicking on that "Read more about this resource" link, so they'll get there. But it just looks really poor when you open the discussion directly and can't see the entire description without going somewhere that isn't within the discussion thread. It would be great if it showed the entire description in the same format as what you see in the Overview without needing to expand it (that only works if it's a very short description) or needing to go to the Overview. The way it is now, it's very tempting to make the first reply in the thread be the full description. That will look bad as well because it's basically duplicating the first post and it also means having to edit both the post and the mod submission when doing updates, but it would at least make the description full visible within the discussion. I just feel it would be better if that were automatically done. There's no reason to have only part of the description showing.
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I triple checked and clicking from the mod release discussion shows the overview as well.
Riamus said:
Hmm... and one other thing we really need for the Mod discussion section... we need to be able to edit posts. It seems you have a time limit on editing now. I'm not sure how long that is, but it's less than 24 hours I think. It is very common to make Reserved posts on a discussion in order to add more information later. But now we can't edit those. That's a problem.
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The purpose of the mods discussion is to discuss things and support for the mod, not reserve posts to update later. All of that is done in the resources, under the history tab
 
Brains said:
I triple checked and clicking from the mod release discussion shows the overview as well.

The purpose of the mods discussion is to discuss things and support for the mod, not reserve posts to update later. All of that is done in the resources, under the history tab
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The history tab is not there if the mod doesn't have a download directly available. Neither are mod versions.
 
Is there any way to change the category of a mod post, once it's created?

When I added my "Rain Collector" mod, I put it under "Food and Drink" since it deals with water collection, and people drink water. But on reflection, it should probably go into "Gameplay".

I haven't seen any way to edit the category when I edit the resource page. Am I missing it?
 
khzmusik said:
Is there any way to change the category of a mod post, once it's created?

When I added my "Rain Collector" mod, I put it under "Food and Drink" since it deals with water collection, and people drink water. But on reflection, it should probably go into "Gameplay".

I haven't seen any way to edit the category when I edit the resource page. Am I missing it?
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As a moderator I have the ability to move them between categories, because the categories act similar to forum sections. I just moved your Rain Collector mod into Gameplay.

So it isn't like it is a tag you could change via editing. If you want anything moved, just report it and let us know.
 
SylenThunder said:
As a moderator I have the ability to move them between categories, because the categories act similar to forum sections. I just moved your Rain Collector mod into Gameplay.

So it isn't like it is a tag you could change via editing. If you want anything moved, just report it and let us know.
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I see that it's been moved. Thank you!
 
khzmusik said:
Is there any way to change the category of a mod post, once it's created?

When I added my "Rain Collector" mod, I put it under "Food and Drink" since it deals with water collection, and people drink water. But on reflection, it should probably go into "Gameplay".

I haven't seen any way to edit the category when I edit the resource page. Am I missing it?
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Yes, you can edit the category yourself. There is a drop down menu at the top right of the mod overview page. From there, you can edit the category as well as certain other things
 
Riamus said:
Yes, you can edit the category yourself. There is a drop down menu at the top right of the mod overview page. From there, you can edit the category as well as certain other things
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I used that before to update the images, and I could swear that option wasn't there before. Is it new?

Regardless, I'm glad we can do it ourselves now, anything that saves work for the forum mods is a good thing.
 
I thought of another suggestion.

It would be nice if resource authors (modders) could have their own page dedicated specifically to their mods. This could include things like general instructions about how to download their mods (like how to download from GitHub and/or GitLab), a link to the repo that holds the source code for all their different mods, and so forth.

In my case, the download links I provide are auto-generated by GitLab, and that service puts the mod folder inside its own auto-generated folder in the .zip file. I need to tell users about it so they put the sub-folder in their Mods folder.

But, if that's not possible, then user-defined templates might solve the same problem. If there are general instructions like that, then they could be put into the template, and the description would be pre-populated when a new resource page is created.
 
khzmusik said:
I used that before to update the images, and I could swear that option wasn't there before. Is it new?

Regardless, I'm glad we can do it ourselves now, anything that saves work for the forum mods is a good thing.
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Not sure. It has been there at least a couple of days.

khzmusik said:
I thought of another suggestion.

It would be nice if resource authors (modders) could have their own page dedicated specifically to their mods. This could include things like general instructions about how to download their mods (like how to download from GitHub and/or GitLab), a link to the repo that holds the source code for all their different mods, and so forth.

In my case, the download links I provide are auto-generated by GitLab, and that service puts the mod folder inside its own auto-generated folder in the .zip file. I need to tell users about it so they put the sub-folder in their Mods folder.

But, if that's not possible, then user-defined templates might solve the same problem. If there are general instructions like that, then they could be put into the template, and the description would be pre-populated when a new resource page is created.
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Great idea.
 
khzmusik said:
It would be nice if resource authors (modders) could have their own page dedicated specifically to their mods. This could include things like general instructions about how to download their mods (like how to download from GitHub and/or GitLab), a link to the repo that holds the source code for all their different mods, and so forth.
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While not exactly what they're meant for, there's a little used feature in the form of "Profile posts", under everyone's profile. That might be a decent spot for such an info-dump; not perfect, but at least internal, so "seemingly safe" to link to, and you might have some edit/mod control over it (I haven't tested it).

khzmusik said:
But, if that's not possible, then user-defined templates might solve the same problem. If there are general instructions like that, then they could be put into the template, and the description would be pre-populated when a new resource page is created.
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For this solution, I'd just keep a template myself; a text file under whatever mod project folders, containing all the preformatted things. Same deal, prolly less hassle than with the forum editor.

Of course, the better support for modding, the better, so not against either idea as such; just randomly offering ideas.
 
Riamus said:
The history tab is not there if the mod doesn't have a download directly available. Neither are mod versions.
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I am curious why a mod in the resources section doesn't have a download link. You can link to other sites if you don't want to upload it here. The resources section isn't meant to be an advertisement section but a place for users to easily download your mods.
 
Brains said:
I am curious why a mod in the resources section doesn't have a download link. You can link to other sites if you don't want to upload it here. The resources section isn't meant to be an advertisement section but a place for users to easily download your mods.
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Which is why the forum section worked very well. But that is gone now, leaving this as the only way to handle it. Developers sometimes want to keep a single download location for things, but the new Mods section doesn't allow just a link to Discord for that download AFAIK. If it does allow that, then we can add that as the link. But I can't edit links after submission apparently, so someone would need to do that. Also, Teragon isn't a simple program to learn to use. Having people download it from Discord gets them in the right location for help using it.

As a note, this isn't the only one there without a download link.
 
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These added features are turning out to be very useful, thank you.

One more question. When a new major version of the game comes out, usually the mods for it have to be updated, and sometimes completely re-written. For those of us who host on Git and use the Mod Launcher, we start an entirely new repository for that version's mods.

So, should mods for a new major game version be considered entirely new resources? Or, is the expectation that they will have the same resource pages, but with updated versions? If the latter, what happens to the old mod downloads? (I'm thinking especially of the time when the new version is still in experimental but modders update their mods for the experimental version. Ideally, both the experimental and the non-experimental versions should be available.)

If the new system came out when 1.0 came out, we could kick the can down the road. But 2.0 is expected to hit experimental in less than a month, so it's going to be relevant very soon.
 
SylenThunder said:
As a moderator I have the ability to move them between categories, because the categories act similar to forum sections. I just moved your Rain Collector mod into Gameplay.

So it isn't like it is a tag you could change via editing. If you want anything moved, just report it and let us know.
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I just posted a new resource for The Wasteland and forgot I had originally started to post my separate vehicles mods🤦‍♂️, so would you mind moving it from Vehicles to Overhauls, please?
 
bdubyah said:
I just posted a new resource for The Wasteland and forgot I had originally started to post my separate vehicles mods🤦‍♂️, so would you mind moving it from Vehicles to Overhauls, please?
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You can change the category yourself by clicking the dropdown menu at the top right of the mod's overview page. :)
 
Yeah, I had clicked there. I see the Change Resource Type now but I don't believe it was there before when it was pending approval. But I can be blind sometimes. Lol. Thanks, Sylen.
 
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