Zandronum

Greetings everybody,

As some of you may know, I have been working on a new licence which should take care of a lot of trouble regarding the use of uncredited and unauthorised resources.
Some people might have experienced this problem where people simply rip out your stuff without giving credit where credit is due. This is even worse if you didn't allow any of your work to be used.

I have tried discussing this issue in the past, in both a private and public thread, but as some of you may know this did not work out well, and I decided to completely abyss both threads with no chance to recover. I should have realised the need for change was not wanted by most people, so I've decided to take this problem int my own hands. I understand this will work work out too well, but with most bad things comes a time of controversy. I believe this change is for the better and the new licence will soon be appreciated by many.

So here's what's going to happen. For the past months I have been working on a bot that will take care of this issue. This bot is fully created by me and it has been thoroughly tested with multiple private threads made by the staff. This bot will download your mod and explore it for your readme. This bot is fit with multiple scripts to decrypt your readme file in order to figure out what you want or not. If it does not decrypt your file, it will notify staff through PM. If no readme is present, the bot will instead read your thread. If that doesn't have a readme either, the bot will once again inform staff, but now informing us no readme was present.

If the bot has read your readme and found out that you as the user did not want your resources to be shared, the bot will then run through various popular and recently used mods on the forum to check if various resources have been copied over. This once again is done through a complicated script, and I can assure you this is done safely. Should you be in violation, the bot will lock your thread and suspend you until further notice.
In case you forgot to credit a user, this is also done. The reason for this is to ensure this is taken serious.

There are many more rules which will be enforced in the future, but for the time being these will be the main rules.

This bot is being ran by the same host that is hosting Grandvoid and IRC. Due to some faults in the scripting, you might have noticed the host messing up sometimes and irc and Grandvoid going down. This was during testing and it's safe to say these issues have been resolved.

The bot and its licence will be launched at 13 AM forum time. I hope you guys have been informed well enough.

Automatic suspension isn't ideal imho. Why not just notify staff that something is fishy and log what it is?
Scripts can give false positives, so collateral damage can only be expected from this. I understand that suspension isn't a ban, but it still seems excessive.

Any documentation on how to properly format a readme to be as easy for this system to read as possible?

Remember that unspecified license means all the copyright applies, so if the mod doesn't have a compliant readme, any resource usage should be prohibited.
https://choosealicense.com/no-license/

This sounds like the kind of thing a neural network could help. Would it be worth the time? Probably not. Is there a large enough data set to train it? Nope.

So it's just going to be you formulating rules. That doesn't sound very forgiving nor adaptable.

It's all about expanding. While zandronum grows, we should prepare for what comes. I expect controversy for this but I can assure you this will be for the better.

Lollipop wrote:Automatic suspension isn't ideal imho. Why not just notify staff that something is fishy and log what it is?
Scripts can give false positives, so collateral damage can only be expected from this. I understand that suspension isn't a ban, but it still seems excessive.

Any documentation on how to properly format a readme to be as easy for this system to read as possible?

As long as you supply a proper readme, anything should be fine.
But if you want to be 100% sure, try this template

So basically the community shot you down twice but you went ahead and did it anyway. I see...

You know Zandronum is already lacking of mods because of the bugs happening online and how outdated the code source is and that bot will only make the situation worse.
If we had plenty of original projects like for G|Zdoom I would understand such a decision.

Unfortunately I am inclined to agree with the previous 2 posts, however I would also like to ask that you keep on check on this bot, if someone blinks and misses what is going on, if no-one actually checks what the bot is doing, it could lead to more problems, I wish to state that just because you have some fancy bit of programming, that you should probably not slack off from your duties, I am sorry if that seems hostile it's just so easy to let others do the work for you and then forget where you stand.

hmm wonder what tomorrow is

Dranzer wrote:hmm wonder what tomorrow is

Sshh...

damn if only u put this much effort into being a competent staff member ?

Combinebobnt wrote:damn if only u put this much effort into being a competent staff member ?

I'd say creating this bot was a pretty big accomplishment