Oolite Website Domain & Fixing the Expansions Manager

[another_commander]

The new owners of Oolite.org were accused of spreading viruses, I understand.

That's urban legend. .
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/5342 ... bed77af7fe

It's just a dead url at this time.

[hiran]

I'm hesitant to interject here, but I will anyway. When I wanted to fire up Oolite a fortnight ago, I knew what I wanted so I just headed straight for the most recent nightly. So, I haven't experienced downloading a normal build from the oolite.space website. So, perhaps I misunderstand the discussion here.

But, if I'm reading your comments correctly, normal builds of Oolite have the address oolite.org hard-coded into the oxz-manager, so people trying to use it are receiving pornography or some-such, instead of the oxz manifest thingy. Is that correct?

It is correct that the old URL 'oolite.org' is hardcoded. Yet people trying to use it will not receive (free or paid) pornography unless it is offered as correctly packaged OXZs.
But what they will for sure not get is expansion manager support to autoinstall expansions.

The expansions catalog:
Machine readable version is http://addons.oolite.space/api/1.0/overview/
Human readable version is https://ooliteproject.github.io/oolite- ... n-catalog/

[hiran]

And this leads to undesirable consequences - the oxz-manager does not work for the current version 1.9, and beginners are disappointed

And how many minutes would it take to rebuild the 1.90 downloads, if the only change that's needed is one website address? And why has no-one done that?

It's not the rebuilds.

The process of issuing a new version (now that we are on Github?) has become a bureaucratic nightmare.

So much so, that it now involves the entire staff of your anaconda: legal experts, assistants to the legal experts, Autotrade Reporters, Purchase Bookers, Turbotraders, Legality Reminders, a dozen or so Yodas and a score of Trading Autotrade Reporters. We can't even get them to agree - never mind do anything.

I sit here in glorious England with my gin-and-tonic firmly ensconced in hand, scratching my head in befuzzlement.

Edited to add ... with the other hand

So far I managed to provide automatic builds of whatever developers come up with. That's where we get the many prereleases already.
But the releases still seem to be preferred in manual control, and we have noone boldly enough to guide through that process.

I get the feeling we should start a thread to discuss releasing what we have. Then simply do it and learn from the mistakes we inevitably will be doing.

[hiran]

Today I seriously thought about trying to correct the address inside a binary file using a hex editor. I have a similar experience.

Ah, the good ol' days of crackz and warez. It's like the internet of old. No, don't try editing an existing binary, there'll be checksums and things that will puke, then the FBI will come and kick your door in.

But, I find it implausible that the process of building a 1.90.1 version to, in essence, fix a typo, takes weeks not minutes.

The Oolite builds up to and including 1.90 where hand-woven by experienced magicians just before they transcended into a purely virtual state and thus can neither repeat the builds nor let us know how they did it.
After some time I added automation to build Oolite in Github, but that works only for Windows, partly on Linux and not at all on MacOS.

We could try to backport these automatic builds into 1.90, fix that URL and rebuild. But that would then remove part of Linux and all of MacOS from the result. Hence my idea is more close to timer's where we take the existing packages and tweak them so the problem goes away.

[hiran]

The new owners of Oolite.org were accused of spreading viruses, I understand.

That's urban legend. .
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/5342 ... bed77af7fe

It's just a dead url at this time.

Hmmmm. A dead url. Is the domain for sale?

[Redspear]

I sit here in glorious England with my gin-and-tonic firmly ensconced in hand, scratching my head in befuzzlement.

Edited to add ... with the other hand

You mean to say that Benedict was errant?

[hiran]

I made some changes to the downloads page. Do you think this is not enough? Is it still necessary to put a link to the starter into each block? Maybe we should add an explanation - why is it "highly recommended" to install the Starter at the moment?

I can bring it back today.

I ask you to allow me, if you confirm that this is necessary.

I am arguing from my perspective but an chauvinistic enough to say this may happen to others, too:
When I am eager to try something out, I do not read all the resources. I start on the homepage, navigate to Downloads and immediately click the download link. As soon as the download is finished I stop the browser and try the software.

So when going for the download link I will notice the three boxes, decide which of them is my OS and focus on that box. Anything that is above or below goes unnoticed.

For that reason I now placed a link into each of the boxes again. Let's see if download numbers go up again. If not, I will not bother if someone cleans up for design reasons. Actually I'd be much more happy if we did not have to add something like OoliteStarter at all. Make it simple for users: One download and that's it.

This is the moment where we might think of
- making Oolite support it's new URL by releasing 1.92
- making Oolite support it's new URL by tweaking the 1.90 downloads
- promote OoliteStarter to be THE INTERFACE to run Oolite, and OoliteStarter would then have to ensure the latest version of Oolite is available and correctly configured.

[Cody]

That's urban legend. .
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/5342 ... bed77af7fe

It's just a dead url at this time.

Aye, it's been "404-Not Found" since not long after the auction. Did someone pay $2800 just to take it down?

[hiran]

That's urban legend. .
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/5342 ... bed77af7fe

It's just a dead url at this time.

Aye, it's been "404-Not Found" since not long after the auction. Did someone pay $2800 just to take it down?

We could try to use it's new reputation to earn more than that...'???

Or let's see how much we can earn by selling oolite.space!

[timer]

That's urban legend. .
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/url/5342 ... bed77af7fe
It's just a dead url at this time.

Aye, it's been "404-Not Found" since not long after the auction. Did someone pay $2800 just to take it down?

David Braben ?

[Cody]

David Braben ?

<chortles>

[hiran]

I can confirm this. The usage numbers of OoliteStarter have dropped considerably, and so have the Oolite download numbers.

Something must have changed on the website I guess.

We are recovering. Not reaching new highscores, but the access patterns have stabilized.
It looks like OoliteStarter is a good entry point for users.

[timer]

Lately, I periodically see how the site of our forum (phpBB) freezes and sometimes I clearly see errors from server, like 50x (it is not network problems). Question - is it just me or does this happen to you too?

In this regard, I want to do what I have been meaning to do for a long time - try to automatically send PM messages to forum participants with unique identifiers (secret key) - after that, if something happens to the forum, you can restore your rights to the login/name on the new forum and probably our other future resources using such an identifier. It would be great if all active extension developers had such a key.

I'm going to do the sending order - to the most active users first.

I don’t know what the limit for PM is - how much I can send before I exhaust the limits.

I don’t know exactly when I will be able to launch a PM mailing, but I have it in my plans.

[Nite Owl]

Lately, I periodically see how the site of our forum (phpBB) freezes and sometimes I clearly see errors from server, like 50x (it is not network problems). Question - is it just me or does this happen to you too?

You are not alone in this. In my case the problem has gone away since this was POSTED. The oddity is that it seems to be a wide location specific type of thing with varying times. You currently have the problem in Russia, Hiran had (or maybe still does) have the problem in Germany, mine was from the East Coast of the U.S. Could it be DNS specific within the server that the Forum resides on? As suggested in my previous thread it may be best to back up the Forum just in case it becomes necessary to move it from its current home. Such a move would be extremely problematic but might allow for HTTPS and better functionality in the long run. Who knows, give it some time and see what happens. Hopefully, like it did for me, the problem will go away with the passage of time.

[Cody]

Aye, you are not alone!