RFC - Centralised OXP hosting

[Diziet Sma]

Dizzy - this will be a project-and-a-half

You're telling me.. it will take a while to get it all going.. I suspect I'll need to get core features up first, then add the 'nice to have' bits as time goes on.

One bit of functionality I'd like to see is a periodic email to people registered on the site, advertising new oxps that they currently don't have. I would have discovered Snoopers, for example, much sooner this way.

A very nice idea! Consider it included! How often would be appropriate to send such emails, do you think? Say, every 2 weeks? Also, this is something that RSS feeds would work with, I think.. (I'm still learning about RSS)

How closely would/could/should 'OXP Central' integrate with the Wiki? It's been touched on briefly in previous posts, but no clear view. If all OXP content is to be carved out of the Wiki, if that's where we're headed, we should at least go there consciously.

This is something that is yet to be determined. Joomla has 2 extensions that integrate with MediaWiki, but to what extent, and if the Wiki needs to be on the same server, I cannot yet say. Also, I believe an extension needs to be installed to the MediaWiki software itself, so Winston would need to be agreeable to this. Having said that, I don't want to see the OXP content removed from the Wiki, I think it's important that it be included. Unfortunately, it needs a revamp, and I don't speak Wiki well enough to do something about it. For that matter, maybe newer versions (or extensions) of MediaWiki could help with this, if Winston can be persuaded to upgrade the Wiki.

From an eggs and baskets point of view, how long can you guarantee that 'OXP Central' will be supported to the standard that you set out? And what do we consider an acceptable minimum timeframe - one year, two, five?

I could ask the same question about guaranteed support for the Wiki and this bulletin board... Nothing is guaranteed... that said, however, this is a big part of why I want to include other admins besides myself. I don't want there to be a single point of failure. Also, I'm in Australia, whereas most Oolite players are on the far side of the world, which means response times if a problem develops could be a little delayed. I'd like to have an Admin based in the UK or Europe, and another based in the US, if possible.

A general observation: it's interesting to see - and it's been apparent from the Website Redesign thread also - the increasingly high standards we aspire to for the way Oolite presents itself to the world.

Yes, I've noticed this also, and it was part of the inspiration for my making the decision to attempt the project. We are seeing increasing numbers of newcomers to Oolite, and quite commonly, they wonder why the same standards of presentation they are used to seeing for many other games are lacking, particularly given the obvious high quality of the game itself. I don't believe that we should let the fact that we are a small volunteer based community hold us back in this regard. We have the skills, we just need to get out of the "we've always done it this way, and it works well enough (for the most part)" mindset. The presentation of games online has progressed considerably, and we need to keep up if we want to see Oolite get the recognition it deserves, IMHO.

[Diziet Sma]

One additional thing for (future) automation and tools is standardisation of metadata for each OXP.

Off the top of my head, I think at the very least we'd need, for each OXP:

* Name
* Version
* Date
* Compatible Oolite Version(s)
* Author(s)
* License
* Maintainer(s) (if different from Author)
* Tag(s) (Ship, Scenery, Mission, etc. etc.)
** Others?

Of course, people should be able to list/search based on these fields.


On the domain, what about 'oxps.oolite.org'? Why invent a whole new domain - if it will be the 'official' OXP repository anyway..

Agreed, metadata would be a massive help. Tags for OXP type is something I already had in mind, but this is better.

Re subdomains, this is an idea I like very much.

[Selezen]

I dunno if anyone has mentioned this yet, but is there any reason we can't use Berlios or some similar source control repository for OXPs? That would provide the versioning and metadata control without any effort on the part of the community.

My offer to use my site was genuine. Let me go into my set up a bit more detail.

My site (hughesd.co.uk) is hosted on an ISP and is costing me about £10 a month. It has been running for nearly ten years now and unless I lose my job and ALL other sources of disposable income, it's not going anywhere. The hosting fees are part of the family household budget so no worries there.

The main domain runs MediaWiki and there is an Elite subsite running on an ASP based CMS (elite.hughesd.co.uk). Both of these technologies have uploaders.

The hosting provider gives me 4-5GB (have to check that, but they keep increasing it) webspace. They also give me unlimited downloads which (so far anyway) is not subject to any monitoring or "fair use" policy.

I am willing to set up admins on both these sites so that they have full access to the domain. I am also happy to set up an FTP area in the Elite subdomain and give access to that to a chosen few in case there are big files to be uploaded.

So, it's there if you want it. I'd even be happy to set up a specific Oolite subdomain with its own CMS (probably Joomla, which I must admit to quite liking) specifically for OXPs and related articles. Again, multiple admin accounts and FTP access would be provided. Free of charge for as long as my ass looks south.

Stay clear of CMS Made Simple, by the way - it can be a bit flaky, especially when trying to tie modules together to perform specific functions. One definite flaw with it is that all of the contact form modules are flawed in some way. At least that's my experience. Joomla has been sweet so far, although it's a bit complicated on the publishing side...

[DaddyHoggy]

And suddenly the offers for OXP hosting turn out to be like London buses - nothing for ages and then three in quick succession....

[JensAyton]

I dunno if anyone has mentioned this yet, but is there any reason we can't use Berlios or some similar source control repository for OXPs? That would provide the versioning and metadata control without any effort on the part of the community.

It could be done, but that would either have to be part of the Oolite project – meaning that only Oolite committers could upload OXPs, and OXPs in the repository would in some sense be “official” – or a new project, which would likely be rejected because of BerliOS’s capacity problems. In any case, all OXPs in the repository would have to be under the same OSI-approved license.

[Diziet Sma]

Ok.. well, that removes BerliOS as an option...

Selezen, do you have root access on your hosted server? As in, you can install binaries, etc? £10 a month seems a lot for only 5GB.

[Selezen]

No, can't install binaries.

I thought £10 was quite reasonble...