Hello everyone! You might have seen many news posts about mods here recently. However, our activity is not restricted to it. We've hosted one project recently (TS Mini Games) which will receive a full news post about it, as well as some tool updates created by our community members (including an update on Final Alert 2, but that also deserves a full news post about it). Anyway, what I want to talk about, in this news, are the updates that are being done recently at our site itself and forums.
Of course, it is our obligation to maintain the site and forum updated and running. However, some times, it is interesting to call attention to what is being done here. Perhaps it should be useful for someone eventually.
Site left and right menu links were recently updated.
We have updated the mods that are featured in our left menu, as well as their download links, ModDB profiles, etc. Although Discord is a tool that became quite popular nowadays, we are still not sharing links for Discord channels yet. Don't take it personally, but they are not public, require an account to access, etc. PPM does not have an official Discord channel either. The closest thing to that, which you'll find, is C&C Mod Haven, although it is not part of PPM nor ran by the same people who run this community.
At the right menu, we have updated affiliates, community links, and official links. It seems that EA deactivated Westwood FTP and even some EA FTPs, so I had to cut links to that. If you still want to know the links to these places, I guess you'll have to look at an older incarnation of PPM's website on Web Archive.
Additional BBCodes on the Forums:
You can now embed Tweets and Reddit content on forum posts. Once embedded, you need to be a bit patient with them since it may take few seconds to show up, depending on how Twitter and Reddit servers are doing since we totally rely on them for it. We also have BBCodes for Twitch, ModDB videos, and, of course, YouTube. The code for some of them was also improved in recent months.
Flood control against cloud services:
It's been a while since PPM has been abused by botnets (most of them hosted on cloud services) that slowed us down completely or even made our forums inaccessible on many moments. Does Error 503 rings a bell? And all that for what? It's hard to say, but some of them were clearly the source of most of the bots that were banned from the forums for posting spam. Unfortunately, their motivation to do this kind of action isn't restricted to that. I prefer to not elaborate on this one here to not give ideas. One of these botnets spammed parts of the site that were important for our maintenance and existence, leaving us temporarily suspended of these services for a month. So, we've also been taking stricter measures to prevent potentially non-human visitors from accessing strategical areas of our services during this month. It helped the forums to serve human visitors faster, which is a good thing.
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This image shows how "CABAL" paid us a visit on December 3rd to 4th, 2019, causing downtime, slow time, and other damages to this place.
Experimental donations in Brazilian currency:
PPM is a not for profit community, definitely not profitable at all, and it has maintenance costs for the server and domains. To make things a bit more complicated, I am unemployed at the moment in order to speed up with my Ph.D. dissertation. So, this place survives mostly on donations, although advertisements are a possibility if you pay attention to what we have to offer. Although, donations are what really save this place at the end of the day.
The problem is the number of fees and obstacles to make a donation. We were loosing more than 15%, or even 20% of the donation to intermediates of any kind, such as Paypal, banks, currency conversions, Brazilian govern, etc. Things got worse during this year since Paypal no longer allowed me to store euros on my account because they've officialized their activity in Brazil (when nobody asked them to do such crap). That has forced two currency conversions and the payment of a Brazilian tax known as IOF (6,38%) every time we try to transform a donation into a payment of any kind. So, considering that currency conversion from any currency to BRLs by credit card is certainly less costly than Paypal's 3.5% fee with awful selling prices, we have started experience for donations in BRLs. The required maths is uncomfortable, and it is not clear if it provides an advantage for the transaction as a whole or if the bank of the user provides an even worse currency conversion costs.
The recent donations through this initiative helped us to speed up our plans to renew the ppmsite.com domain, which was going to expire next february. Now it should last additional 5 years. We also have January and February covered. We'll either have to opt between march or SSL renewal, and we'll need more help for the rest of the year. We also have several domains to renew during the year, although our plan is to renew most of them for one additional year only. So, any upcoming help will be deeply appreciated.
Domains:
As I said above, ppmsite.com domain was renewed. However, we've spent more time working on other domains recently as well. You know, the name of this community is Project Perfect Mod. However, thanks to the ppmsite.com domain, many people mistakenly call this place "ppmsite" or "PPMsite". And no, this is not the name of this place. We've bought this domain because projectperfectmod.com would be a very long text to write. In fact, we do own projectperfectmod.com. It was a redirect to ppmsite.com because I've never cared to setup it properly. Nowadays, this problem has been rectified partially. It no longer redirects. It serves the site in the same way ppmsite.com does, although all links are still connected to ppmsite.com. That's something I plan to fix soon. The same applies to the respective .net and .org for both projectperfectmod and ppmsite.
And, for PPM, I also have plans to expand its game development content and introduce the projectperfectgame.com initiative. We already own the domain, which serves PPM's website for now. The difference between game and mod is a very thin line. A mod requires an existing game to run. However, some of our mods became standalone and, therefore, games. "Mods" for engines like OpenRA are actually games. The interesting thing about game development, when compared to mods, is that games may eventually be forgotten, but the creation of games is a timeless source of fun. The content required to officially extend this place into game development would be something useful for our existing public, like programming, a better understanding of the game loop, AI, design and balance.
And that's all for now. We have been posting a lot of news here and I am not seeing the same amount of replies. The forum is a place for discussion, to allow people from different places of Earth to exchange ideas about something they enjoy. So, spill the beans, share your ideas. Discuss any of the points of this post and I will try to reply as much as I can.
Of course, it is our obligation to maintain the site and forum updated and running. However, some times, it is interesting to call attention to what is being done here. Perhaps it should be useful for someone eventually.
Site left and right menu links were recently updated.
We have updated the mods that are featured in our left menu, as well as their download links, ModDB profiles, etc. Although Discord is a tool that became quite popular nowadays, we are still not sharing links for Discord channels yet. Don't take it personally, but they are not public, require an account to access, etc. PPM does not have an official Discord channel either. The closest thing to that, which you'll find, is C&C Mod Haven, although it is not part of PPM nor ran by the same people who run this community.
At the right menu, we have updated affiliates, community links, and official links. It seems that EA deactivated Westwood FTP and even some EA FTPs, so I had to cut links to that. If you still want to know the links to these places, I guess you'll have to look at an older incarnation of PPM's website on Web Archive.
Additional BBCodes on the Forums:
You can now embed Tweets and Reddit content on forum posts. Once embedded, you need to be a bit patient with them since it may take few seconds to show up, depending on how Twitter and Reddit servers are doing since we totally rely on them for it. We also have BBCodes for Twitch, ModDB videos, and, of course, YouTube. The code for some of them was also improved in recent months.
Flood control against cloud services:
It's been a while since PPM has been abused by botnets (most of them hosted on cloud services) that slowed us down completely or even made our forums inaccessible on many moments. Does Error 503 rings a bell? And all that for what? It's hard to say, but some of them were clearly the source of most of the bots that were banned from the forums for posting spam. Unfortunately, their motivation to do this kind of action isn't restricted to that. I prefer to not elaborate on this one here to not give ideas. One of these botnets spammed parts of the site that were important for our maintenance and existence, leaving us temporarily suspended of these services for a month. So, we've also been taking stricter measures to prevent potentially non-human visitors from accessing strategical areas of our services during this month. It helped the forums to serve human visitors faster, which is a good thing.
This image shows how "CABAL" paid us a visit on December 3rd to 4th, 2019, causing downtime, slow time, and other damages to this place.
Experimental donations in Brazilian currency:
PPM is a not for profit community, definitely not profitable at all, and it has maintenance costs for the server and domains. To make things a bit more complicated, I am unemployed at the moment in order to speed up with my Ph.D. dissertation. So, this place survives mostly on donations, although advertisements are a possibility if you pay attention to what we have to offer. Although, donations are what really save this place at the end of the day.
The problem is the number of fees and obstacles to make a donation. We were loosing more than 15%, or even 20% of the donation to intermediates of any kind, such as Paypal, banks, currency conversions, Brazilian govern, etc. Things got worse during this year since Paypal no longer allowed me to store euros on my account because they've officialized their activity in Brazil (when nobody asked them to do such crap). That has forced two currency conversions and the payment of a Brazilian tax known as IOF (6,38%) every time we try to transform a donation into a payment of any kind. So, considering that currency conversion from any currency to BRLs by credit card is certainly less costly than Paypal's 3.5% fee with awful selling prices, we have started experience for donations in BRLs. The required maths is uncomfortable, and it is not clear if it provides an advantage for the transaction as a whole or if the bank of the user provides an even worse currency conversion costs.
The recent donations through this initiative helped us to speed up our plans to renew the ppmsite.com domain, which was going to expire next february. Now it should last additional 5 years. We also have January and February covered. We'll either have to opt between march or SSL renewal, and we'll need more help for the rest of the year. We also have several domains to renew during the year, although our plan is to renew most of them for one additional year only. So, any upcoming help will be deeply appreciated.
Domains:
As I said above, ppmsite.com domain was renewed. However, we've spent more time working on other domains recently as well. You know, the name of this community is Project Perfect Mod. However, thanks to the ppmsite.com domain, many people mistakenly call this place "ppmsite" or "PPMsite". And no, this is not the name of this place. We've bought this domain because projectperfectmod.com would be a very long text to write. In fact, we do own projectperfectmod.com. It was a redirect to ppmsite.com because I've never cared to setup it properly. Nowadays, this problem has been rectified partially. It no longer redirects. It serves the site in the same way ppmsite.com does, although all links are still connected to ppmsite.com. That's something I plan to fix soon. The same applies to the respective .net and .org for both projectperfectmod and ppmsite.
And, for PPM, I also have plans to expand its game development content and introduce the projectperfectgame.com initiative. We already own the domain, which serves PPM's website for now. The difference between game and mod is a very thin line. A mod requires an existing game to run. However, some of our mods became standalone and, therefore, games. "Mods" for engines like OpenRA are actually games. The interesting thing about game development, when compared to mods, is that games may eventually be forgotten, but the creation of games is a timeless source of fun. The content required to officially extend this place into game development would be something useful for our existing public, like programming, a better understanding of the game loop, AI, design and balance.
And that's all for now. We have been posting a lot of news here and I am not seeing the same amount of replies. The forum is a place for discussion, to allow people from different places of Earth to exchange ideas about something they enjoy. So, spill the beans, share your ideas. Discuss any of the points of this post and I will try to reply as much as I can.