First of all, you posted your thread on July 6 at 3pm EST and the modified time on client.cs is 7pm. It seems pretty unlikely to me, but I'm willing to accept that someone might have downloaded it between 3pm and 7pm and modified the file before it was posted on this forum. If it was before 3pm then it would have had to been yours because I seriously doubt someone would have been able to write up a leaked file before you even announced you were actually making it.
Understandably I'm fairly skeptical, that being said I'm going to assume everything dated earlier than 7/6/2010 03:37:28 PM is yours and everything afterwards was packaged by some guy who has it out for you.
Can you beat RTB though? RTB has the brand name to it, it has the momentum. RTB is the defacto file host on Blockland and already has almost every mod in the game on it. It has an entire section on the forums set aside for it. It's been around for 5 years and most people have been happy with it, baring the people who are banned from it or have an axe to grind with Ephialtes. You could write tons of content in the time it takes you to write your RTB clone, even plugins that address all of the problems you have with RTB! You could focus on just the gallery and chat systems and have that done fairly quickly. Pile on a mod manager and you're probably bumping up development time tenfold. By the time you finish the first version of BC, RTB will already be that far ahead in its own development. And if you succeed, the point still stands - you're dividing the distribution of mods into two different services that are exactly the same. Do you really want to do that? Why do you want to make it so complicated for modders, choose ONE or the OTHER, if you want RTB mods use RTB, if you want BC mods, download them through BC. How can you do that to the users? I'm not going to constantly switch mod managers, it's either one or the other and if I pick one I'm missing out on the other's content. When and how do you plan on replicating RTBs backend, the mod management system, the quality control system, modbot? The forums were based on phpbb and the download portion of the site was integrated into it for convenience and it's pretty hacked together. The next version of site's backend is entirely separate from the forums precisely because keeping them together is such a pain.
Knowing this, how do you plan on overthrowing the community behind a mod that's been around for 3 years now, not counting the years when it was still a mod for vanilla Blockland because so few of those people are around anymore? Even if your system is better people still wouldn't like it, precisely because it wasn't the old system! Go read up on the issues schools are having with angel and blackboard. Angel is newer but everyone swears by blackboard.
To do what? RTB is so broken that nothing can be done to improve it and you've got to start from scratch? I don't really agree with that, in fact, I'd argue that it's running pretty well right now. Provide an alternative to RTB? Why bother? RTB is specifically the sort of mod where there should be no alternative ever. Competition is good. Too bad that's a maxim of economics and not communties. Two kinds of jeeps? Fine. Two kinds of guns? Fine. Two separate incompatible upload and package management systems? No. It has to either be BC or RTB, you can't have both. Sure, it works for Steam, it works for GOG, and Impulse, and the EA games manager and GWFL and the virtual arcade on the xbox or virtual console on the wii, and whatever else.
However, that's a market of probably 1-2 billion people at most, and if one service has 200 million users, another has 400 million, and a third has 5 million it's totally fine. Blockland is probably around 17,000 active users but that's just a guess. RTB has about 9000 users and that's not a guess. And we'll say another 4000 people are probably just downloading mods off of RTB's site. Again, the numbers aren't important. All of their demands are satisfied by a single service. Managing the game is simpler because it's all in one place. Divide 13000 up. Two groups of 7500. Or even 5000 and 8000. Or 2000 and 11000, divide it up however you want. Do you think the community will survive that change intact? Do you think it will survive at all? Do you think the change will be good or even worth it? I know you weren't here for the mod wars between RTB, TBM, AIO-r, and a few other small mods, but the effect was pretty drastic. Blockland was small then, guess what, if we take the 2% of that 13k who care about the issue to complain, nearly 300 people arguing will look and sound like. Years from now everyone will be reminiscing about how awesome the forums were before we all hated each other. TBM is still around 5 years later, still producing a game molded into their vision of what Blockland should have been, entirely out of spite. We lost a lot of people then and we'd lose more again. Every comparison anybody has ever made on these forums about competition or comparing mods with the market is totally and completely invalid and has no bearing in reality whatsoever, precisely because this is not a market and competition is something entirely different when you are giving away something for free. Choice is good, too much choice is bad. You should be able to run all the mods you want on a server and find any to your liking, but choosing between two separate backends for managing a server and a game shouldn't be a choice the average person has to make.
If you can make a better mod, should you?
Still, this isn't about making a better mod or anything else I suppose. It's mostly because Ephialtes is the bane of your existence and you won't quit trying to one up him or squabbling at everything he says until either one or the other blinks. I've known Ephialtes for almost 5 years now. The days I talked to him almost daily on the IRC are long gone and now I just occasionally talk to him on Steam or see him post on the forums. I can't pretend to know what he did to piss you off but he must have done something terrible.
tl;dr version: Read the first letter of every paragraph.
