I wanted to get some thoughts & opinions from however little users still remain on this forum about BLO and BLG:
BLO is a project I started before I joined Glass as a core developer, the original intention was to create a Steam Workshop-like in-game interface for downloading and managing add-ons.
To cut a long story short: the client was never finished (only a prototype was made) and I have been maintaining and making small changes to the site itself for over 7 years while simultaneously working on Glass throughout ~5 of those years. BLO ended up just being an alternative add-on repo without the benefit of any in-game features like Glass, but it is one that has been online for almost as long as Glass has.
I ended up leaving Glass after a few years to spend more time working on personal and work-related projects and only ended up coming back recently because of the Glass breach incident.
Jincux, the founder and lead developer, is insanely busy nowadays and Crown, another core developer, appears to have dropped off the face of the earth. After a discussion with Jincux it was agreed that ownership and upkeep of the domain be transferred to myself and that myself and a few others (Conan & McTwist) be added as owners to the GitHub org. During this period, we were also trying to recover as much as we could from the original Glass VPS after the damage that was done.
Blockland Glass has now been successfully running on a new VPS for about 2+ months now with a completely rewritten version of the website, and Lake (new client developer) recently made a pull request on GitHub where he has updated the Glass add-on to remove all features that no longer work with the shutdown of Glass Live et al. His PR was approved and it's now on the
development branch, but it has yet to be publicly released solely because I haven't got around to rewriting the Glass' upload process on the website yet.
So with the focus primarily on Blockland Glass now, and the fact that I am paying for it alongside Blockland Online, I wanted to see if anyone else could think of a reason for BLO as it is to exist anymore.
My thoughts are that it would be best to shutter Blockland Online, take all the add-ons off of it, merge them into Blockland Glass, and then send an update order to all BLO add-ons to re-download themselves with version.json information pointing to Glass' repo instead. All files, media, comments, view counts and descriptions could be transferred over.
The only major differences I can see between BLO and BLG are the following:
- BLO has a "Brick Finder" tool that lets you do reverse brick UI name searches, primarily used for finding missing bricks in saves or identifying what add-on a brick is part of. It would be trivial to move this to Glass.
- BLO allows for add-on uploading without being held for review1. I am willing to compromise on this by allowing Glass add-ons to be uploaded immediately, but not publicly displayed until they are reviewed by a moderator (whereas they used to simply not be available at all until review).
Any comments would be appreciated.
On an additional note, Glass will remain supported on v21 only and there is no intention at this time to have the service running for Blockland Rebuilt or other versions of the game. Rebuilt have a fully working copy of RTB, which a lack thereof in v21 was the sole reason Glass was created in the first place. There is no reason to compete with their own service and the Rebuilt team themselves have no current intention of getting their version of RTB working for v21, it only makes sense that it is done this way to avoid having two popular content services running at the same time on both versions of the game. Any Glass add-ons running in Rebuilt should still update provided
Support_Updater is installed, although I understand their preference is that you (as a developer) re-upload your add-on to their version of RTB.
1 Contrary to popular belief, this has never meant BLO was un-moderated. I have always been notified of every new upload and update, and manually check the add-ons usually within 24 hours. Users also still need to prove they own the game first in order to upload.
