TheGameSquid on 3/10/2024 at 21:03
Hey everyone! Longtime Thief fan and forum lurker here.
I started re-playing Thief and Thief II again a few years back (two of my all time faves) and slowly got more into playing Fan Missions more recently.
After I tried compiling a list of existing Fan Missions, and trying to create an archive of most of them (a more difficult task than I was expecting), I thought about providing another public file host for everyone to enjoy. Some of the older sites have stopped accepting new missions it seems and others are down, only function partially, have no https support, etc. I thought it might be something nice to do for this wonderful community. There's a couple of high quality ones, but I wanted to provide my own high quality one on top of that.
However, before even thinking about doing something like that, I wanted to ask everyone here what the general rules for something like that would be. Am I allowed to publicly host missions like that? Most FMs come with a standard readme or info document that states that you're free to redistribute the missions unaltered. But not all of them do, and I certainly don't have to capacity to go through over 1200 missions to check the licensing agreements, I just don't have the time (or remaining sanity) for that.
So that's my question: what would the requirements be for proving a site hosting fan missions. All I'm looking to do is provide a dead-simple archive of missions with direct links. No ads, no tracking analytics, no nonsense. Just something for everyone to enjoy and that more ambitious sites like Thief Guild can use to provide links to missions. I just want to make sure I don't offend anyone by providing links when providing links without the proper missions, or by interfering with how the community here usually works.
Thank!
R Soul on 4/10/2024 at 19:54
The more FM hosting the better. There are no rules about where any FM is hosted; it really is a free-for-all. People make FMs to be played, so it's best to go with the assumption that if it's somewhere, it can be anywhere else too.
When it comes to requirements of the site, I think a table that can be sorted will be fine, like (
http://www.keepofmetalandgold.com/fmarchive.php) komag or (
https://www.thiefmissions.com/search.cgi?search=&sort=release#m) thiefmissions (I'm sure you know of these sites). But it is your free time, so no-one will begrudge you having something even simpler.
I think with all these sites, the main long-term issue the host faces is when life becomes busy, or interests change, and as you found, the site gets out of date. On thiefmissions, Jason set up an upload feature, but it he still had to approve it (or do something) to make it available. Allowing a few trusted people to assist with site management could be an ideal compromise between keeping things simple and secure but not placing the onus on just one person.
Thank for offering to support FM hosting.
Kubrick on 7/10/2024 at 10:36
I think another site would be great, the more the merrier.
But if you're not aware, mission authors have been without an object repository for some time now. Perhaps you could reconsider your project towards a more niche endeavour, but that would provide the community with a much needed feature.
