OpenArena Message Boards

Aloha hey!

Like someone already suggested, using a wiki page for download mirrors would be great, since anyone can easily add or remove mirrors. The current DO NOT LINK[/b]) h t t p s : / / openarena . wikia . com/wiki/Download_Mirrors]Download Mirrors wiki page (http://([b) does not look like it's maintained at all; old downloads, no structure, not intuitive at all.
The main page should redirect to that wiki page instead of relying on one single, hardcoded mirror.
Maybe one should also mention packages for Linux distributions like those for Ubuntu/Debian.

I know it's quite horrible to maintain a list of official mirrors, but I'd still suggest using ModDB (http://www.moddb.com/) and SourceForge (https://sourceforge.net/), since they run their own CDN. The only difficulty here is whether their Terms of Service include some nasty paragraphs, which I have not checked yet.

Finally a Torrent is needed, which is great for people on dialup or in countries where no local mirror is available.
I suggest creating one single, official torrent with a lot of trackers and some http and ftp webseeds as well, which should use the same files as the normal download (which makes seeding easier).

If there were more "direct" ftp or http downloads, I'd even suggest setting up an official MirrorBrain (http://mirrorbrain.org/) repository at openarena.ws

A wiki page with mirrors would actually require more maintainance to prevent malware to be on the list, it shouldn't be on for even the shortest time. There won't be a lot of people putting bad links on, but there might be some. Also the game is opensource, someone might modify malware into the game and distribute that as if it was the real game without anyone noticing.

For a torrent, I don't see a reason whynot and according to you it has an advantage for slow connections, so let's do this. Only which trackers are we going to use?

Can we lock single wiki page? If that is posible malware links won't be a problem.

+1 for torrents. Why shouldn't we use piratebay as a tracker?

I haven't checked yet, but probably Wikia has got the same page protection levels as Wikipedia:
- no protection (default; anybody can edit the page)
- semi-protection (only registered users can edit that page)
- protection (only administrators can edit that page)
More they exist some more protections types, like protections from renaming (moving), protection from re-creation, etc. I don't know which of them apply to Wikia, too. Probably it is not possible to enable/disable specific users from editing a specific page...

On Wikipedia, protection is usually meant as a temporary measure, applied to pages that are suffering repeated vandalisms or edit wars. However, some important pages (e.g. some templates used in many, many pages) are indefinitely protected.

In case a user cannot edit a protected page, he has to propose the change in the "talk page" associated to the page (if he's smart enough to understand it, and if someone else notices his message, with some luck...).

It seems like torrents are still considered to be used for warez only, and as such trackers like thepiratebay are most reliable at the moment. I don't see a problem using them, but I think we should split the tracker discussion from this thread.

Malware or other fake downloads are indeed a problem. While one should provide checksums (md5, sha1), people never really use them.

Is the official download going to be one single zip for all architectures (Linux, Windows, Mac) again? Otherwise we might want to use some script (which I doubt to be possible on Wikia) do detect the visitor's operating system and pre-select the correct package.

In any case we are going to need a descriptions for the visitor to chose the correct download in terms of http/ftp, torrent and location (us, fr, de) or even a (Linux) distribution maintained package (Debian/Ubuntu, Gentoo).

Edit: Here's a separate Public torrent trackers topic (http://openarena.ws/board/index.php?topic=4392.0).

Regarding the torrent itself, I would use an original, not-unzipped zip file. This allows for easy seeding if you have downloaded the zip through other means like http/ftp and also allows to check whether the zip has been tampered with.