Mod Bakery: Discussion & Questions

Hey everyone,

We've heard a lot of questions and concerns about how we plan on managing our upcoming mod sharing platform. Today, I want to dive a little deeper and let the community give feedback on the upcoming changes.

For years now, we’ve been working on several iterations of the platform and originally planned to launch it on the Donut Team website. However, we acknowledge that a lot of mod creators feel that the Donut Team site is too closely connected to us as a team to facilitate fair competition among mod creators.

Some mod creators have actually expressed their motivational issues in the past as a result of this and it is for this reason as well as various others that we believe it would be better if this mod sharing platform was its own entity, separate from the Donut Team name altogether.

Introducing “Mod Bakery” (working title).

We’re still in the planning phase for this project and it has not entered development yet however we are actively researching technologies to power it and also want to gather your feedback on our plans for it as they are right now.

Currently, we plan to move all community features from the Donut Team site to this new platform while maintaining all user accounts and forum posts.

As for new features, this site is where we’d like to bring the Mod Storefront idea we’ve discussed and tried to develop over the course of the past few years to life.

We think all mod creators should all have an equal chance to succeed and the playing ground on which they do it should be controlled by the community, not by us. We want to have an easy to browse mod listing and mod pages where creators can upload builds of their mods and tell the community what they’re all about. We’d also like these mod pages to house dedicated discussion boards for each mod as well as a review system to allow people to rate mods and describe their experience with them.

We want to maintain an open dialogue for this project as we plan it out and begin development in the coming weeks. Please be sure to let us know what you think on this thread.

If you're curious, we currently have five of our staff members working on Mod Bakery:

• Jake will be the primary developer on this project.
• Lucas will be assisting in development.
• Loren and Kenny will be assisting with testing and discussing the things we're working on.
• Tyler is creating the website's art to make it super fly.

Lastly, we’ve now paused development on the current Donut Team website while we prepare to shift development to this behemoth of a project.

Thank you for your support, we look forward to reading your responses and questions.

Sincerely,
Jake
Website Lead

So, once this is released, will it become where mods are showcased, and showcasing them here will be disallowed?

Going to share some comments from people on our Discord

@Colou: If you just see the name modbakery.com, you're probably gonna think it's a bakery as opposed to a SHAR modding site.

The goal is for people to understand its a mod site in general, the site will be game agnostic but primarily focus on SHAR in the beginning.

@DeepFriedBurger: Will both Mod Bakery and Donut Team be connected in some ways, and will Donut Team still retain everything that it has now (the forums, user accounts, etc.)?

The current etched plan is to have DT hold the account system and Mod Bakery host everything else. Forum posts and user accounts will be kept exactly as is and just move over to the new site.

@DeepFriedBurger: Once Mod Bakery is released, what will happen to the Donut Team forums? Will showcasing mods be disallowed or discouraged there? Will posting about anything not related to Donut Mod be allowed?

The Donut Team Forums will cease to exist once Mod Bakery launches. All content currently on that forum will be moved to the new forum on Mod Bakery.

@Gordon CMB: Will the bakery be moderated? Also, if mod categories are gonna be a thing, will the categories in the bakery use Meta.ini information, or there's gonna be special categories inside the bakery itself?

Bakery will be moderated, but the details of that I don't think I can discuss just yet.
Mod Categories will exist, the ones used in the Meta.ini may be used, but i think having set categories rather than typing them out might be a better option for discovery reasons.

@DeepFriedBurger: Will the structure be sort of similar to Donut Team? As in, one big forum page and every topic (including mod launches) is posted there. If not, will there be a way to know whenever a topic is created so that you don't end up missing out on things that get posted and mods that get launched?

There will be the main forum and then other forums mod creators can create. Mod creators can moderate their own forum, however we will be able to overrule and remove that privilege if they begin to abuse it in anyway. You will be able to subscribe to mod pages and be notified when it receives an update. The forum will not be the primary place for reading about mods anymore.

@lavenfurr: will old mod releases from the forums be moved to the new system? or will it all just be stuck there until the mod owners manually move it across themselves

Migration will probably be manual I imagine (though Jake might have a different idea in mind) so we'll probably work with mod creators that are still around to move their stuff over. I'm guessing we'll probably have some kind of public testing version of the site prior to it actually being launched so that might help populate the listing beforehand.

@DeepFriedBurger: If everything is being moved over, what is happening to the mods/user accounts that are no longer active or being updated? The creator doesn't exist to create forum(s) regarding their releases, so what happens to them?

At this point I imagine we'll keep the contents of the Mod Showcase board as is in an archived state or something like that. The plan is to migrate all user accounts and forum posts but the actual forum boards won't be exactly the same.

@Stevens: Will the Karma system be transferred over or will there be a new system in place?

@DeepFriedBurger: I don't really mind regardless of whether or not it is removed or not. You can't really do anything with Karma, although earning it can feel satisfying.

@Stevens: idk , i think the karma system could be used for like a medal system which i think ive mentioned before somewhere
but like once you have like 30 karma you get a bronze badge/name/icon and silver at 50 etc

I have ideas on making the karma system better and having high karma unlocking more privileges. We don't have much to share on this yet, as it will probably be one of the last things we work on in terms of the website.

Jake, why are you referring to yourself in third person here?
"Migration will probably be manual I imagine (though Jake might have a different idea in mind)"

However, what will remain on the main site after Mod Bakery will be opened?

Jake just copied something I said, so it was me referring to him (though it is a bit confusing when he reposts it like that).

will the discord server be kept the same or will it change to a new "Mod Bakery" one?

Hey Nathan,

Sorry it took a few days to reply. We're not sure yet what we want to do for the Discord just yet. When we have more information, we'll let the community know!

Sincerely,
Jake