I started trying out some mods for Civilization 4 like Fall from heaven 2 which is absolutely amazing. I picked up on some things, though:
I hate forums. I just can’t understand how anyone actually gets anything done using them. I can never find what I want / need, information gets duplicated all over the place, most responses are absolutely useless and just cluttering up everything, conversations it isn’t even threaded.. Have these people never heard of good old IRC and mailing lists? Much better signal vs noise ratio. Even blogs would be better because it makes it much easier to ignore comments. But that would make it more difficult for multiple people to participate. On the other hand, the audience might get bigger than if it was a forum. (I’m sure if an article as actually an article it will be picked up more easily by someone outside of the forum like digg or reddit, for example)
No one seems to use wikis. A good wiki per project would really help sort out most of my gripes with forums: All the information in one place, always up to date, easy to search, easy to navigate, etc. I see there have been attempts at unofficial ones, but those failed probably because the core team didn’t embrace them. Trac would be a good place to start because it integrates almost everything a project needs.
Where’s the source code repository? Has no one heard of cvs, subversion, bazaar, mercurial, git… the list goes on. Why can’t we get up-to-date versions? I understand that these mods have lots of data, but it would be cool if you can at least get the latest versions of the code.. Would make it much easier to contribute.
Mods are generally free and community based efforts so you would think it would be a bit more open than this. I’m not just picking on Civilization based mods, though - I’ve seen this elsewhere too.
Anyway.. I started thinking about this because I have some theories on why the AI in Fall from heaven 2 feels a bit lacking compared to Beyond the sword and maybe it would be easy to try and fix, but now I have no idea where to start. Unless I join the forum madness..