“Popular subgames” and “popular mods” is outdated and unfair about minetest.github.io

[rubenwardy]

Especially because they become outdated so quickly.

BFD and Carbone are no longer in development, and are quite old.

Dreambuilder is not a subgame, but a mod.

It was a subgame, but is now a modpack. It probably shouldn't be featured though, as it's only used on VanessaE's servers. It's better to highlight the mods inside it if they're popular.

Subgames should really be selected by quality, not (perceived) popularity. Popularity is a terrible measurement.

I kinda agree with this. Popularity is a crude way to measure quality.

[bullet points]

I agree with all of these excepted

Having a crafting guide (unless they don't need one)

This should be encouraged, and a definite bonus, but not required if the game is good otherwise

There is no easy fix. Just trying to keep the sections updated by hand via PRs is a bad solution as PRs are usually extremely time-consuming, and we shouldn't waste so much time whenever a high-quality mod pops up.

This is really a temporary solution until we have a mod store again which can do this for us.

[Wuzzy2]

Having a crafting guide (unless they don't need one)

This should be encouraged, and a definite bonus, but not required if the game is good otherwise

I strongly disagree. Without a crafting guide (or a similar mechanism), the game is unplayable. If you don't know the possible crafts, you can't even make a pickaxe. And nobody wants to remember hundreds of crafting recipes. I do not want to be something like this promoted on the homepage which beginners (!) will read. We have to draw a quality line somewhere, and it is there.

And sorry, there is absolutely no excuse to not have a crafting guide anymore. There are high-quality crafting guide mods readily available, so adding a crafting guide to a subgame is now very easy, it just needs to be done. And most subgames (https://wiki.minetest.net/Crafting_guide) have a crafting guide anyway, so this rule won't even filter out that much.
Long story short: Just add a freaking crafting guide, it isn't hard! Either that, or make your subgame in a way that a crafting guide is not needed.

This is really a temporary solution until we have a mod store again which can do this for us.

Accepted. But at least we should look through the current list of mods and kick out all very old mods which have been either superseced or don't work with latest release.

[Wuzzy2]

Okay, let's start with the easy part: Remove all broken, low quality or obsolete mods:

• Better HUD (and hunger): known critical bugs, not maintained anymore
• Minecraft-like item drop/pick-up: Old, and there are probably better item_drop mods out there
• Craft Guide, Inventory++, Crafting: Extremely old and long superceded by more modern mods
• Weather: Extremely old, we have much better weather mods to offer now
• Snow Biomes: Obsolete
• Nether: As much as I hate to say it, but this isn't really of high quality

Subgames:

• Move Dreambuilder to mods

Texture packs:

• Remove Summerfields. It is (sadly) under a non-free license. Can we at least agree to not promote proprietary anything on the very homepage of Minetest? ;-)

Agree with my lists? Did I miss something?

[SmallJoker]

Just peeking in for a short server list analysis, in case that's helpful to find mods that are used much.
The mods are sorted by the amount of players playing with the specific mod on their server. The percent number is the occurrence of the mod compared with all players.

https://pastebin.com/raw/2Hab0W1V
EDIT: Moved to pastebin.

https://pastebin.com/raw/2Hab0W1V

Now take the top ten mods (sans server-specific mods) and we have a list of actually used mods that could be featured.