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Updating Others' Mods: What's standard operating procedure?


Endarire

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Greetings, all!  (If this post should be moved to a better place, do it.)

Having read K4thos's instructions to convert mods to EET, and feeling curious about modding in general, what is expected for doing minor technical updates to mods to make them EE/EET compatible?  I assume the original authors will be credited as such, and I would be listed as an updater or a maintainer.

I know the best way to handle this is to receive formal permission from the mod authors before doing anything with their work, but what if the mods are a year old or more and the authors are out of commission or unresponsive?  The point is not to try to take over mods currently being worked on, but ones that have seemingly been unofficially abandoned by their authors.  I seek to understand the community's stance and recommendations on this before proceeding.

Thankee!

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If the mods are hosted by an active site, the admins / moderators would be the ones responsible for updates. In general, technical updates, compatibility updates and bugfixes will be accepted. You could ask before hand to make sure the mod is not being worked on, and afterwards offer your update in the official mod's forum.

If the mod is not connected to an active modding site, you could still make an update and offer it at one of the bigger modding sites, preferably as close to where the mod was hosted/discussed/already updated before. This was also done for very old mods, the updates were offered at SHS "Mod Resurrection" section or also at BeamDog's. Important is that you explicitely state that it's an update, keep the author's name and credits, and list the changes inside the mod package - and are ready to take it down if requested.

A no-go is uploading at an own modding site with an own attached forum and proclaiming that's ok because "mod was abandoned". Also, we are talking about technical and compatibility changes and bugfixes. Closing holes as I did for NTotSC is borderline - I only did it because many people already put effort in this revised version and adding a functioning journal system and closing dialogue holes seemed like a "fix" to me. Adding new content or changing / removing content because you don't like it is going too far.

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