Use the In-Game Community Mods - Original PA Mod Manager (PAMM) is Obsolete

Yep, but I was responding to people who were suggesting that I do exactly that. Not you.

You realise we're talking about two distinct contexts of responsibility, right? Troubleshooting issues is not the responsibility of the user or some random 3rd party, it is the responsibility of the developer.


In this case, I had an issue where PAMM was not updating its mod list correctly, was not updating available mods correctly, and was not identifying that a new version of PAMM was available.

It is not Bitdefenders responsibility to maintain a mod. It is the responsibility of the developer of the mod to establish why the mod isn't working, and implement a solution, or advise users of the solution to this issue. Which you have done. Partially. The troubleshooting information is not in the OP, so users have to trawl through a 650 post thread to find relevant information. That's not organised or efficient. I'm providing you with some very valid feedback on how to make your mod better. Feel free to continue being a **** about it.

If your ideas about banks were correct, can you please explain to me why I am able to get a refund for the money I spent if a merchant does not deliver the product or service? That is not the "fault" of my bank, as they did not cause the issue, but they accept the responsibility in putting that error right, given certain conditions.

Technically you're getting the money back from the vendor, with the bank acting as the intermediary or interface.

They don't accept responsibility, they simply have the power to enact your refund request.

Honestly guys, we've got the point where flawed analogies are going wild. False positives are a thing with AV software and there isn't much anyone can do about them. They are a thing. It happens.

Assuming your AV doesn't maniacally cackle as it quarantines said false positive, you should be fine regardless.

Why so much walloftexts?

There are two meanings of responsibility. I was hoping I wouldn't have to resort to throwing the book at this discussion.

1. The state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over someone
Synonyms: authority, control, power, leadership, management, influence; duty

2. The state or fact of being accountable or to blame for something
Synonyms: blame, fault, guilt, culpability, blameworthiness, liability


Guess which meaning I have been referring to for every recent post in this thread? I'll give you a hint, it isn't the second one.

Look back page 32. I'm talking about the fact that it is the mod developer who is responsible (management and leadership wise) for maintaining their own mod. At no point did I actually place blame, or guilt. It was the forum reacting to the perceived attack on one of their own that did that.

Sure, Bitdefender are responsible for sussing out stuff at their end, as Raevn says. But I never said they weren't responsible for doing that.

At the end of the day, (and it really is the end of the day), the idea that PA's modding community should not do its very best to ensure their mods are the best they can be is ludicrous.

Goodnight all.

You never said they weren't responsible, but you never said that they were, as far as I can tell. An omission is a fault that you should recognise.

Thanks for explaining your meaning, but perhaps you should've made that explicitly clear instead of allowing numerous poeple to go on the second definition (as I presume they are, though I could be wrong). The onus is on you to make sure that the posts you are making as as clear and concise as possible.

I see the PA mod community doing it's best. Making a massive fuss like this, is you not doing your best. A PM would've sufficed. A lack of attitude would've sufficed. Using the Report function to avoid responding to inflammatory posts would've sufficed. I'm not a moderator, and I dislike backseat moderation. But it must be said.

Correct, an omission is a fault I should recognise.

Notice how I agree with Raevn that Bitdefender share responsibility for dealing with stuff at their end?

Notice the only time I use blame is after it has already been falsely assumed I am attributing blame, and then it is blame for an inaction that did not occur, and the person to whom I attributed blame knows that both of us know that there was no inaction?
Notice how earlier still in the thread, I'm talking about communicating to Bitdefender so that they can fix it?

No omission occurred.

Read back through my posts. You'll see I emphasise that meaning repetitively. You'll even see that Raevn uses responsibility in exactly the same way that I do.

Damn, you used onus before I had the chance to. Blast. I was considering chucking that into a post a bit above.

My posts were perfectly clear, if you practised good reading comprehension and didn't allow your preconceptions to run away with my meaning.

A massive fuss? It's not a massive fuss. I made valid feedback, that feedback was shouted down and misinterpreted, and I repeated that valid feedback until I made my point. I have never had any problem doing that publicly.

I don't really feel that there is any problem in publicly making my overall message clear (mod developers do have a responsibility to ensure their content is as good as it can be).

Considering that neither information about the possibility of conflict with security software, nor the address of the domain is present in the domain of the OP, I have a wonderful bookmark to find that information in this thread.

I've been quite amused by this whole endeavour.

You've been quite amused by the whole endeavour? Classic bait detected.

I don't get why you're here to make friends either . . . is that some kind of clever insinuation that you're "taking the kiddie gloves off"? I'm guessing because I complained about your attitude?

You've been an *** (really, they censor the alternative term for donkey?). Repeatedly. You said you've made your point, and yet you're still carrying on (prior to me involving myself) and insulting peoples' work by insinuating that it beggars belief that they're not calling up AV companies to get their specific completely-unnoticed custom-built project whitelisted.

I'm sorry for misinterpreting your definition of "responsibility". Genuinely, nobody likes being wrong or being taken out of context.

That said, I'm not here to make friends either. I'm here to tell you that your attitude is running directly against your argument (to get a conflict resolved). By acting in the way that you are, you are not making people want to help you, even if you have a valid point.

Back to the point about omission, you vaguely kinda agreed with raevn before complaining that it was his responsibility. Except that (in the post of his you quoted) he'd already said that he'd contacted the AV provider . . . and that you should do the same.

Do you want to know why? Do I have to "get a book out"? It's because AV providers don't automatically whitelist a product after a single request. You need multiple people to state that the software is fine before it's considered for the whitelist . . . otherwise anybody could call up and say "yeah my trojan.exe is perfectly safe, please whitelist it".

Yes, you should make your message clear. However, you did that posts ago. You're now just carrying on unnecessarily for some end goal I can't ascertain. To feel clever, perhaps? Your language and pretentious attitude certainly seem to back that up.

I wash my hands of you, and wish you the best of luck in clearing up that attitude. This whole derail will hopefully be deleted by a mod not involved personally anyhow.

ok everyone, the problem has been fixed and @StormingKiwi has received a refund for the total amount he spent on PAMM. Can we get back to modding now?

I am amused. Quitch and I always spark each other off. Neither of us learns. It's funny.

No that was a typo where I was going to take that line as an argument, but decided that it was genuinely inflammatory. I removed it but had issues with the removal, saving to draft, and a funky display error I haven't figured out where sometimes copy and pasted stuff is invisible. I've found that copying and pasting as plain text generally fixes that error, but unfortunately ctrl+shift+v is not in my muscle memory.

Actually I'm not insulting anyone, and I'm requesting more documentation in the OP about potential conflicts?

No, I agreed that it was his responsibility, and I disagreed with his take on my conversation with Quitch, because Quitch had misinterpreted my meaning in responsibility?

There clearly is still substantial miscommunication. And I'd rather like to clarify that.

The thing is that if PAMM breaks, it affects the installations of a number of dependent mods.

So it's quite important that PAMM does not break. Because a broken PAMM affects every other mod installed.

Your sarcasm ignored, if you mean adding some proper documentation into the OP (troubleshooting, FAQs, etc.), be my guest.

Multiple parties in this thread need to play nice, or multiple parties will get a break from posting.

It would be helpful to have a couple troubleshooting tips like the domain to whitelist in the OP, but that's really all that can be done. Thanks again raevn for making this epic tool!

its only one party that needs a break i was going to report it but left it one day and you have issued the warning now so do not need to ask for mod to ask a user to back down for what is a antivirus software issue

i going to reload my computer as i can't get this mod manager to work on my system, works on others (cross domain thing)

need to add a photo to my name

Actually it was me who reported the conversation

@raevn
Any thought on previous post like this one ?
I saw several people having the same issue like here, and most recently here
I just had the exact same issue than Lavasnake in the latest link, except that my mod was still in 1.0
People may think a mod may be broken, simply because it didn't notify an update in PAMM.
These annoying issues kind of defeat the purpose of the notify / auto-update feature of PAMM

In almost all cases, this is a mistake with the mod itself, although I can do something to help. Currently, only the date is used to determine whether a mod is updated - this is because there are various different formats for version numbers, so using the date was easier. I can't check the 2nd and third mods you linked to with this post right now (as I don't have the old versions of the mods), but I can say the issue with the anchor mod is due to this - v1.5 had the date "2014/23/02", whereas v1.7 has "2014/03/23" (note the format changed, and 23 comes after 03, so it didn't think it was older). When I set the format in the modinfo.json file for v1.5 to YYYY/MM/DD, it then correctly detected that an update was available.

There's two things i can do to help this situation, although ultimately it's still important for mod authors to ensure the mod information is correct:

• Include a version number check alongside the date check
• Convert dates to a date object rather than using alphanumeric ordering (I thought I had already done this, but it doesn't seem to be the case)

Thanks for the explanation, I thought PAMM was relying on the version number only.
Since I think modders (correct me if I'm wrong) mainly refer to the version number when they push an update, I think it would indeed be more reliable to add that version number check as you suggest.

That would make sense if we could keep our version numbers consistent. What's Hotbuild2 up to by now? Version 1.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.9.99?

Point taken
Let's force integer for version numbering in order to get a mod published on PAMM then
You can't go wrong with that

I prefer major.minor.build

Major only increments with big code changes, like something close to a full rewrite. Minor increments with new features or other improvements, and build is something I usually use for bug fixes or little things.

I'm most familiar with semantic versioning, although I think it's more focused on libraries. Roughly as above, but major is for "breaking" changes.

It's basically that, but since this kind of mod doesn't deal with backwards compatibility I would be less strict on it. I also use version 0 for pre-release and version 1 for post-release. In any case, I wouldn't want to enforce a version scheme because it would just make mistakes more likely to break things and discourage inexperienced coders from getting involved. The less overhead we have for making mods, the better.