(this time, instead of forgetting to increment the version number once, i accidentally incremented it twice... no v2.9.2 ig)
After some thinking, I have decided it would be best to remove the http-player-badge system from this mod. HTTP player badge refers to a special type of client-side badge, that aims to reward this mod's contributors that help me with this mod's development. The three badges that are affected are: bss_translator, bss_debugger, and bss_supporter. As cool of an idea as this seemed for me, I did run into some issues that eventually lead to me deciding to remove them:
- Hosting & privacy: I do not have a server of my own where I can reliably host
http-player-badgedata, and which people where assigned whichhttp-player-badges. Initially I chose GitHub, but not only does this make all the data and its history public for everyone, but I also have to manually create a separategit commitfor every change that is to be made to the badge data. - Automation: Given that my only option is GitHub (which isn't ideal for the reason mentioned above), there isn't even a way to "automatically" grant those badges to people that contribute to the project. In other words, keeping track of everyone and everything has to be done manually, and people have to request badges and send ther Minecraft account info (Name/UUID) publically, on GitHub. And what if someone wants a badge or no longer wants it, and I'm not available to grant/revoke it at the moment? That's another potential problem.
- Contexts: The
http-player-badgesystem makes less sense in certain contexts. For example, when someone creates a "fork" of this mod. In the context of a fork, what does a "supporter" even mean? A supporter of the forked project or this original project? - Maintenance and backwards compatibility: Another big problem is haivng to worry about older mod versions. If I were to make even a slight change as to how the
http-player-badgesystem operates, it would immediately break older versions of this mod that rely on the older versions of the badge system. What if I wanna move badges elsewhere? What if I wanna change them or add more of them or remove some of them? Making any of those changes would be impossible without running into problems. - Networking: When someone clicks on
Statistics, their device sends an HTTP request to the internet (this mod's GitHub repo.) to retrieve the badge data. Not everyone likes that and is okay with that. It can be seen as a privacy violation as well, especially to those who wish to avoid sites like GitHub so as to hide their IP Addresses. Some may even have limited internet connection, and for those people, every wasted "byte" of network traffic matters.
Overall, while I like the idea of the "player badge" system, I don't think http-player-badges can work out the way I imagined they would. As such, I will stick with the idea of stat-based "client-side"-only badges. Basically showing client-side badges to players with certain statistics.
In the meantime, the feature will of-course, be removed from the 1.20.x version as well in its next update.
As for this release, I will publish it on CurseForge and Modrinth shortly after publishing here.