Keyndb - A torrenting-based modding site

[Arteeh]

Hello everyone. I wanna introduce a little project I'm working on.

Modding sites like Loverslab and Nexus host tremendous amounts of data, and collectively have millions of people downloading it. This puts a big financial strain on the owners of these sites, forcing them to reduce bandwidth by implementing artificial limits like Nexus' 2MB download limit, or Loverslab's 10 second download countdown, search frequency limiter and intrusive ads. This is a big annoyance to users but is seen as a necessary evil by most. I'd like to create a platform where these unpleasant features aren't needed, using torrenting.

Keyndb.com (it's live right now, check it out!) is a website that will host video game mods, similar to the Nexus. The big difference is that I don't actually host the files themselves. When you download a mod, you get a torrent file, which you can then use to download the mod using torrenting software like qBittorrent. This means I don't have to hold terabytes of content, and the site's bandwidth goes way down. Torrenting also means you could download a mod of several gigabytes in less than a minute.

You have an idea how torrents work, and I hear you ask: torrents need seeders (people who have the files, and can upload the mods to downloaders) to stay alive. Will old mods die off if the uploader stops seeding the file themselves? This may happen, yeah. To prevent this, I'd like to add a feature that lets fans of a mod sponsor it. This can be a one-time payment or a small subscription. Users can decide how much they pay and where the money goes to. This money can go to three places:
- The mod author themselves
- Me, to keep the website alive
- The mod's "seed fund": more on this below.

If users donate to a mod's seed fund, I will have servers seed the mod in exchange for a small amount of money to pay for these servers. This money is slowly taken from the seed fund until it runs out. This only happens when there is not a single user seeding the mod themselves, however. If a mod is popular and there's lots of money donated to its seed fund, it's guaranteed that it'll stay downloadable for a long time. If you're a mod author, you can upload your mod to the site, and throw a dollar or two at the seed fund to make sure people will always be able to download your mod.

However, this is all speculation and planning. Keyndb.com is currently not usable yet. I try to work on the site as often as I can, but I'm extremely busy with other things. While I know my HTML/CSS/PHP/SQL, I don't have serious web development experience so everything takes a while for me to figure out and build. That's why I'd love to find other people who want to build this website with me (in exchange for some equity in whatever income the website may possibly generate).

Some more things:
- I don't have any plans to add rules to the site besides "don't break the law" and "don't be an a**hole".
- NSFW mods should have an 'NSFW' tag, which makes it invisible by default. Users can flip a switch to make them visible.
- One could make a fork of Mod Organizer 2, with a built-in torrenting client (libtorrent). Pressing a download button will send the torrent over to Mod Organizer, and the mod will show up under the Downloads section just like any other mod from the Nexus would. This way you don't even have to mess with other torrent clients.
- My intent is not to 'outcompete' sites like Nexus or Loverslab. In fact, I'd love for them to use the same torrenting system so their users can benefit from the upsides as well.

I'd love to hear thoughts or feedback.

- arteeh

[Vagrant0]

The biggest problem with torrents as a means of serving mods, or files of any kind, is that you need someone to act as a seeder for anyone to get that mod. Although setting up some kind of 'pay to seed' system might solve some of this; knowing people, it is unlikely to work since people would be more likely to pay into it for popular mods instead of obscure mods that they just can't seem to find a reliable download for. Mods would still need an initial seed (authors may not be willing to do this, and tying up a server for every new file may be outside the practical scope of your network), and that seed would need to be present long enough for it to spread to others to fill in for seeding. This later part becomes a problem as users tend to just leech when it comes to torrents, so without a server or some indentured party working as a reliable seed, torrents are likely to be dead or very unreliable.

 

The next biggest problem is that torrents don't work well in cases where you are have files that are constantly being updated. Even with seeding taken care of, you run into the problem of old (possibly buggy) mod versions being shared just because it has the most active seeders. Every new version would essentially start back at 1 seeder, so people wanting the latest version will have a harder time downloading it than the most popular version. If a mod author updates a mod several times within the course of a month, there could be several live torrents for various versions of that mod, making it a nightmare for the mod author when it comes to tracking down any lingering bugs. This is one of the reasons why, in the past, torrents only made sense in the case of downloading the resources used by a mod (BSA files), as these tended to change less frequently while being the bulk of a mod's filesize. Although trackers can be disabled, once it gets out in the wild and other trackers start being added as a backup, this becomes more difficult.

 

Then there is the problem of mods being uploaded without the original authors permission (or knowledge), and being yet another site that a mod author needs to make their rounds with updates, bug reports, answering feedback, ect. Assuming of course that people aren't going to use it as a way of spreading malware, mods with questionable content, or worse under the guise of it being a popular mod. If being an uploader requires little to no vetting, then people don't care about breaking rules; if being an uploader requires a lengthy process, most probably wouldn't even bother.

 

 

Best suggestion is to narrow your focus towards some niche that your site can specifically cater to, and do it better than other options out there. The advantage of torrents is that you can provide access to rather large files, or collections of files, for example. But you kinda have to be willing to enforce rules and continually push it the whole way in order to make most anything like this work (eg, can't just half-ass it by setting up a framework and sitting back collecting server money).

Edited February 25, 2020 by Vagrant0