Re: The endless influx of low-quality, low-realism, quantity-over-quality aircraft into FGAddon

> On 25 May 2026, at 12:46, David Hudach <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Yes, this is because they don't make the products, their job is to show a list of available items based on the search. They don't have a dog in the fight, they are neutral (possibly paid to rank some higher). Back to your pizza analogy and one that aligns more with the current discussion of FG. You own the pizza shop and one of your cooks wants to sell and uncooked pizza or one that does not meet the standards of the restaurant. Do you offer it on the menu? What is the impact to a new customer? It may be hard to predict. But what is the safest "bet" for the restaurant owner who cares about future and existing customers and his brand, his product, his pizza shop.

Ah, this is a fundamental difference of understanding here. You feel that aircraft are part of some conceptual FlightGear brand, but I don’t, because I think we’re more like Amazon / eBay, connecting ‘people who make aircraft’ to end users. How good or bad a particular aircraft doesn’t impact the FlightGear band *much*, any more than buy some crap from Amazon means that everything Amazon sell is crap. (Of course if all you can find is crap, you might decide the whole thing is, so there are problems here for sure)

Now, you can fairly argue that new users might not understand this, and feel that all aircraft we show them are somehow blessed / checked / rated as being ‘good enough for the FLightGear official stamp of approval’, but we have not ever tried to make that claim, and personally I’d prefer we educate people up front in the **opposite** direction: that all the content (scenery, aircraft) is user authored, and that it can be hugely variable in quality. And then give them the tools (the rating system) to make their own choice.

We can discuss (as Richard suggested) tweaking the tools UI for filtering, and we can definitely improve the first-run messaging on the download screen to give some expository text, eg:

“””
FlightGear aircraft are contribute by users just like you! Some are created over many years by teams of people to faithfully model every aspect of an aircraft, while others are simpler, works in progress or have missing features. Aircraft have a rating and you can adjust the filtering to see fewer, more complete aircraft or more aircraft, potentially with some issues. Click <here> to open the ratings panel for more information.
“”"

We can of course extend the ratings panel to allow filtering on tag, eg the FDM type tag. I’ve so far avoided making a nice tag-selector UI but it’s ‘just some work’, in the ratings panel.

Kind regards,
James

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