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

I think I can look into prototyping the web/backend side of this. My
initial thought is to keep the launcher offline-friendly: the backend
collects authenticated ratings, stores/moderates them, and periodically
exports aggregate JSON/XML for the catalog generator to merge. I’d avoid
written reviews in v1 and only support one 1–5 rating per authenticated
user per aircraft, since reviews add moderation complexity. The launcher
would only consume the exported rating field, not call the backend live.
Does that match the direction you’re imagining James?

Kind regards,
Philips Nguyen

Vào Thứ 5, 28 thg 5, 2026 vào lúc 15:57 James Turner <[email protected]>
đã viết:

>
>
> On 27 May 2026, at 17:28, Curtis Olson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Jumping from overly generic to overly specific ... I wonder if some sort
> of aircraft review system (like an amazon review) would be useful?  People
> could give aircraft up to 5 stars and attach a comment or review.  I would
> want these comments to be currated to avoid spam or inappropriate things
> (not to filter negative comments.)  But developing such a system and
> integrating it in a way that people would see it and contribute to it and
> benefit from it would be a significant effort.  The current self rating
> system is far from perfect, but no system will be all that great.  Don't
> forget, each person that comes to this project has different interests and
> different priorities.  What is fully developed with a 5-star rating for one
> person might be severely lacking for someone else.  What is fully developed
> for someone running flightgear on a laptop might be different from what is
> fully developed for someone building a physical cockpit in their living
> room or garage.
>
>
> Right, I’m thinking we can add a rating category called ‘user rating’,
> 0..5 as the others (adding more rating categories is easy), and allow
> people to submit ratings.
>
> This does need someone to produce a backend (web based) which:
>
>  - collects ratings (+ optionally reviews) based on aircraft-id
>  - lets me download the current ratings as XML / JSON, so I can merge them
> into the generated catalog.xml
>
> (I’d start with just a rating, and worry about reviews as an upgrade, it
> makes the backend much more complex)
>
> The Launcher side changes for this are then pretty easy.
>
> However, the curation side is a big deal here, since otherwise someone can
> just automate a POST to the backend and skew the ratings up/down
> arbitrarily. I’m not sure how to handle that, we don’t have any secret API
> keys or similar backed into the build and I’d sooner keep it that way,
> otherwise self-builds and binary builds get different behaviour.
>
> Of course, the current ratings curation is ‘make a patch against Fgaddon’,
> which apparently is also significant barrier :)
>
> If someone who knows web stuff can comment on the backend / curation
> pieces, it would help me estimate how feasible this all is.
>
> Kind regards,
> James
>
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