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

Hi James,

I was thinking the rating would be submitted through a web page, but if the
launcher is going to POST it directly then yes, the awkward part is mostly
authentication / abuse prevention.

For a first version I’d probably keep the backend very small: just accept a
rating for an aircraft-id, store it, and expose an aggregate JSON/XML file
that the catalog builder can fetch.

For storage, SQLite might be enough at first and would keep backups simple.
The main question is whether anonymous ratings are acceptable. We could do
basic rate limiting and maybe have the launcher generate a local anonymous
id, but of course that would not be abuse-proof.

The cleaner version, in my opinion, it would be to open a web page from the
launcher and let the user sign in with GitLab/GitHub(or a different service
if you prefer) before rating. More friction, but much easier to reason
about.

Either way, I agree reviews should be left out for now. Just 1–5 ratings
first.

I can sketch a small backend/API/export prototype if that would be useful.

Kind regards,
Philips Nguyen

Vào Thứ 5, 28 thg 5, 2026 vào lúc 17:54 James Turner <[email protected]>
đã viết:

>
>
> On 28 May 2026, at 11:27, An Phúc Nguyễn Vạn <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> 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?
>
>
> Uh, I was assuming the launcher would submit the ratings via a HTTP POST :
> it’s the authentication or lack of around that, that I’m unsure about.
>
> QNetworkRequest (which is what I will use to POST) lets me set arbitrary
> heads / SSL cert / etc of course; it’s just a question of what is actually
> sensible, in an open-source application.
>
> Agreed about leaving reviews out for now.
>
> On the catalog side, the catalog is built by:
>
>
> https://gitlab.com/flightgear/fgmeta-python/-/blob/next/src/flightgear/meta/aircraft_catalogs/catalog.py?ref_type=heads
>
> So long as the wrapper script can download a JSON / XML of the ratings by
> aircraft-id, I can parse that and include it when the catalog.xml is
> generated.
>
> In terms of the backend, it needs to run on probably ‘my’ FG Hertzner
> server, which is Linux of course. And ideally be something small and easy
> to back up. (As far as I know, we can’t run anything dynamic on GitLab,
> only static stuff)
>
> Kind regards,
> James
>
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