It has been a long and tireless process to get here, but we're finally here! We are opening up the site for general use a bit earlier than originally planned, so please bear with us as we tweak, refine, and improve the site and its offerings.
Why are you moving from oxidemod.org? Since the project was started by the original creator way back in 2012/2013, oxidemod.org (and related domain names) have all been held and hosted by third-parties. The development team for Oxide has always had little control and say over what happens with the site and domain names with limited access to properly manage it, so we started working on moving and rebranding to uMod.
The company (Ideal-Hosting/IAMONSYS) that originally held the domain names for Oxide had always held the projects assets close and showed no interest in parting with them, but as of a early 2018, they sold the domain names and other site assets to Nitrado (another game server provider). We tried to work out a deal with Nitrado to obtain the assets and domains, but they have shown little interest short of an excessive cost to us. For this reason, we are not doing a copy/paste of the old site due to lacking access to do so, but also because we'd like somewhat of a fresh start, shedding much of the stale content from the old site.
So what does this new site provide? A lot of useful improvements and less headaches! We've heard and seen the desire of an official marketplace for premium plugins, and we know that developers would love a way to offset their time spent making all the neat plugins that server owners utilize on a daily basis. So, a marketplace will be one of the main features coming to this site soon, complete with options for developers to protect their work and various methods of distribution.
While I'm sure there will always be room for improvements, we've put a lot of work into making sure the platform is secure to avoid abuse. We're hoping the new site will help provide developers the tools they need to protect and distribute their work as well as better incentive to stick around and keep motivated. Free is always great, but developers need to eat too!
With this new site also comes a CI (build and test server) setup to help developers and submission reviewers an easier way to see issues with their plugins. This will help with the migration process to find any potential issues from changes or just old code that should have been updated ages ago. Hopefully this process fixes and resolves a lot of the open issues users are having with some plugins.
Here's a little summary of a few of the key features that the new site does and will provide:
- Marketplace for premium plugins, extensions, and tools; with optional protection methods, licensing options, and direct or remote distribution options for marketplace developers to utilize (coming soon!)
- Integrated downloading, installation, and updating of plugins and extensions on your game server CI server and frontend for building and testing all plugins, extensions, and tools; and their updates
- Inspection via CI server for finding and notifying about any potential issues with plugins
- Site and email notifications of all updates, messaging, and account-related actions
- Integrated support and ticking system for general support, discussion, and issues (coming soon!)
- Vastly improved and easier plugin/extension/tool submission process
- Overhauled and improved API documentation and tutorials (coming soon!)
All documentation we currently provide is in the process of being moved, updated, and overhauled for the new site. We're also working on getting server-related tutorials made for each supported game along with host-specific tutorials for setting up a server with uMod / Oxide.
What will happen to my plugins? Any public plugins currently hosted at umod.org and/or oxidemod.org will be automatically migrated to the new site platform once we finalize the automation tools involved with that process in the coming week or so. We'll be taking the time during this migration to also fix any unmaintained plugins and catch up with any issues with plugins. If you have any private or paid plugins you'd like to share with the community, those can be submitted manually once the Marketplace is open and accepting submissions.
Any plugins currently in the submission queue at oxidemod.org will be reviewed at oxidemod.org and migrated manually to the new site if they meet the submission guidelines and requirements; otherwise the submitter would be notified of any necessary changes and asked to resubmit on the new site. We're a bit behind on plugin submissions, so bear with us! We'll also be working with select third-party marketplaces to work on bringing over some of their premium plugins to offer in our Marketplace. There will be some method for migrating any existing licenses you have for these as well, if any, to the new site as well.
Hosting your server with a provider? We'll be reaching out to various providers to offer support to integrate and benefit from our new services with their hosting platforms. We want to make sure you benefit fully from the features and offerings provided by uMod and the community of developers.
What's happening to Oxide? The project itself is being renamed to uMod to better reflect what the project's goal of becoming a fully universal modding platform supporting multiple games. It is also going to have a lot of work done under the hood to cleanup, improve on, fix issues, and to make it more consistent and universal across the games we support. I know you've grown to be attached to the Oxide name, but it's tightly bound to Rust, and we're trying to push it to become more than just "the mod for Rust" and try to get the platform up to par where it can be easily implemented into any game either by us or by a game's developer.
We've also been teaming up with some talented individuals from the community to help offset the workload with development of the projects and/or moderation of the community. Youll probably see a few of them around the community here and there, keep an eye out!