An Update On Best Mods

[Christian]

Hey everyone, I wanted to provide an update on Best Mods.

 

After the initial release of our web scraper last year, the website has been retrieving quite a bit of traffic due to the amount of mods added (we are at around 112,000). However, in the past couple of months, the daily traffic numbers have went down. This is most likely because I stopped the web scraper temporarily back in May (2024), so no mods have been added and existing mods haven't been updated.

 

The reason I stopped the web scraper is due to it being hosted on one of my home server's virtual machines and I believe it was consuming too much power making my electric bill rise in price. I didn't like this implementation to begin with, so I want to definitely move it to a dedicated VM with a hosting provider where it should be hosted. However, this is going to require some work since I want to get it setup with Docker Compose which is a bit more complicated (not the web scraper itself, but due to some of its requirements).

 

We are still receiving 100 - 200 visitors a day which isn't bad. With that said, I've received mostly positive feedback on the website itself. Though, I will admit I've received around 5 - 10 complaints from mod owners (some polite, some rude) asking for their mods to be removed. Of course, I've removed these mods since then because the mod owners have the right to not have their mod(s) listed on our website. I do want to apologize to any mod owners who are upset about their mods being listed on the website without permission, I went into detail about this on the Best Mods' about page here. (this was a tough decision to make, but it's the only way the website will really function properly). I also want to note that our website is a mod index that redirects to the original mod source(s). We do not host any mod files (other than images) and it will be kept that way (it'd be illegal otherwise).

 

At this time, the Best Mods website itself is on the backburner since I'm currently working on Best Servers and also want to build a completely new website for this community afterwards. However, I do want to continue building onto it in the future. The website is completely open source as well, so if anybody wants to implement new features or improve the current design, they are welcome to via pull requests and will be credited if implemented.

 

Thank you!