Transport Tycoon Forums

Could someone explain why linking to a topic that already exists on the forum is a bad thing?

Because that's another forum. This here is the OpenTTD forum. The OpenTTD forum is the official forum of the OpenTTD project, and the maintainers of the OpenTTD project do not encourage and do not want to be associated with distribution of copyrighted content.
Guess why those files are not just included with OpenTTD is it that hard to understand?

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I couldn't have said it any better

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Well firstly, the fact that the non-OpenTTD parts of the forums are considered different forums is non-obvious. For all technical purposes, they are the same forums, and someone who doesn't pay lots of attention will see the OTTD forums as part of tt-forums. And there is also a difference between distributing something yourself, and linking to somewhere which itself links to distribution locations. It is not that hard to understand, it is just not obvious.

Anyway, the OTTD devs have made clear they don't want us to link to that other thread at tt-forums, and I wont do it from the OTTD forums again.

Oh, and it seems XeryusTC's link suffered a different fate

I agree with Conditional Zenith, I too was mistaken. I thought this was all one big forum covering all to do with Transport Tyccon.

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Last I checked, the Open moderators don't have control over what goes on in the other sections, and can, therefore, hardly be held responsible for that. But they can be held responsible for what they can control, and they take that responsibility seriously.

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Yes, that is all true. But it still doesn't make the distinction between OTTD forums and the rest of the forums any more obvious.

It does make sense, since http://forum.openttd.org redirects to the OpenTTD part of the forums.

I'm with CZ, it all seems very academic and somewhat specious reasoning to me. If it's to cover the possiblity of legal action I suspect that being a subform to a place that does offer the link won't offer any protection.

Exactly. All seems a bit daft to me really!

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What if Owen places child pornography somewhere on the forum and doesn't remove that. Are we, OpenTTD developers who don't have any moderator rights outside of the OpenTTD subforum, then equally guilty as Owen, especially when we actively remove links to it?

Replacing 'child pornography' with 'copyrighted game' shouldn't make any difference under the assumption that "we" are not required to tell the authorities that something illegal happens.

I just want to clarify my statements in case they are misinterpreted.

Firstly I'm not complaining that the mods are removing links. They are allowed to, and they are being polite about doing it. I would prefer that they clarified that it was a link to a topic at tt-forums.net that was removed, but on the whole I have no complaints.

Secondly, I'm not saying that it is hard to understand that they are separate forums, or that it makes no sense, most people could understand it once it is explained to them. I'm just saying it is not obvious, and many people will not see that they are separate.


That argument only makes sense if coming via that url is the only way to get to these forums. There are other ways to get to these forums and people coming here via other means would probably have no idea that forum.openttd.org redirects here.

I'm with Rubidium about the lack of liability, though as usual IANAL. OTOH, if CP was put in here and Owen didn't remove it, that would be a different situation.

Just to clarify, I'm not saying what the OTTD mods did wasn't right. It irked me more that this is considered a seperate forum from Transport Tycoon Forums as a whole. I ,and many others, browse the site as one forum, this just being part of it.
On the issue of the legality of the links perhaps Owen should be approached with regard to removing the offending links from the site altogether. After all, if its considered wrong here then it should be wrong on the forums as a whole.

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Pfff, is this discussion still on going?

Conditional Zenith: my appoligies, I intended to PM you why I removed your link; I forgot. I understand you didn't know you weren't allowed to link to those topics, now you do

This policy is in place for at least as long as I walk these forums. The same goes for people who publish a .zip file with those files in it: they will be removed. So now you all know

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Well I was meaning more for everyone else's benefit. I know what I linked to and that it got removed. Everyone else just sees a removed link, and then someone else posts the exact same link.

Well, it has always been the case that linking to warez and similar is against the forum rules. However, an exception has been made for the TT games, in the prescribed topic in the General Transport Tycoon forum, due to the fact that in the past we had many, many threads asking "where can I get the game?", and for most people, it is very difficult to buy a copy of the game. Should the game be re-released properly by MicroProse/Atari/Chris Sawyer/whoever, then the links would of course be removed.

With regards to linking to topic 3407 from the OpenTTD forums, I personally have nothing against that, but if the OpenTTD developers/moderators feel that doing so may cause problems, then I am happy to back them up on that view.

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Owen Rudge
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May I kindly ask, why the Linux Generic downloads of the nightly builds are no longer available?

I tried both Etch and Lenny with my Linux, but since it's a Ubuntu, they do not start.

Will the Linux Generic packages return?

The .deb files should work on your Ubuntu, maybe with minor work, but okay. Nevertheless, the generic linux files failed last night, because of a bug in a subsystem. If you check yesterdays nightly, they are there. And if you check in 8 hours, they will be there Just one day one file-type is not available, and people notice .. sigh ..

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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Thank you very much. I am glad to hear!

Well, try to see it in a positive way - people are that much interested in OpenTTD..

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* @Belugas wonders what is worst... a mom or a wife...
<Lakie> Well, they do the same thing but the code is different.
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My patches
check my wiki page (sticky button) for a complete list