Unmaintained mod version compatibility

[Gordon Wrigley]

TL;DNR can the mod users have a way to vote on whether an old mod is working with newer game versions

Mods often work across multiple versions.

Also mods are often abandoned.

Generally people are helpful and if a mod is popular there will be comments indicating if it's working on the latest version or not.

Thus upating to a new version requires going through all the old mods you have and skimming through the comments to see if anyone has an experiences with it on the new game version.

This can be a bit tedious 

 

It'd be nice if there was some way in the mod DB for the users of the mod to indicate if they have had success or not with using the mod on a newer version. And if this was then exposed to filters and mod updater tools.

[Kulze]

I get why, but it's also troublesome to handle.

If it's community-feedback then how will you handle false positives for example? Is it a list of versions it works with? And what about people stating it after short usage but along the way something breaks which isn't often used, leading to issues with a specific mod?
How to see for the player directly if it's the version causing the issue versus incompatibility with another mod as well? How to handle those false positives and false negatives?

It's commonly not done because it's a big mess of fringe-cases that make it unreliable at large to do that, though some functioning system there would be really nice to have, I agree.

[Cedric the Silent]

Most of the time I just ignore mods that aren't update to the version of the game I'm running except for if said mod is listed as a dependency for a mod I know is up to date or if someone in the top comments said they tried it and it works or if it's a mod that is only one game version behind that I really can't go without then maybe I would bother to test to see if it works. Other than those scenarios I tend to just avoid the long hassle of testing older mods to see if they still work so it would be nice if there was some type of way for people other than the mod author to mark said mods as still working with current games despite not being labeled for current versions.

[LadyWYT]

It's a neat idea but I don't think it's very workable in practice. A new game version can break older mods, yes, but it's also very possible to break mods by using outdated versions of other mods or mods that are otherwise incompatible. And several users are inclined to just say "it doesn't work!", rather than take the time to properly troubleshoot and figure out exactly why things aren't working correctly, in which case it's going to be all too easy for a mod to get several false "it doesn't work!" votes.

[Zaph42nd]

Like the idea, but I think it could be somewhat messy to implement especially if dependencies have to be considered too... Far as compatibility goes, usually major versions 1.22.x, 1.21.x are not compatible with each other, service-updates and smaller updates (e.g. 1.22.1, 1.22.3, etc...) are cross-compatible unless there's some major fix that happened or a mod relies on a specific exploit or feature (that is pretty rare, however and have yet to see any mods play into game-bugs). Echoing others too, I think the issue too is reports would be either very detailed or lacking detail, plus with Github already being used for some mods (and its subsequent features being as they are), it's one extra place to keep track of bug-reports and compatibility notes, might be difficult to keep tabs on for mod-makers. As for abandoned mods, that's its own issue, I'd not be against project-management allowing you to list a mod as abandoned/no-longer receiving updates, but that'd be one extra thing for mod-makers to include so not sure if it's worthwhile (though, I've never developed plugins or mods so can't speak for that experience, user experience filtering by major versions already gives a fair indication of compatibility in my opinion)