To provide a method by which Wabajack can assist mod authors in maintaining creative control over their mods while still allowing for more rapid installation of mods
- Users can download a mod, change it and create an installer with Wabbajack that publishes these changes via binary patching this goes against usage restrictions for "no modifications of this mod are allowed".
- Users can extract BSAs with Wabbajack, going against warnings for no BSA extraction
- The nexus doesn't seem to provide a good way to track a modder's desire to not allow end users to modify their files
- Wabbajack allows downloading from 3rd party sites that does not maintain author's rights. We currently have a "who cares" attitude, which isn't condusive to collaboration with the modding community. It would be good to improve this situation.
- Wabbajack maintain a list of authors/mods who have opted out of allowing their mods to be modified.
- This list will be editable via a GitHub PR (a hassle for authors), or by including a magic string
WABBAJACK_OPT_OUT_OF_MODIFICATION
(or something similar) to their mod summary page. - Wabbajack will query this info during compilation and refuse to binary patch or extract BSAs for any mod in this list.
- Wabbajack will switch to using code signing for releases, and a non-exe distributed modlist. Modlists will become serialized blobs of data, and not executable code. This means users will know when they are using a unofficial build. And thus someone disabling these content control features will create a modlist that no official Wabbajack build will install.
- Wabbajack will scan files from 3rd party sites to try and find matches with the "opt-out" list. This matching will be done via SHA256 (not very useful) and via filename. So if author
modder334
has opted out and his mod containsmodder334s_immersive_cheese_reborn.esp
, Wabbajack will never create a modlist that downloads opt-out files from a 3rd party site.