Last Updated date for User Files

[ColinM9991]

This may be in the wrong forum as I couldn't really find a better place to post this.

 

It is simply to ask if it's possible for a "Last Updated" date to be added to the User Files section of the website so we can see when an item was last updated?

 

Obviously, any items which haven't been updated should not have this visible.

[ops]

Hello!

bumping this topic, as it would greatly increase the usability of the userfiles section (at a guessed low effort)

best regards

[Furiz]

That would indeed be useful, and really not something hard to add.

[Sunbather]

I also don't understand why such a basic feature isn't implemented. Having a hard time judging when or if a file was updated.

Edited December 29, 2024 by Sunbather

[cfrag]

Well, I fully agree, and I do not understand why ED, owning the entire User Files space, do not integrate mission discovery into DCS, and automatically update any content that you have downloaded when it is updated. Integration could then go one step further and also integrate mission upload to user files into Mission Editor, making that part so much less painful and better.

Here's to hoping,

[ColinM9991]

Bumping this as the most recent newsletter talks about howthe User Files section is often overlooked. Thank you to those that have also contributed in recent months. To be honest, I completely forgot I made this request over the years.

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/news/newsletters/eae6d1cc1970bf3ea19f2b42bc98e121/

Part of the reason why it is overlooked might be because it's not a very user-friendly experience. Investing some time in revamping the journey and improving the functionality might attract more users to it, but revamping the journey is well outside of the scope of this request.

Implementing a straight forward "Last Updated" date, that describes when the file was most recently updated, would be a great quality of life improvement as it means content creators don't have to add a new comment to inform users and those users don't have to check the comments or description to see if there has been an update.

Edited February 14 by ColinM9991

[cfrag]

2 hours ago, ColinM9991 said:

Part of the reason why it is overlooked might be because it's not a very user-friendly experience.

The year's still young, but we have a contender for "understatement of the year"! The UX is last millenium, and simply user-hostile:

• it breaks apart your mission description in a lame, 30 years-old attempt at preventing code injection (so "where" becomes "wh ere" or "update" becomes "upd ate" etc. As if no-one has heard of prepared statements. Terrible, crummy, old code
• The onus is on you, the content creator to provider (in an old, GeoCities-like interface) to provide information like player aircraft types, map, etc. -- all things that a simple script can read out of the miz file by itself. Clearly, ED don't care much about content creators, or they wouldn't deter them with such a crummy interface. 
• Remember that all users are logged into DCS. Why is that important? Because it would be trivial to write a script/interface for mission creators to share/publish AND UPDATE their contributions  from MissionEditor. 
• And players who downloaded missions can see updates for their mission as they become available.
• ...

All that (and a lot more) is what separates the pros from the amateurs, the good, community focused companies from fly-by-nite wannabes. I really hope that ED will some day soon realize that content creators are an important part of their community and extend a hand to make it easier for people to share and enjoy other people's work.

Yeah, I'm rambling again. It pains me that one of my favorite apps has such a sh¦%%y player-facing side.

 

[BJ55]

15 hours ago, cfrag said:

share/publish AND UPDATE their contributions  from MissionEditor

Who's gonna take the workload of checking if files are safe before they're uploaded in the DCS updates delivery server? You know, a lot of users have to make AV exclusions and some missions/campaigns need desanitizing, immagine if a bad actor steals the credentials of a contributor...

[cfrag]

15 minutes ago, BJ55 said:

Who's gonna take the workload of checking if files are safe before they're uploaded in the DCS updates delivery server?

Who's doing it now? Because right now it is being done. Making an existing process better is possible. Making it more efficient and user friendly shouldn't take 20 years if you attach value to it. I'm not saying it is going to be free. The opposite is true: caring for customers can be a significant investment. It means that you are showing dedication and care for the community. And there could be some payoff at the end. The perceived lackluster uptake of UserFiles may well be a chicken-and-egg problem: No one uses it because the interface is bad. The interface is bad because no one uses it. etc. 

22 minutes ago, BJ55 said:

immagine if a bad actor steals the credentials of a contributor...

What is keeping them from doing it now? In this day and age digital contributions is a process that has been well understood, solved, documented and freely distributed. A contributor can request a crypt key pair from ED, and their contributions are then encrypted not only tamper-proof during upload, it can be disabled at a heartbeat from ED at all clients who downloaded it. This is commodity software by now, implementations of this are cranked out by the dozen each day, and are part of many web publishing bundles. The documentation for writing this kind of software is openly available and has been for 20 years. I've implemented this kind of software more than 15 years ago, more than once. If I can do it as a side job, I'm certain ED's talent can if they set their mind to it.

The problem of Lua not being properly sandboxed points the finger at another rather glaring shortcoming on ED's side that I'd rather not dwell on, but it's hardly a good  excuse to make player's and contributor's UX as horrible as it is now. 

[ops]

bumping, as recently the userfiles were brought up again.

an "updated" date would tremendously increase the functionality.

along with a searchbox in the same form (not the general fuzzy search in the top bar, but as additional filter)