New staff & the future of JKHub

No, JKHub is not shutting down and no, I am not leaving! Chill.

 

It’s no secret that the 20th anniversary celebration was a finale of sorts in terms of events around here. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that things have been quiet from our end in terms of announcements and whatnot. As this game and community ages, the harder and more work it is to conjure up news and events, as sad as that is. However, that doesn’t mean things aren’t going on behind the scenes or that we are shutting down, by any means. However it does mean we are exploring new avenues of keeping JKHub more affordable and sustainable for the coming years.

 

As you all should have noticed if you’ve spent any time around here, we have no ads on this site and we really don’t ask for money hardly ever anymore. That was partly because Caelum had been footing the bills for basically everything for a period of time, which got dumped on me when he left and I’ve been trying my best to do the same. We found out late last year that the software we use, Invision Community, has increased their pricing and forcing a monthly payment to use their software and get updates. As activity on JKHub goes down, prices go up. Not good.

I want to make it clear that we will never serve ads on JKHub, that's not a respectable solution for me, but we are looking into moving to a more lightweight and simple architecture, built from the ground up, to help cut costs and to streamline what we do best: mod and tutorial hosting. This will mean losing a lot of nice features that Invision Community has provided over the years, but the goal will always be to prioritize the features that matter most: mod pages with a download link, screenshots, description, changelog, download count, comments, etc. By the end of it, it may resolve a lot of minor gripes we’ve had over the years with the software we’ve been using, with no control to change it before now. With this new project, we’d have complete control, not to mention breaking free from being locked into an ecosystem that requires a subscription.

Originally we planned for Summer of this year, but that for is not happening. I’ve been doing a ton of testing behind the scenes and fixing bugs and stress testing on a completely different community. As of now, timeline is unknown but most likely not until 2025.

There’s also been a lot of brainstorming going on regarding opening up our community to more games than just Jedi Outcast and Academy, so that has been part of this whole project as well, seeing if it would be a feasible move to take on much more responsibility and work in the long run. If you are part of other retro Star Wars game communities that have modding scenes, let me know if they have something like JKHub available to them or have they resorted to moddb and Nexus Mods and reddit these days? Would there be a desire for a JKHub-like website for those communities? Would you be willing to help?

In recent weeks we dealt with multiple attacks on the wiki, which to be honest I’m shocked hasn’t happened before. We had our wiki configured so anyone can edit or create pages, which I assume was done by Caelum to leave as little engagement friction as possible and encourage more people to contribute. We have since changed that setting, after multiple attacks completely blanked dozens, if not hundred of pages. Luckily wikis are easy to rollback.

Though this event sucks, it does allow us to mention the wiki again, in case people don’t know about it, and to contribute to it if you have any knowledge to provide to it that is missing. Shoutout to @afi for being the arbiter of the wiki. It’s kind of a separate staff role but a staff role nonetheless. After this incident we have brought on @NumberWan as well to help staff the wiki, as he was already helping out where he could as a normal user. Big thanks to those two and anyone else that has contributed to the wiki! That is another big feature we provide that won’t be going anywhere.

In addition to NumberWan joining the wiki team, @Bart has joined the main staff team to help with file approvals and moderation. He’s been around for quite awhile and is both knowledgeable about many topics but also a kind and helpful presence. Welcome to the team!

Today I released the first of a new series I’m doing, called The Sounds of Jedi Knight. Essentially it is just another ambient sound video, but for each map of Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy, and maybe Dark Forces 2 if I feel up for it. The first video released today is for Kejim Outpost, the first mission of JK2. I decided to avoid music, to avoid copyright strikes, and I figure anyone could combine their own music to it in another tab if they wanted to. It’s a very calming white noise type of niche video that isn’t for everyone, but hopefully some people enjoy them!