The last post was made five months ago; the maximum "no post" limit before necromancy was suggested to be six months to a year so hopefully you'll find it okay that I'm going to add a post here.
The Celestia Motherlode is, sadly, nearly dead. The moderators don't seem to be accepting any more addon requests. I've submitted them and it was three weeks until I got a reply. Planet Nine (2016), Ultima Thule, Messier 87 black hole, none of those remarkable breakthroughs have an addon focusing on them in the Motherlode. No more active moderators, but we need new moderators. No more addons based on recent astronomical events. So basically, people can't submit their addons, which they've been working very hard on to get multiple people to download, on the site dedicated exclusively for doing so.
I've seen a load of good addons here on the Celestia Forums, by AnthonyBRusso, Lafuente_Astronomy, FarGetaNik, SevenSpheres, etc. and you just can't forget Celestia Origin. Unfortunately, mostly because the forums were down for a long time, the addons on this forum doesn't seem to be downloaded as much as those addons on the inactive Motherlode, so (based on what I've personally seen) very little people are going to find out about these good addons, compared to those that visit the Motherlode. I know the celestia.space site mentions that you can get addons in the forums, but I don't think that's helped much considering the relatively short amount of time that new site was up compared to the Motherlode.
I myself like the Educational Activities made by Frank Gregorio, even though they are outdated (referring to "Theia" as "Orpheus" in the Giant-Impact Hypothesis); I even have them myself an uninstalled Celestia Origin, though I don't think there's anything wrong in the latter. But more people will prefer Celestia Origin since it's larger and more updated. Even more, its main downloading method is muTorrent, which by itself is not illegal but has scared people into not using it due to its reputation for being used to download illegal content. So Celestia Origin is, sadly, far more overlooked.
LukeCEL wrote:when Celestia finally gets updated to 1.7, the data files will all be updated, making a bunch of add-ons on the site obsolete.
LukeCEL is 110% about that; some of the code might become obsolete in Celestia 1.7.0., and many of the addons on Celestia are either no longer needed or outdated, so... that just pretty much drives everyone else away. But I
personally think they can stay for various reasons, including nostalgia.
As for the main Celestia website over at celestia.space, it seems very modern and fresh-looking; definitely a good improvement from the previous shatters.net; the latter domain name also seems to have nothing to do with Celestia and thus would make people think it's different; thus the new main website is more attractive.
So the final big question is,
should all the addons that we've made here, such as the following: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7],
all be migrated to the Motherlode? And should the moderators of the forums also be moderators of the Motherlode? (I have no desire to be a moderator of both the forums and Motherlode whatsoever).
I will never use other people's addons without permission. Please answer your own answer; thank you.
