[Beery]

I'm not sure this is wholly relevant to this discussion, but it may be. Here I go rambling on about my modmaking philosophy:

I think it's important to keep all modders working well together for the good of the community. That's why my philosophy has always been that mods truly belong to the community as a whole - not to the mod-maker alone. Also, when a mod combines many small mods, it's important to list the contributors. I've also found that it's a good practice to keep one's name out of the mod title. Finally, each modder's work should be clearly distinguished from that of another. This is the philosophy I used when building the team that made RUb so successful. We were all in it for the community and not for personal glory, so we shared all mods and the community benefitted greatly from the free access to all mods.

So here's my advice to all current modders:

1. Share your work with other mod-makers. By all means insist on getting a listing of credit for the mod, but let's not keep so tight a rein on our work that no one else can adopt a particular mod. If we all were to do the latter, this game would be a lot poorer for it. Sharing the wealth enhances a great mod's reputation, and makes the community so much richer.

2. If you build a mod, make sure it's unlikely to be confused with any other established mod. 'Real U-boat' and 'Improved U-boat' had this problem to a certain extent.

3. If you build a large-scale mod using bunches of smaller-scale mods from other folks, remember to credit them in the readme file.

Finally, it's important for the good of the community that no mod-maker gets alienated from other mod-makers, or from the community. We have a bunch of talented people working for our benefit. So let's try to keep people in the game.