Would you prefer your projects here passworded?

[DaMan]

Thanks for the heads up on the Zelda Classic password remover. I don't know why I never though to Google that. People who don't turn on the map need to DIAF nobody got time for that.

[Blox]

Seeing that I do things for the sake of doing things and for the sake of people using them, it would be a very strange decision to arbitrarily lock it up as if I am the only one worthy of tinkering with it.

It's also sad that people are locking their shit up in many other places than this LoZ community you speak of, including people fucking up their Warcraft 3 maps so that nobody can take a look inside them.
It is sad because it doesn't discourage the sleazy type who truly want to do some dirty shit, but it sure discourages the nice people who just wanted to learn from it - or fix something about it - and who won't look for a way to crack it open.

By building up a "passwording" trend in a modding community you are thus effectively creating a self-strangling community, because I already know that a lot of people have had their first modding experiences around ZDoom by modding their favorite mods - some luckier than others, since the internal quality can vary a lot. ;^)

Beyond that there's also the issue of authors leaving indefinitely, leaving their stuff unfinished, and the moral question of "how would the reception to me cracking the mod open and continuing it myself be?" arises.
While in an open community you won't have to bother your mind with finding a way to successfully crack it open and the reception to that; and only in the case that nobody wanted issues with the mod fixed (heh) or you're doing something very strange with the mod will you face much hostility.

[Marisa the Magician]

Don't forget highly restrictive EULAs and such (which are more commonly found in Minecraft modding).

[Zanieon]

AFAIK, only Classic Doom and Unreal Tournament communities works in this true style of a "community" with open source things and persons doing what Blox said about fixing bugs of the content of members who don't appears for a long time.

By what i saw, other communities including the Doom 3 specific and all Quakes kinda do this, they all compile their work to nobody else than the original devs access them.

[Marisa the Magician]

I'm glad I'm part of both of said communities. And speaking of open source, I started putting up my modding work on GitHub. Licensing the code under MIT and the assets (those that I made myself, at least) under Creative Commons.

[XCVG]

The Doom community is, by far, the most open and collaborative mod community I've been in. Being able to derive, borrow, and combine is a fantastic freedom, and the general attitude it breeds is open and inviting. It actually came to me as a shock that other communities weren't so pleasant.

Take the Bethesda (Fallout 3/NV, The Elder Scrolls) modding community. A very useful and popular modpack was taken down, because modders couldn't stand that their work was being... uh, actually, I still don't understand their objection. It's not like they weren't being credited or the compiler was adding porn to it. Most mods have disclaimers saying you can't make derivatives, upload it to other sites, or anything, which I find a bit arrogant. The sense of ownership- the general attitude of I made it therefore it's mine and only mine- is a bit absurd to be honest.

Personally, I'm in favour of paying it forward when it comes to mods. I'm taking something that already exists and making more of it; it's only fair that I allow others to do the same. That so few seem to ascribe to this philosophy is quite disappointing to me.

From a technical standpoint, I don't think it's possible to lock WADs. It is possible to encrypt ZIPs and I think zlib has decryption support, but you'd still need to store the key somewhere. I'm not even in favour of seeing this capability in GLOOME. Might I suggest third-party wrapper solutions for those who really must lock their game up?

[Gez]

You can encrypt a zip, but if you want people to be actually able to play your mod, you'll have to give them the password.

It's the basic issue. You cannot give people the ability to access some data while denying them the ability to access this same data.

[Siberian Tiger]

Would you prefer your projects here passworded?

No.

It's a terrible idea; I already posted my thoughts on this[1].

[Marisa the Magician]

Speaking of encrypting archives. That reminds me of a recent project I got interested in. A PC port of the Umineko PS3 version, where the game archives are password protected and require you to own both the original PS3 and PC games in order to stitch together a 27-digit password following some instructions about file sizes and numbers in the manuals.

Then again I suppose this is done to support the original devs.

[Nash]

My main beef with Quake modding communities and also the Clickteam community, locking up their source and code hoarding. This is why I've abandoned Quake modding more than 3 times. I just can't learn anything at all. No one is teaching anyone anything. Good riddance Quake modding community, there's your reason why Doom modding is still alive in 2015 while Quake is dead as shit

[Tormentor667]

In my eyes one of the reasons that the Doom commnity is still alive after 20 years is, that every content is accessable, editable and trackable somehow. Changing this kills the community.

[TheBadHustlex]

It's rare to see a mod where all the resources are 100% origial content, which would be the only understandable reason to protect a project from beeing opened up by other people. Even then, it would be weird, as G/ZDoom is supposed to be an open-source-based community. I'd say if you don't want people to use your (original!) stuff, just tell them that they should'nt do that/should ask for permission first.
So no, I wouldn't like pw-lock at all.

[Hisymak]

Speaking about whether it is possible to really effectively protect/encrypt your projects.

There is actually one "way" - to zip your pk3 with 7-zip instead of standard zip. There are people who have no idea about the existence of 7-zip and try to unzip pk3 files with standard Windows zipping program or with WinRAR. That will of course not work for 7-zipped pk3s and people will think that the pk3 is somehow protected. I must admit that I personally thought it too in early time

But now let's be serious. There is a real way to protect your projects, but that is applicable only for map ACS scripts or ACS libraries - not providing the source code of the scripts. As far as I know, ACS scripts are the only resource in Doom which is compiled from source form into binary form and the game doesn't need the source form to run. But anyway, deleting the source of ACS scripts is really bad and should not be done. One reason is that when you lose your source (your disk dies or whatever) then you're not able to retrieve it again, and also other people are not able to fix your script (or help you) if there is any serious error (in big projects like Jumpmaze it is common practice to fix other people's maps and scripts). And even if these are not your issues, people still may have a need to look into your scripts to for example find out how things are implemented and how your stuff work and may get inspiration for their work and learn something new. So I believe that including your script sources is common practice and decency in this community. When someone sees that there is no script source in your map then he will certainly get upset.

[Worst]

Here's a short list of steps to protect your wad from any unauthorized edits:

1. Never release your wad online or otherwise
2. Invite people to play your wad at your home
3. ????
4. PROFIT!

[phantombeta]

@Hisymak
There's decompilers for vanilla ACC.
However, there doesn't seem to be one for GDCC or any other non vanilla ACC ACS bytecode compiler...