About
RSS Feeds
User Accounts
Privacy Policy
Plugin Authors
Tags
Posting Guidelines
About the LightWave Plugin Database
This site was created in response to a thread on the NewTek forums suggesting that NT build a plugin repository. Because of copyright and manpower issues a repository seemed unlikely to ever happen. And while Flay.com is a great site and has a searchable database of plugins, it's lacking in some items such as RSS feeds and the ability for users to directly add to the database.
RSS Feeds
There are two types of RSS Feeds on this site. The main feed, linked in the Navigatio menu, which contains new and updated plugins along with the "Today's Plugin" entry. Then there are search feeds, any time a search is done there'll be a link on the results page which is a unique feed for that search, allowing you to see when there are new matches. Because Author and Tag lists use the same search page, they also have RSS feeds of their own.
Because you can subscribe to many different search result feeds, they each need to have a unique name to seperate them in your feed aggregator. By default thay have the current date and time as the name. To use a custom name, click the Name Feed link on the results page, you'll then be given a form where you can enter the desired name. Clicking the Name Feed button will forward you to the feed's full URL, which you can then subscribe to. The Author and Tag feeds are pre-named with the Author or Tag text respectively.
User Accounts
In a perfect spam-free world, access would be completely open. But we don't live there. Thus before adding plugins or posting comments, a user must first register via the Login page. Accounts are used to keep track of who posted what, useful info should the mighty banhammer need to be used.
Additionally, to prevent vandalism to plugin entries, users can only edit the entries which they have submitted.
Privacy Policy
The only data required to open an account is a username, a valid email address and a password. Of that data, the username is the only item which will ever be shown on this site, specifically it's shown with comment postings.
After activation the email address is used only as a login name. However, for the duration that a user is logged in, the email address is stored un-encrypted in a cookie on the user's machine along with a unique token. The token is a hash of several different values, it's purpose is to validate the login session.
The email addresses gathered via user registrations, will never be sold or traded.
At the moment, Google Mail's server is being used to send the activation and password reset emails.
Plugin Authors
Because of the anti-vandalism mechanism in place you won't be able to edit your own plugins' entry without first getting your own account. Eventually there'll be a page where you can request that an entry be reassigned to your account, but till then just email me the entry's URL here.
Tags
Tags are used to group together plugins which have similarities. For instance a Modeler plugin which creates tubes, and a surface node which draws tubes on a surface could both be tagged with Tubing. Thus grouping the two dissimilar plugins by their purpose. Now whenever the tag Tubing is clicked both of those plugins will be listed, along with any others which have been tagged with Tubing.
Another use for tags is to group plugins that are part of a collection. Say an author has a collection of plugins, each plugin could have it's own entry which describes just that one plugin. But tagging them all with the name of the collection allows them to be grouped together.
Posting Guidelines
When using the Add New Plugin page the following guidelines should be followed:
URL/File Upload. Only submit the URL of the plugin file if the creator doesn't have a page for it, otherwise submit the page's URL. If uploading files, be sure you have permission to do so. However if the plugin is old or has been abandoned by the author, please upload it because this may be the only place a user will be able to get the plugin.
Summary. This is what is show in the lists and feeds, and as the Details text if the Details box is left blank. The first letter will automatically be capitalized and any trailing periods will be removed when submitted.
Details. If there's no better way to describe it, then using a bit of text from the author's site is allowed. But credit should be given below the text, something along the lines of: "Text courtesy author's site."
Images. Just to be safe, don't use any images from the author's site. Any examples or UI screen captures should be your own.
Availabilty. The definitions are thus:
Commercial: It's not free but, it may have a limited demo version.
Free: Full functioning and no cost.
Open Source: The code used to make the plugin is readily available (it doesn't need to be GPL to count). All uncompiled LScripts (.ls) should have Availability set to Open Source.
For LScripts. Unless noted by the author as being incompatible, check the boxes for Win32, Win64, MacPPC and MacX86. For Host, you'd check LScript in addition to which type of script it is (Layout or Modeler).
And take note, none of the fields will except any HTML or SQL code.
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