Mod Friend, the mod

Mod Friend, the website

I’ve noticed lots of players lately asking for other players to post lists of mods they play. Or mods they think are fun. Or just suggest random mods so they can try something new. It seemed to me that players were looking for new mods to play, but didn’t have a good way of finding them.

So I made a new website to help out called Mod Friend.

     
http://www.cuchazinteractive.com/mod-friend/

Mod Friend is kind of a search engine/recommendation service for mods. It builds on the popular MCF Mod list, adds a search engine, and adds a way to randomly pick mods based on properties like popularity, quality, and appeal.

The quality and appeal parts of the recommendation system are based on ratings from other players. I just released the website very recently, so the website doesn’t have much data to work with yet. That means the recommendations might seem a little too random. Don’t worry though, when the website starts to collect more ratings from players, the recommendations should get much better.

The popularity part of the recommendation system comes from Mod Friend, the mod.

Mod Friend, the mod

Mod Friend, the mod, is a mod for Minecraft that quietly collects information about what mods are being played and sends them to the Mod Friend server. The mod popularity data is used to improve the mod recommendation system on the website.

The data collected are painstakingly anonymized and handled securely to avoid leaking information about which players are playing which mods. I only care about which mods are being played and how often so I’m totally not interested in gathering huge profiles on players to do evil things with.

Mod Friend, the mod, is also open source, so you can check that the mod is doing exactly what you want, and nothing more. 

View the source code.

Don’t want to participate in the data collection effort? No worries, just don’t use the mod.

If you do use the mod, you’ll be helping to improve the recommendation system on Mod Friend though, so I and other players hope you’ll use it. =)