Introducing The Windower Addon Directory

Hello!

I'd like to bring a bit of light onto a project I've been working on recently, which is the Windower Addon Directory!



One of the things that has always bothered me about Windower addons is actually finding what is out there. There's no real set standard for sharing addons, and trawling through github to find cool things people have created can be a bit of a pain, if I'm honest. I'm hoping that this site will help with that.

The idea is to, gradually, over time, build a centralised source of any publicly available addons on github. As it stands, my crawler (and code) is far from perfect, so I've undoubtedly missed stuff! I've added a submission form for repos the crawler didn't catch, which I will check over manually and add to the directory.

Right now at least, the directory is basically unvetted. I've fixed some obvious crawling errors here and there, but for the most part, it is entirely automated. This means that if you intend to use this, please read the warning I've popped at the top of the site, as I really don't want to be held responsible for you getting banned for downloading and using ShadyAddon69. Over time, once I have a solid list, I intend to go through every addon and at least categorise them, but this will need to be done manually.

I also intend to work out a way of dealing with the many duplicate uploads of addons, and determining which ones are the maintained versions, and which are not. For now, the site is using basic deduplication and taking the most recently updated lua as the "correct" one, but I do realise this will need a better solution in time.

For now, I hope you find a use for my little project I think is kinda neat, and thank you in advance if you decide to use it, or even better, contribute repos!

I get you're trying to do a good thing, but theres a reason most of these addons arent supported by windower. Even if we all know where to find them, you've just broken the first rule of Fight Club.

We know what anchor is but we dont tell people where to get anchor or how to use anchor. Its not to gatekeep, its to make sure that people who dont know what they're doing dont get themselves banned.

Neat project for sure--though I wonder if a simple "-Awesome" Wiki/markdown file on github would be more useful long-term?

What system do you have in place for repo owners to opt out of being scraped?

I appreciate what you're saying, and you present a good point, but I personally don't see the difference between someone finding an addon on github, downloading it without understanding it, and possibly resulting in punishment, and getting it from an aggregated source such as this. There's nothing stopping someone from just looking through github to find anything listed, my crawler is just using their API to find addons, ultimately, same as anyone can just find said addons using the right search terms.


There's currently no system in place, quite simply because this is all publicly accessible. Anything on the site can be found via a search on GH as I mentioned above. If there's a particular reason a repo owner does not want their stuff listed (but continues to want it publicly accessible?), I can look into it.

Thank you for your contributions, this will definitely be a helpful tool for those who want an easy and simple way to look up for their addons (and most updated versions).



You're the first person to name a specific addon. The post didn't mention Anchor at all, so if we're talking about "Fight Club rules" that seems a bit ironic.

This is a good idea, but is OP prepared to be the gatekeeper of other author's addons? The list is not curated as you say, which makes it effectively the same as searching "ffxi addon github".

Having a nicely presented list is great, but first time an addon on the list doesnt work or does bad things the onus will be on the list that addon came from.

What makes official windower addons "official" is that they are curated and their updates vetted.

Quite literally the first thing under the title on that page is a warning against what you said here.

"Here's the list of everything. You assume all risks. Dont @ me when you get banned cause you loaded dumb ***."

You know as well as I do that those warnings mean nothing and OP will get the blame regardless how many warnings there are.

You generate a list, you make yourself responsible for what's on the list.

Someone searching the Internet on their own and downloading something can only be on them.

One reason I don't want my stuff to be in this collection, but not the only reason, is that the links are not to the repo but directly to each individual lua file.

I need users to be able to see, for example, the main repo-related readme rather than the per-addon ones, but also the links to my discord, the links to my patreon (I don't have one, saying in general), etc, otherwise we have a Google Search Snippets issue. Furthermore, you are not linking to repo licenses, which depending on the license might not be allowed.

Websites are also publicly available on the entire internet, yet we have robots.txt and scraper exclusion for a reason.

(also you're listing a million library files that are useless on their own, but this is a minor detail)

Seems to me that if OP wants to take the blame that's totally up to them. Maybe some people are too stupid to search effectively.

On the other hand, most of them are just shovelware. It'd be more useful to have a curated list of ~50 worthwhile addons written by hand with information on them than an auto generated list of 700 links to trash. It's a little easier to sift through than other search methods, but it's still mostly junk.

FFXI basically runs on people working hard in their spare time to make addons work, and continue to work. I think this is a good idea and I hope the naysayers enjoy playing a laggy mess with non of the QoL features from addons stuff like this helps to support.

Every "naysayer" is already using a lot of these addons.

The concern is around how this list is generated and who is responsible for its content.

The idea of a centralized site sounds great but this is kinda throwing out AI slop vibes to me at least.

Here is some constructive criticism.
1) Ditch the whole massive list that is auto generated and instead hand tailor lists from safe to more risky.
2) Dont link directly to the lua file but to the owners repo itself.
3) Windowers official repo doesnt even really need to be listed here since all addons are in the launcher. Can make a note to check the launcher for official addons
4) If repos have a mix of safe and risky addons have a note that some addons from the repo could be risky.
5) If a repo author doesnt want to be in your list be respectful and remove them(or dont but then makes you seem shady and untrustworthy)

However I do think some addons/repos are better left in the shadows for reasons. We all may know something exists but doesnt need to be front and center on a site. It could also lead to bad things for noobs that dont fully understand what they are getting into.

Are you stupid? Did you just find these forums today by coincidence? You think people never talked about anchor here?

https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/58132/oathsworn-blade-master-trial-cleared/8/#3737450
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/58233/se-stepped-up-their-antibot-game/3/#3732925
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/58101/segments-are-pain/7/#3725081
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/53853/the-last-dance-iii-a-dancers-guide-new/39/#3718507
https://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/57797/gearing-pld-2024/#3698458

Just a few

Except no ones ever told anyone WHERE to find Anchor. I mentioned "this specific addon" because its one of the first ones you'll see due to it being alphabetically sorted. I could have referenced ASE instead, and guess what, that has been talked about here too. And yes, I'm aware that talking about it gives people a clue how to find it.

What do you mean how to find anchor? 3rd result https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=ffxi+anchor

Those are some fair points, and valid criticism. I appreciate that, thank you.

1) I'll make sure your addons are not included going forward, and include a form for those who also do not want their addons included. If I can build the site into something people are happy to use, in time I will include a way for authors to opt out of being included on their repos, but that feels very presumptuous of me to do right now.
2) I will sort that so instead of linking to the Lua directly, it goes to the repo. Unsure why I didn't do it that way in the first place honestly, likely just inexperience on my part.
3) Licenses is a good point, and again, my fault for lack of experience, I will fix this up. Thank you.
4) This will likely be fixed with the move to linking to repos, instead of linking to addons directly, but I will make sure I do a pass to filter out libraries.

On the whole, thank you for the measured feedback, I appreciate all of it considering your experience.


There are always going to be people that are going to do something stupid, regardless of warnings, and suffer consequences. I do not feel that alone is worth preventing to try to do something that might help the majority.


I like the idea of a curated list, maybe that could eventually be the main tab of the website with "All" being an alternative. Thank you for the feedback.


I was actually very very scared to share this site publicly and it took some convincing from friends to get me to do so, because I was worried it was just going to be labelled "AI slop".

I know you don't me, and I don't know you, but I can promise you I am very strongly anti-AI. I've spent the last year or so teaching myself python, as I already knew a fair amount of HTML, and Lua from my previous career. I've driven my poor friends completely insane with questions about how to do this, or that, etc. I understand why you would make that assumption in today's world, but at the same time, I'm a little hurt that my work isn't good enough yet to stand out from AI, yet. I can only improve. As for your feedback...


1) I won't be doing this, right now, at least. Maybe in the future when I can curate a list of solid addons.
2) See my reply to Lili above.
3) Fair point, I'll change that.
4) I can do this as I manually review repos after making changes.
5) See my reply to Lili above.

Thank you for your feedback.

Agreed with everything else, but... The punishment for using third party software doesn't vary by addon, so the warning should be universal as well. Players have been and will continue to be banned because they thought they were using acceptable addons. This is almost giving them a reason to point a finger at you when that inevitably happens.

Honestly, I appreciate what's trying to be done here... but this is not the place to talk about this stuff. We got all kinds of people on this site. Players who use windower, players who call windower cheating, buy gil, sell gil, bot 24/7, report people for botting, encourage tools, despise tools...

This is a no-win situation... probably best to just leave this stuff on GH and let people search for it themselves.

How do you get the addons, maybe it was mentioned in the thread, I just skimmed through the replies.

I see some of my old stuff I wrote years ago, not that they are any shady or dangerous but not something I'd recommend for daily use or should be considered experimental.

The core idea is neat though but would need to be structured/controlled in some way.

Edit: I see you mention a crawler, so you're scraping Github search result based on tags or something I assume via cronjobs/schedule?

I guess yeah its that easy

Oh hey, someone who actually wrote addons and has found their own addons on this database doesnt know how to download them.

While I'm sure Meliora would figure it out if they spent more than 5 minutes on this, you are vastly overestimating the intelligence of your average FFXI player.

Again, this isn't gatekeeping, I know its easy to find, the point is to let them find it. Its protecting the stupid idiots from getting themselves banned. I'm not calling Nalfey an idiot, and I sincerely apologize for the stray you're about to catch, but dude got banned because he was talking about his own addons in game.

Now theres a very good chance that someone who stumbles onto any of the more dangerous addons probably wont figure out how to download, set up the addon and load it, but in the event they do, their first instinct will probably be to ask their linkshell in game.

It found something I really didn't want people to find (I deleted it), not against the project in principle but its likely going to put more eyeballs on some authors stuff than they'd like. (people who back stuff up for personal use, were not the original author, have half baked/experiment/under development branches, don't want to support randos using their code etc...)

If people care about keeping their code private I'd recommend bitbucket over github anyways. (not an expert here, but when I wanted to back up sensitive code (not ffxi related) the terms of use seemed much more palatable several years ago (i set stuff up and roll with it until I feel there's good reason not to), someone more in the know may have a better recommendation).

>be FFXIAH user
>make plogon
>leave plogon repo public
>someone indexes public plogins
>get upset the thing you made public is public



There's tons of great luas out there that are absolutely fantastic and worth people learning about but are difficult to find if you don't know how to use github, this just comes across is incredibly gatekeepy to be upset about

Hot take: Gatekeeping is good

2, 3, and 4 do address my personal concerns entirely, if you implement those I won't feel like my stuff needs to be off it. Still I think an opt-out would be nice to offer regardless, as others might feel stronger about it.

You can always make the repo private if you have no intention of sharing it outside of a closed circle, and invite those you wish to have access to view it. I don't really understand this argument, honestly. If you leave it publicly viewable, anyone can find it, not just me with my crawler held together with duct tape and a prayer, anyone who can type the right search term into github. If you have zero intention of sharing something, you can, once again, just make the repo private, nobody is going to be able to find it then.

(This does not run counter to my earlier statement about authors opting out of the directory, I will honour that, absolutely, but not being on my website does not mean your addon is somehow granted a cloak of invisibility)




You're pretty much spot on. It's just a bunch of search and code-search queries with some deduplication and some logic to handle github's rate limiting, and a cron job to run a daily update that runs a similar search, but limited to uploads/updates in the past couple days, which is checked against current data.

One currated not windower approved list please
Not to use just to look