TMC

The shared content model

Ownership, visibility, engagement switches, archiving and API exposure — the behaviour every content item has, in one place.

Every content item — mod, asset, server, app, community, collection, group, article — carries the fields on this page. They mean exactly the same thing on each of them, and they are enforced server-side rather than by whichever form happens to be showing.

Ownership and access

An item has one owner, the account that created it. Beyond that, access is granted explicitly:

Grant Lets the holder
READ See the item even when it is hidden
WRITE Edit it
DELETE Delete it

A grant goes to one member or one group, never both at once. When it goes to a group, every member of that group inherits it — which is the main reason groups exist beyond being a roster.

A group is both a grantee and a target

A group can hold a grant over somebody else’s mod, and somebody can hold a grant over the group itself. Those are separate: handing a group WRITE over your mod does not hand its members WRITE over the group.

Staff can act on any item. Everything else — including every API write — resolves to the same check: you own it, you hold a WRITE grant on it, or you are staff. There is no path that is more permissive than the edit form.

Visibility

Three independent switches, regularly confused:

hiddenbooleandefault false

A draft, or a moderation hold. The item is removed from view entirely. For anyone without access it behaves as though it does not exist — reading it by id through the API returns 404, not 403, because a 403 would still confirm the id is real. Its relations are hidden with it.

nsfwbooleandefault false

Adult content. The item stays listed, but is filtered out for viewers who have not opted in, and is excluded from the anonymous API surface.

archivedbooleandefault false

Retired by its owner, but kept readable. It stays visible, keeps its stats and its engagement history, and is simply flagged as no longer maintained. This is the honest option when a project is finished — hiding it breaks every link to it, and deleting it destroys the discussion around it.

Deletion is a fourth thing, and it is destructive: it cascades to media, releases, comments, reviews, ratings, follows and permissions.

Engagement switches

Owner-controlled, on by default, and enforced server-side rather than by hiding a button:

Switch Governs
allowRatings Likes / dislikes on the item
allowReviews Written reviews with a star score
allowComments The comment thread
allowMedia Whether members without edit rights may contribute to the gallery

allowMedia is on by default because community screenshots are the point. Your team can still hide or remove any contribution, and chooses which ones are promoted into the main carousel.

A collection has no allowRatings. Collections cannot be rated at all, so the switch would be a control that silently does nothing.

Turning engagement off shows a notice on the page — except on items marked isOfficial, which are trusted and do not get the warning.

Official items

isOfficial marks a first-party or trusted item. It is admin-only: set from the admin panel, never by the owner. It suppresses the “engagement disabled” warning and adds an Official badge to the card.

API exposure

apiPublicbooleandefault true

Whether this item may be read through the anonymous, unauthenticated API.

On by default: a published item is already readable by anybody with a browser, so refusing the same handful of facts to a script would be theatre rather than privacy. It is a switch because “readable on our page” and “harvestable in bulk by anybody” are not the same thing to everyone, and the owner is the one who gets to say so.

It governs the anonymous surface only. An authenticated key belonging to somebody who can already see the item is unaffected — this is a publication choice, not a permission.

subDisabledbooleandefault false

Opt out of one-click subscribe/install through the official app, leaving only a manual download.

It exists because the install path is per-app — a plugin describing where a mod file goes for that game — while the failure is per-item: a mod that ships an installer executable, or lays its archive out differently from everything else for the same game, cannot be placed correctly even though every other mod for that game can. Rather than let it install wrongly and break somebody’s game, its team can say so.

Anonymous reads are additionally gated on the item being completely public: not hidden, not NSFW, and not filed under a hidden parent. See Reading without a key.

Licence and usage policy

Two separate things:

  • license — the legal licence (MIT by default).
  • The usage policy — the owner’s plain-language answers to what others may do: redistribute, modify, use commercially, require credit, require share-alike, feed to an AI model, use in NSFW work.

Every policy answer is a three-state value: yes, no, or not stated. Not stated is not “no” — it means the owner has not said, which is the honest default. See Permissions and usage policy.

Environment

Mods and assets carry an environment: ALL, SERVER or CLIENT. It is not decoration — it decides which items are offered for a given install, since a dedicated server and a player’s game are the same files arranged differently.

virusScanLink is an author-supplied link to a third-party scan report (VirusTotal, Hybrid Analysis). It is a link the author is vouching with, not a verdict we produced. Our own results live on the individual uploaded files, and the page renders the two separately so a reader can tell them apart.

Timestamps

Field Means
createdAt When the row was created
updatedAt Any write, including automatic ones
lastEdit The last editorial change — what “updated” means to a reader

lastEdit exists because updatedAt moves whenever anything touches the row, including background jobs, and an item that shows as “updated 4 minutes ago” because a counter rolled over is lying to the reader.