Regarding the following article

The Kodi Streaming Add-ons Tracker! (Voting / Online Status / Last Updated)

This is an excellent article; the graphic really clears up some confusion. So long as this forking epidemic continues, I think the page needs to be stickied and regularly updated, with all of the worthless forks clearly identified. Many of these forks are not really improvements: in some cases the previous (or revived) version is better at finding older content and English dubs of foreign films.

Wouldnt it be nice if–

– Developers used an add-on naming convention which has some relationship to the code ancestry, so you have some idea what you are getting and where the code branched from ?

– If you could tell before installing which apps force you to re-type the search every time you hit the back button?

– If developers cooperated to make one awesome app, instead of this constant forking?

– If they separated the providers package from the user interface, so you could get the GUI you want with the SOURCES you want ?

A lot of these forks are made by script kiddies who did not improve the code, they merely renamed the app and made a new icon. They have no problem-solving or strategic management skills that would overcome the need to constantly fork the apps and move the repos from one host to another. Just as the users need to understand the genealogy of these apps, they also need to understand that the apps are simply Kodi front ends for existing third party web sites. We will all keep playing this silly shell game until the developers learn how to use Tor & I2P hidden servers or the decentralized web, so repos dont have to keep moving.

https://medium.com/textileio/five-projects-that-are-decentralizing-the-web-in-slightly-different-ways-debf0fda286a
https://medium.com/textileio/walking-the-dweb-walk-9abc8b6e2b20
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentralisation-next-big-step-for-the-world-wide-web-dweb-data-internet-censorship-brewster-kahle
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> NoobsAndNerds Repo

This has been unreachable for a long time. Is it just down for me, or everyone else ?

> BoB is another fairly up and coming add-on.

What?! BoB is an OLD add-on which long ago disappeared from active repos. What am I missing here ???

> Abandoned but Still Working

> Covenant – Colossus Repo – This was my favorite add-on after Exodus went down. Unfortunately, the Colossus repo was deleted from Github and the developers seems to have abandoned it.

Okay, weird. I have it as version 999.999.9 and it still updates
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/covenantkodi/repository.colossus/master/addons.xml

> In my Covenant tutorial, I explain how Covenant works so much better than Exodus.

Okay, whatever. I still get better results with Exodus when searching for some older content and foreign films with English dubs.

> cCloud was a great add-on… still hosted in SuperRepo. It’s in the abandoned category because I believe it’s not being developed/supported anymore. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.

How do you get SuperRepo??? That’s been down for a long time! The current install instructions are linked right on the developers home page: http://ccloudtv.org/

But Ccloud does not really belong in a list of movie apps, since its mostly live streams.

> in September 2018, it was exposed that the developers of Gaia had cryptocurrency mining malware hiding in the add-on. Gee, I wonder if that’s why it was so slow?

I’ve been preaching for years that Kodi needs a CPU meter and internal task manager like Chrome, so you can monitor total and per-app CPU load. The warning continues to fall on deaf ears — just as the app uninstaller has been partially broken for 16 years and you need Noobs “Security Shield” to clean up the trash.

TVaddons claims to have a crypto-miner detector built into the Indigo app, but TVA also has a history of impersonating fans, perpetrating scams and pushing malware — so I dont know if the tool really works or if its made by the same guys who made the miner! Since they have collected over $100,000 in donations for other people’s apps, I really dont trust them not to mine cryptos.

crypto miner discovered in TVA pairing tool
by inAddons4Kodi

As a reminder to others, you can also look at ‘Settings | System | Add-ons | Running’ to see Kodi background tasks… but it’s definitely not convenient, and does not show CPU usage.

How to protect Kodi from cryptojacking

https://elevenews.com/2018/09/27/monero-mining-malware-affects-third-party-kodi-addons/

> Neptune Rising – This is one of my favorite because it’s a fork of Covenant. Unfortunately, Covenant isn’t maintained anymore, but Neptune Rising is.

I have Covenant as 1.1.4 and its still working, from that 999.999.9 repo mentioned above. Do you see anything wrong with that?

> f4mTester – I’ve heard this is a popular IPTV add-on. I also noticed that it seems to be included in every repository that I have. I tried it out and none of the links I tried would work.

It’s my understanding that this is related to f4mproxy, and some apps will use it as a dependency, to resolve dynamic stream URL’s where the true address cannot be bookmarked because it changes every 5 minutes to prevent direct linking by media players which cannot parse javascript (e.g. Kodi).

What is F4MTester Kodi Add-on?