Thanatos_Prime

Very impressive work in this thread. I hope I can get a clear logo from the title in this box image, any help is appreciated. Several tries and my meager Gimp skills just weren't up to the job.

To whomever is giving the person who is deleting C64 covers\box fronts an education I really appreciate it. They obviously didn't read the notes given to them with the last set they tried to delete, such as checking with GameBase64 before they tried to delete or make changes, so I'm not holding out much hope that this isn't the same person who submits the fake Wii games every week or so or the one that is obsessed with changing random game screenshots to things they obviously aren't like Control Panel info or Box fronts. However, it was nice to feel like someone is looking out for the platform. Thank you for addressing it quickly and knowledgeably. You made my day.

I've seen Unlicensed used in relation to Nintendo/Superfamicom games that were not officially recognized by the platform rightsholder. Homebrew can be for games not officially published or for games that came out after the "natural life" of the platform. So if someone made a Nintendo game for sale now, the art wouldn't necessarily be fan art, but the game would be classified as a homebrew. Alt names should be used for each individual name. On the Fan Art Background vs Clear Logo issue. At one time it was stated that text in Fan Art backgrounds that interfered with reading the clear logos should not be used, but that is very subjective and logo sizes change all the time. Some have taken this to mean no text whatsoever, no matter how small, which seems like overkill.

Anyone want to talk about the fact that lots of formats shipped games in magazines with tapes\disks attached to the magazine. Someone is trying to delete a bunch of the C64 games with magazine covers marked as box art that came packaged that way. I know we have MSX and Playstation media that came packaged similarly, not to mention all the plastic bag with a xerox inside for Apple, Atari and Commodore products. I think they should be marked as box art, but would love to hear a rational argument against it that doesn't start with "....it ain't box shaped".

There are likely things that could be done with the web interface to help. Only accepting JPGs for fanart backgrounds springs immediately to mind, as does the ability to retract a DB addition you made yourself and realize is incorrect in some way. However, there are limited funds and bodies to do the work. The roadmap for the next wave of work was voted on and prioritized and none of those items are in the current plan. We can submit requests, if you do it let us know so we can vote for them on the submissions\error reporting site. I believe this is the place. https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/launchbox/issues?status=new&status=open Someone please correct me if this isn't the right place for such things.

I can see this argument from both sides. On the one hand, people use regions when it simply isn't necessary and often in ways that cause problems. On the other hand if it truly is a single region game (leaving out ALL the ones where we later see that it isn't truly a single region release) then having it set for the correct region has no real impact. My vote is to set it once and leave it alone. Back and forth is a waste of everyone's precious and limited time. If it is already set to the correct region on a single region, let it stay that way. And I would like to reiterate the earlier point about the all caps reasons\explanations. Remember that many submitters do not moderate, so telling the same 3-5 moderators who already *know* the rules gets under the skin pretty quickly. You are preaching to the choir.

Primary name should be the North American one, other names as Alt names. Though, be careful. Some of the Fan Art boxes look really convincing, which causes some people to upload them as actual Box Fronts instead of correctly uploading them as Fan Art Box Fronts. Ignore Fan Art for game naming. If I'm unsure, I skip it and let someone who knows the platform better do the voting. While we are on the subject, remember that release date is based on whatever was the very first release date without regard to the region where that happened. So you will often get a game with a NA primary name and a release date over a year before that was released in North America because it is using the Japanese or European release date. Also, we try to avoid using Kanji in primary name but instead use the phonetic translation (there is probably a better phrase for this, someone help me out) so instead of using 絶対に本当！ ...we would use, Zettai ni hontō! Though again, kanji in alt game names is acceptable. Also you can use tools which allow you to take pictures or download the art to verify game names in other languages. I mostly use my cell phone and Google Translate, but I'm looking forward to trying this out: https://ian-nai.github.io/In-Browser-OCR/

Here is a good thread all about that subject.

Numbers aren't a problem. Doom 3 isn't a problem but if it was Doom³ then it might cause a problem. Though I remember at one point Jason mentioned that only the dashes in default names caused issues after some fixes he did, I'm not sure what the status on superscript numbers (power of like ³, ², ⁴ and so forth) and so try to avoid them.

Alternate Names cover a multitude of sins. One of them is to allow matching ROM names that might contain dashes, so they can include dashes.

It was already marked for deletion by another person and deleted from the DB before your request could be fully processed.

Sorry mate. I understand what you are saying and I fully disagree with you. Let users download everything in the database and then they can decide what to keep and what to delete to give the user the maximum amount of choice. We should be the arbiters of that choice as little as possible. You should spend your energy on getting the dev team to add the Cart Fan Art category and not in trying to break things so they don't download.

All database items should have regions where necessary to allow them to properly download. Let people make their own decisions about what they want to keep and delete locally.

Yes, something to differentiate them in the title and developer is a good one, though primary publisher is very often used. If you see anything in parenthesis it is likely because of this. Thank you for taking the time to find out beforehand because it does make it so users cannot download the correct graphics\art.

Before making it mandatory for Box art or if not set properly when the game itself was added, yes.

I saw another batch come through recently, only one had a message but it was not *that* message, so perhaps it was from another submitter. Currently, I am all caught up again. We need to get a third party commenting on this. I did check my settings and opened moderation from another rarely used browser and with my AV disabled just to be sure the issue wasn't on my end. Then did it from another computer but there were no more moderations of this kind.

Lol! Mood.

Mad as a hatter then as it is not there. I use URLs all the time and have never had an issue, however I don't see my own moderations so it could be that we are all having issues with the Reason area not working properly. It would be really hard to know. If this is the case I can see you being really frustrated lately. Might want to check AV and scriptblocking as it may be getting blocked by one of those on your browsers side. Some more testing may be in order.

And more... are these you?

This one in C64 just came through:

...and new changes of this type are still coming in without a link. After your last entry I got to a notification that there were no more moderations needed (Good Jorb!) and then I started getting more all without a link or info. If you are using some scripted or automated method of making these changes then your script\automation needs to be adjusted. If you are making changes manually I would really appreciate if you add a link as it will get people just jumping into the moderation stream to better understand our new paradigm.

You included the link in one or two of the posts. Out of hundreds. And I'm only assuming you did it in 2, as I only saw one. And that was after moderating over 100 of them.

Oh good, new information. It would have been really smart to have linked this Forum post when making the changes instead of just hammering the DB with them. Not everyone reads the forums over the holidays. That said, glad this is now working without all the extra alt names.

Thanks for posting. I was debating if I was being overly harsh declining some of the ones that made the least sense. I have no problem adding jpg (if that's all you can make or get) if there are none in the DB, but deliberately replacing good PNG screenshots with questionable and only slightly larger JPG files seemed a bad move. I wish I had read this 30 minutes ago, you would have saved me some agonizing.