Jason Carr

Hahahaha. Cop out. :P

Thanks all. Wanted to say thanks to @Cebion, @FistyDollars, and @TheTabman for their incredible dedication to moderation today. @HardcordHubz and @CADScott aren't far behind. Here's the current running after our first day: 1. Cebion 2. FistyDollars 3. TheTabman 4. HarcoreHubz 5. CADScott 6. wkLeon 7. Darklesh 8. donarumo 9. SentaiBrad 10. BilH12 Thank you all! There's three more weeks to go, of course, so it's still anybody's win.

Very cool @CriticalCid. That's actually genius, the concept of using videos as themes...hmm. Thanks a million for that feedback. That's probably the most genius feedback I've gotten this year. Let me ask you guys this...what if, for themes, we offered video backgrounds that could be customized per platform (or per list). Then we could allow other simple tweaks like the locations of the lists and details, etc., but it seems like it would make the incredibly daunting theming task much, much simpler. Any thoughts? I've got goosebumps, Cid. Seriously, thanks for this. Platform videos are definitely a great idea as well and planned; not sure if they'll be a focus for 6.0 yet.

Thanks guys. Yes, I do plan to enable platform changes.

I think this is actually because we don't search the platform name, only the game title, overview, developers, publishers, and genres. Obviously we probably should search the platform names as well. Thanks for the ticket.

That's a really odd one, @Antropus. I've never seen or heard of that happening, so maybe it's a really strange formatting issue or something of that nature; I'll have to dive in and run some tests to reproduce it. If you can create a bug ticket for it I'd appreciate it.

Thank you guys. I ended up implementing adding new games first after all. I do plan to come back to this soon, though to add the fields I discussed above. @Samer, that makes sense. I can add those as well when I add the other fields. Alternate titles are interesting because it's not always associated with a language; sometimes it's associated with a region. For example, some games are named differently in Great Britain than in the US. I like your Media field idea, @M-6502, so I'll add that as well. Manuals we'll probably add eventually as well, but probably not at this point.

Sounds like it's competing with the Controller Automation features. So turning off controller automation should stop that, I think. I don't think it's on by default (it's a premium only feature). Can you confirm that?

Thanks, @XoRRoX. From what I can tell LedBlinky will be fairly easy to implement directly, so I'll probably just do that. Hopefully I can get to it soon.

Thanks guys. In the future we may provide more granular approvals for particular fields with added games. As it is right now, I would suggest accepting anything that isn't outlandishly poor or incorrect. If it's just the wrong release date (for example), or the overview is poor, or something of that nature, I think it'd be better to accept it so that it at least gets added to the database, especially if it has a decent image attached. Someone will certainly notice it later and correct it if need be.

For me it was the Wolfenstein 3D shareware episode on MS-DOS. Wasn't the whole game, but sure felt like it when I was 9. My Dad tried to keep me and my brother from playing it for a few weeks, but somehow we ended up playing it. Between my brother, my Dad, and I, we mapped out all 9 levels on graphing paper. Lol. The other most notable games that I beat early on as a kid were King's Quest V, King's Quest VI, and Master of Magic. Later on, I felt like I was king of the world when I beat DOOM II. Come to think of it, I really didn't beat that many games as a kid.

With the LaunchBox Games Database now getting into full swing with game additions, we feel like it's a good time for our first moderation contest! Starting from the date of this post (April 30th, 2016), a contest is on to see who can moderate the most changes between now and Saturday, May 21st. The contest will run for roughly 3 weeks. We feel a time-based contest is a better choice to help promote quality moderations instead of focusing on just the total number. During that time, any and all moderations count, including rejections. We have Submission and Moderation Guidelines for both contributions and moderations that should be followed as closely as possible. Not following the guidelines will unfortunately disqualify you from the contest, so please review the guidelines. The prize will be a LaunchBox Premium forever license for the top 3 moderators. If you already have a premium forever license, you'll be able to gift the license to a friend. If you are not yet a moderator, then good news everyone! All you need to do is make 25 approved changes to the database and you will automatically become a moderator. Rejected changes count against that number, so be sure to make accurate and legitimate changes or additions. Changes are on a per-field basis (not a per-game basis), so 25 changes should be relatively easy to achieve. We know that not every feature of the database is perfect at this point; we're still working on moderation comments and game deletions, for example. These features should be out soon; please do your best to to follow the guidelines as best as you can right now, and they will be revised when need be. If you would like to discuss the Guidelines then please do so over at the official Guidelines forum thread. Thank you everyone; feel free to comment here with any questions. :)

Hi @XoRRoX, the joystick buttons shouldn't do anything when LaunchBox isn't in focus, sans for the controller automation stuff. Are you seeing the buttons doing things even when LaunchBox isn't in focus? I'm guessing maybe it's something else on your system that would cause that.

Lol. Yeah, I'm more concerned about not ripping people off than anything else. I don't want to use anyone's videos if they don't want us to, and restricting that with moderation would likely be pretty hard. That said, if ever we prove it to be possible, I would like to jump in that direction. For example, if Progretto approved us using their videos, it might be a good test to just upload their videos in batch and see what the bandwidth requirement might be for Arcade only. Just a thought. I haven't tried getting in touch with them at this point, but maybe eventually we can see what they say. My guess is that EmuMovies just got permission from Progretto to use their videos.

Good points @SentaiBrad. Screenshots are relatively easy to take and should be easy enough to get right. Box art may be different.

Ah, that is a good point. Rejecting poor quality images does encourage people to contribute new ones.

I should note that there is definitely a history of people using other people's videos across sites and such. I noticed that many of the EmuMovies arcade videos are the same videos as the Progretto VideoSnaps here: http://www.progettosnaps.net/videosnaps/ It does look like the EmuMovies videos are encoded a bit differently, though. I'm not about to try and figure out who had the videos first or if they had permission to use the other people's videos, but it may be that we could use Progretto's videos since they're freely available to download. We may want to get permission from them though. Would love to hear peoples' thoughts on the matter.

I do indeed plan to eventually. There are several major challenges with videos, but the benefit of becoming a great source of videos too could be HUGE. So that definitely intrigues me. Some of the challenges: - Bandwidth requirements - Requirements right now are no big deal, hosting images is still relatively cheap, even if we got incredible amounts of traffic. However, videos may prove to be more of a problem. It's hard to know what to expect and how much bandwidth would cost, so I'm not sure if we would need a way to monetize that feature or not. That said, I don't really want to tackle it unless we can make the videos free. It's something to think about; I don't want to not do it for that reason, but it is a challenge. - Not ripping off EmuMovies - One concern I have is that users would just upload videos from EmuMovies and other sources that we really shouldn't steal from. It's actually very difficult to create quality videos like EmuMovies has, so we'd need some *very* dedicated people in order to get a decent number of videos created. - Moderation - Along the same lines, how can we tell if a video that was uploaded was ripped off from somewhere that's going to cause a problem? There are other potential challenges with moderation as well. So those are just some thoughts that have been bouncing around my head. I'm still excited about the possibility; I hope we can get there.

:) Great ideas guys. The concept of user themes still excites me; it's a major challenge but I'm hoping to start looking at it for Big Box soon, then LaunchBox will probably come after.

Thanks @Dal, the video is marked as private, so we can't see it. Probably the best thing to do would be to mark it as Unlisted, so that it only shows up for those people that have the link. :)

Hi @Antropus, yes, for games that use ROM files, the best way to check for duplicates is just to look to see if the ROM file path already exists. I think I actually do the same thing for other types of games too (whether it's a Steam game, MS-DOS game, whatever).

100% agree. Screenshots should be exactly how they were taken and never blown up. I'm on the fence whether we should be rejecting screenshot contributions that are blown up (especially if there are no other screenshots for the game), but ideally, yeah, I agree.

TheTabman said Can I be hopeful that with the addition of a "add game" feature, there will be eventually also a "mark game for deletion" (to be reviewed by an admin) feature? Yes, absolutely. That is coming. I'm working on adding games as we speak, could be done today. Then we'll move on to those types of things.

Very cool @M-6502. Very nice art indeed. :)

SentaiBrad said Updated the guidelines. Ha, beat me to it. Thanks, Brad. :)