Jason Carr

Looking further, it looks like people are being extremely picky when approving or rejecting changes, which is great. That's exactly what we want, because it means we can achieve extremely high quality with the data. We won't have the problem of items sitting in the queue for too long once we add a lot more moderators, as changes won't take near as long to get approved or rejected. Going forward we're going to add an automated system where you gain moderator status automatically after a certain number of approved changes. This way you to have to prove that you are capable of making quality contributions, while also allowing us to grow the moderator base so that everything is truly community-moderated.

One example of a change in moderation is changing the title for "Arctic Active Rail Playing Game" to "Arctic". It's been moderated 11 times by 11 different people (lol). However, we can't agree on whether to accept the change or not, because some people prefer to keep subtitles like that while others don't want them. So it's been approved by 6 people and rejected by 4 people. Changes are only ever approved or rejected once the approvals are three greater than the rejections, or the rejections are three greater than the approvals at any one time. So that change in particular brings to light our need for some standards and rules. ;)

Good idea on finding missing data, @CADScott. We'll look to do that here at some point, though of course we need to finish up editing, moderation, and LaunchBox integration first.

Yeah, if your queue is empty, it just means that you've already approved or rejected every change yourself. So the remaining items are either changes you've entered yourself, or they're changes that need additional moderation from someone else.

Unfortunately I am still seeing the crashes every once in a while. Currently trying to figure them out; I'm still thinking they're probably game controller related, but haven't figured that out 100%.

Ah, sure. There are so many issues with AutoHotkey and game controllers right now due to the MS bugs that I might actually have to re-implement the premium game controller features without AutoHotkey. I'm gonna look into this tomorrow to see if I can sneak it into 5.10. Unfortunately there's nothing I can do to make AutoHotkey work correctly with controllers at this point.

Yeah, I think this will really help to improve things across the board. I still need to tweak LaunchBox to support all the various image types, but that is planned for 6.0. We definitely have some stuff in the moderation queue (79 data items at current) so help us moderate, guys! :)

Hi @CADScott, something like this came up elsewhere and supposedly the solution was to open the Game Controllers Control Panel applet and mark the one controller as the default controller. In Windows 10 it's under Advanced, Preferred Controller. Does that work?

Also, one more thing I wanted to mention...we've changed the list of image types to be much more extensive: Advertisement Flyer - Back Advertisement Flyer - Front Arcade - Cabinet Arcade - Circuit Board Arcade - Control Panel Arcade - Controls Information Arcade - Marquee Banner Box - 3D Box - Back Box - Front Cart - 3D Cart - Back Cart - Front Clear Logo Disc Fanart - Background Fanart - Box - Back Fanart - Box - Front Fanart - Cart - Back Fanart - Cart - Front Fanart - Disc Screenshot - Game Over Screenshot - Game Select Screenshot - Game Title Screenshot - Gameplay Screenshot - High Scores

Alright! I've opened up moderation for everyone in this thread whose forum email here matches their registration the LaunchBox Games Database. If your email doesn't match, hit me up here with your gamer tag and I'll hook you up.

Hi all, I just finally opened up changes, uploads, moderation for game images live on the site. Up next will be the ability to add and delete games. I know moderation isn't perfect at this point (we could do a lot of things to make it easier and more streamlined), but I'll be spending more time on that after we get editing squared away across the board. I'm about to open up moderation to the rest of the folks in this thread, so stay tuned. :)

Hey guys, the crashes I was seeing before I can't get to happen anymore. Funny thing is I haven't updated any code. So I'm actually wondering if Windows Updates might have been the culprit; I was seeing the crashes with consistency for a while, and then they just disappeared. So, first off, what versions of Windows are you running? If you can make sure your updates are all up to date and test some more, it'd be appreciated. If none of us are seeing the crashes anymore with 5.10-beta-3 then I'll call this fixed.

Wow, very strange. Did you restart LaunchBox after disabling controllers completely?

Hi @Drybonz, feel free to add a ticket for this. I don't expect I can make it a priority for the moment because I don't think that's a common scenario, but if we put in a ticket for it then people can vote for it.

Yeah, I'm getting the crash as well, so at least I can replicate, though it is random. Can anyone go back to 5.9 to confirm 100% that it doesn't happen with that release? Thanks guys.

Okay, good. Glad it's not an issue in 5.9. Odd that this just showed up in the betas, but this is now my top priority. Should be easy to figure out since not much has changed since 5.9.

Did it start happening with 5.9? Or the latest betas?

Okay, does the crash occur only in Big Box? Do the controller settings match exactly between LaunchBox and Big Box? Do you have AutoHotkey enabled for them?

External hard drives actually terrify me because of those issues. It's more expensive, but it's much safer to get a Dropbox account (which are now 1 TB large) and just sync to all your machines. That way you always have a backup in the cloud, and you can always restore deleted/missing files. If you get the extra versions feature, you can get back any version of any file, even from 6 months ago. It is expensive but I can't live without it these days. I subscribe to Crashplan on top of that for proper cloud backups (space is unlimited for that so I have like 15 TB backed up). Then there's the RAID 1 I use in my machines just in case a drive dies. I'm a little bit nuts I will admit but haven't had any data loss in 15 years. Still have my development projects from high school. ;)

Sigh, this is definitely caused by those rotten drivers. Try manually changing the game controller settings in the options to use the new XInput option. Turn off Use All Controllers if it's enabled.

Yeah, typically the files that go missing are the files that were in use at the time of the incident. It is possible that LaunchBox had a bunch of files open and hence they went missing during whatever file system error occurred. Are you using FAT32 on the drive, exFAT, or NTFS?

Hi @Scoremonger, thanks for reporting this. However, I am 100% certain that LaunchBox did not cause that data loss. In every single instance in the past where images/videos/whatever were lost, it was caused by something moving around (just looking in a different path and the files are still there), or user error. LaunchBox does not just go out and delete files, and it's impossible for LaunchBox to do that by an error occurring. Metadata getting corrupted in the LaunchBox.xml file is one thing, but completely missing files is very different. The only time when LaunchBox has any code to delete files is during image cleanup, but since obviously you didn't run that operation, it's not possible for LaunchBox to have deleted any files. Obviously though you've had file system errors; that's what's happened here. You don't have to have a bad drive to run into that issue. Sometimes a power loss or hard reset can cause these issues, and sometimes it's extremely hard to track down. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to back up your entire collection just in case a bad drive or file system errors like this occur; even though LaunchBox does not cause these kinds of issues, they can and will happen eventually. External drives are even more likely to run into issues like this due to always being moved around and plugged/unplugged.

Hi @AladdinSane, you're sure this is only happening with Demul? My hunch is it's those pesky failing DirectInput drivers again. Try disabling all game controllers in LaunchBox to see if that happens to fix the issue.

Gotcha. This is the same error that @scree was seeing I think. Seems to only happen on 32-bit machines.

Yeah, I've seen this too. I'll see if there are any updates to the forums software which might fix the bug. It happens with the changed user names too, but I've seen it happen even for original user names now. :/