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UnderwoodNC

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    More information about "Add To Games DB"

    Posted · Edited by UnderwoodNC

    2 hours ago, Unholy said:

    Thank you for the explanation! Yeah, it is a great way to do things, IMHO, and is very to how we do things between us regarding new content on Arcadepunk (and on other stuff/orgs I'm involved with). And yes, absolutely, a surge in BS data can be problematic. There is some kind of paradox with things that are largely community-based like LaunchBox; low or inexistent community input is very problematic, as is too much community input... And it's hard to find a sweet spot somewhere.

    Right now, I think that the best would be an easier way to add to the database from the software itself (a little bit like how community star ratings are added by the users currently, for example), but in a way that would avoid getting swamped under a sea of useless data, as you explained very well with your reservations. It can be achieved with the combination of a number of things; a big one that has worked very well in such area in projects I am involved with, is with an internal "user rating," so basically, if a user sends you garbage data, that user would then be internally  flagged and his/her "contributions" will then stop reaching the assigned content approval team (while the opposite thing would happen with users that contribute in the right way). Such a system can be a little overwhelming at the very start, because all users will start with the same internal "rating," but things will typically fall in place very quickly, and usually stay that way once it is reached. 

    I tried to explain everything in the simplest way I could think of, in a language that isn't mine, so please excuse me for any mistakes.

    Anyway, I LOVE LB, I was a VERY early adopter, and you guys proved yourselves to be wise in the way things are run. So thank you!! 

    I would love an API-driven approach.  Any crowdsourced data is going to have varying degrees of quality and require a manual review mastering process.  That’s just the nature of the beast at the moment, even wikipedia has manual editors.

    Around the time I had to step away, they were working through implementing multilingual support in metadata entries.  As I get up to speed, I’m interested to see what approach was ultimately taken there as well.

    I do know that when I complete it, it will only be text data.  I’m leaving out image upload support as that ended up causing a lot of duplicate images to be uploaded.  I can add some image comparison logic, but those types of algorithms aren’t 100%.

    I should be able to focus on it toward the end of the week, and am definitely open to any feedback on what people would like to see from it.  

    One thing I am considering is to only support adding new games to the database.  The previous version allowed modifying existing entries, and I imagine that is where the majority of the junk data originated.  

    At the very least, I think I need to highlight the differences between the user’s data and the games database’s data, with an “Are you sure” button before the user can submit the changes to the database.  Maybe even a Visual Studio-esque diff tool to indicate which differences should be selected for submission to the database.  

    For example, the user may select a game to review its metadata and say, for this game, the description in the database is better, so replace my description with the one from the database, but my genres are better, so submit the genres to the database for consideration.

    It becomes a more manual process in that case, but it can still be done within the app instead of having to go out to the database web interface, so I think it’s still a better user experience.  The added step should help curb bad data from being submitted haphazardly just because the plugin says you have additional or different metadata for a game than the database.

    More information about "Add To Games DB"

    Posted · Edited by UnderwoodNC

    Sorry for the long delay, all -- moving, new job, lots of changes, but thankfully positive. 

    I've updated this plugin to work for the new LaunchBox v.Next -- I haven't made all the changes I want to yet, and I have only tested a few games, but the plugin ran successfully throughout the submission process.  I hope this works for everyone, but if you have any issues, please let me know.

    One update I still need to make is regarding duplicate images, as @Mr. RetroLust mentioned above.  I'm still getting caught up on everything essentially over the last year and a half, but that's one issue I want to tackle sooner rather than later.

    • Like 1
    More information about "Add To Games DB"

    Posted

    Hey gang, I didn't see these messages, sorry for the delay.  I'll take a look at Next this weekend and see what I need to do to update it.  I also need to go ahead and open source the code on GitHub, I keep meaning to do that.

    Thanks guys, hope you've all been well!

    • Thanks 1
    More information about "Add To Games DB"

    Posted

    Hi all, work has kept me away for too long, but I'll look into these asap.

    @Expello - Agreed, it sounds like something may have changed with the form to add games, maybe an ID or class name change, I'll check it out.

    @Xirious - It may be an incompatible driver.  The automation tool, Selenium, uses a driver to load Chrome and interact with the browser.  The latest version of chromedriver.exe can be found here:  https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads  Please try updating that driver and replacing the existing chromedriver.exe in the AddToGamesDb folder.  It sounds like that will fix it, but let me know if it doesn't and I'll keep it on the list when I can make a batch of updates.

    @Juan-K - Hi Juan-K, other users have also mentioned Firefox issues.  This may also be an outdated driver.  Firefox has gone through some major updates recently, so I wouldn't be surprised if the driver to control Firefox needs to be updated as well.  The Firefox driver in the AddToGamesDb folder is called geckodriver.exe and the latest version can be found here:  https://github.com/mozilla/geckodriver/releases  Please try updating to the latest driver and let me know if you run into any issues.

    Thanks everyone for your patience!

     

    • Thanks 2
    More information about "Add To Games DB"

    Posted

    I still need to take a look at this.  It looks like you don't have Chrome installed, which is the default browser it uses.  Do you have Firefox installed?  It should pick up Firefox and use that, but I haven't tested thoroughly tested that functionality yet.  I'll uninstall Chrome hopefully sometime this weekend so I can test this out and get a fix for everyone.  

    More information about "Startup Video Manager"

    Posted

    COMException would be triggered by the VLC implementation.  Do you have both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions installed?  The default is typically the 32-bit version, but LaunchBox is a 64-bit app, so it needs the 64-bit version of VLC currently.  I haven't had a chance to work with it much more than that yet, but it's next on my list.

    More information about "Add To Games DB"

    Posted

    Thanks @massatomic I haven't had a chance to do a lot of testing with Firefox yet.

    @Chris Kant If it's showing as Add New Images, but the game doesn't have a LaunchBox Games ID, then it found that game in the latest version of the database that was downloaded.  If that's the case, please try to have LaunchBox find the game again, it should be there.  I'll check add image button issue this afternoon.  Are you also on Firefox?  I'm not sure what you mean by it will always have your login data for Chrome?

    More information about "Startup Video Manager"

    Posted

    The next release is also going to correct my middle of the night coding misspellings -- wow.  BoxBox and BixBox.  It's like Double Dragon III all over again.

    Some neat enhancements for it on the way, along with another plugin that I hope will be wrapped up this weekend.

    More information about "Add To Games DB"

    Posted

    Right-o, I've added it to LB to test and found an issue for existing games without any images, and it's fixed in the release I just uploaded.  Thanks for your patience @flores9 in figuring out what was going on, taking care of issues like this helps to make this an even better plugin for everybody, and it's much appreciated.

    • Like 1
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