Moderator Guidelines and Contributor Rules

[lugnut2099]

Doh, hey, I'm the jackass that was doing those US NES release date changes... and I'm not even a noob, just hadn't been terribly active in a while.  Anyway, my reasoning was that I'd sworn that back a year or two ago I had looked into the question and read that, due to this being a US-based site yadda yadda, that the US date took priority just as the US title takes priority.  Not sure if that was ever actually the case and then the protocol changed in the meantime, or if (more likely) I just got confused way back when.

Anyway, yeah, I'll knock that off.  But man, the regional date entry does still seem like a pretty major omission, I look forward to that finally getting added whenever it may be.

[Thanatos_Prime]

Glad you've got your head screwed on straight, now, Lugnut. Glad to know we won't see more of those. 

[kurzih]

On 4/23/2016 at 2:49 AM, SentaiBrad said:

Moderator Guidelines and Contributor Rules

1. Do your best to check sources.
2. Game names should reflect the box of the game, with the exception of games that break scraping in LaunchBox.
   • For example, Alien 3 breaks scraping with it's superscript 3.
   • Characters like : and - and & are acceptable as long as they don't break the above rule.
   • Characters like - and + are not acceptable UNLESS on the Boxart or the Developer spelled the name of the game with them. Still cannot break the scrapability rule.
3.  
4.  

Hasn't that superscript rule/issue been obsolete for quite a long time?  Just tested the soon-to-be-changed 1080° Avalanche and had absolutely no issues scraping and getting the metadata & media from the Launchbox database.

[Thanatos_Prime]

11 hours ago, kurzih said:

Hasn't that superscript rule/issue been obsolete for quite a long time?  Just tested the soon-to-be-changed 1080° Avalanche and had absolutely no issues scraping and getting the metadata & media from the Launchbox database.

The degree symbol is not the same as superscript numbers. If it does change for those, I would expect to see a change to the game creation rules.

[Carcharoth]

Sorry for probably being the six million person asking this, but I made some searches and found conflicting info and I don't want to give a moderation "OK" to "bad" stuff.

ATM 2022.
What are the rules about porn and nudity games?
I know nudity itself is not allowed.
Is a pornographic game allowed? as long as the images proposed do not show nudity
Are censored images allowed?

Some Visual novels are showing up, the images provided do not show nudity, but on STEAM they have the "nudity" Tag so I was not sure what should I do.

Thanks in advance.

[Thanatos_Prime]

On 5/9/2022 at 8:21 PM, Carcharoth said:

What are the rules about porn and nudity games? Zero nudity in game images, the games themselves can be in the database, just no box art, screen shots etc. that contain nudity.

Is a pornographic game allowed? As long as the images proposed do not show nudity. Yes.
Are censored images allowed? NO.

Some Visual novels are showing up, the images provided do not show nudity, but on STEAM they have the "nudity" Tag so I was not sure what should I do. Nothing needs to be done.

 

 

[Fratopolis]

So I am new to being a moderator. I saw the initial rules but never saw the full rule list here until just now. Luckily me being OCD already followed those rules since that is how I would do it. I may even be a bit more strict in some instances.

With that being said. Who was adding all those CD-i disc images yesterday? All white label CD's I have been rejecting. Almost looks like promotional discs. At first I was finding the correct disc online after rejecting and uploading the real one.  Then I saw it was just one after another and quit doing that.  Am I right to reject all those white label discs? They seemed legit but I could not find matching discs.

One more question. After accepting or rejecting a change/add/delete it seems to take sometimes like varying 10-20 seconds to move to the next change.  Is everyone experiencing this?

[Suhrvivor]

2 hours ago, Fratopolis said:

After accepting or rejecting a change/add/delete it seems to take sometimes like varying 10-20 seconds to move to the next change.  Is everyone experiencing this?

That's expected, as people add changes to the DB the website becomes slower and slower. Only known solution is purging the history of changes but that is done server side by a web administrator, nothing we can do about it.

[Thanatos_Prime]

3 hours ago, Fratopolis said:

Then I saw it was just one after another and quit doing that.  Am I right to reject all those white label discs? They seemed legit but I could not find matching discs.

One more question. After accepting or rejecting a change/add/delete it seems to take sometimes like varying 10-20 seconds to move to the next change.  Is everyone experiencing this?

Try your best, things get into the DB that shouldn't be there, or should be marked Fan Art. The nice thing to remember is that the DB is infinitely fixable and will be fixed. If you have the time and the inclination, fix what you can. You are right to reject what you cannot find, but be persistent. Use not just the normal websites ( https://www.theworldofcdi.com is a good one in this case) but try reverse image searches, which can often show if the disks are Fan Art creations.  But accept you can't fix everything that people mess up.

 Slowness can be an indication of many things. Some entries take longer than others, full game entries longer than simple image replacements or additions. If there are a lot of new entries coming in, moderations can take longer. My last few moderations took only about 5-6 seconds each, but earlier it was taking longer.  Things are also usually much slower when an update is about to come out. Though it is true, we are probably getting to the point where the old changes should be purged from changes status. We got a tremendous speed boost last time that was done.

[LonestarK]

Any guidance on the hundreds of database entries that list a license type, "Public Domain/Freeware" , as a Publisher?  Is this bad data that should be removed from the details page of each of the affected games, or is this part of some unwritten rule around here?

[Thanatos_Prime]

No, this is often correct. Many, many games were released as freeware aka public domain games, you will especially see this in the 8bit to 16bit era. There were even tons of public domain games gathered up and distributed on disks\CD to spread them prior to the internet, often for a very nominal fee to cover the media and a bit of time for the person making the compilation. 

Unlike shareware or licenseware which we tend to count as "released" these are often homebrew games that the owners made simply to have gone through the learning process of making a game and gave them away to the community to get feedback, praise and often some tips on how to make the game better from other hobbiest coders. Even some released games were given over to the public domain after they were no longer selling by the authors, in some cases with source code so that other up and coming coders could learn from the game, or even modify it and change it into a whole new game.  

 The Amiga and C64 games we are seeing a bunch of right now are generally correct. The thorny bit is if they were FIRST released commercially and LATER made public domain by the authors. I believe it should be set as Released in this case and put the original publishers even if self published. However some sites like Amiga's Lemon and Hall of Light will only list the final status (because they will link to PD but not copyrighted games), so there may be more things labeled Public Domain in our DB than there should be, simply because of a limited amount of info on them. So if you see something entered as PD and someone else is changing it, both were working from the best info they had at the time of the entry and cut them some slack.

[LonestarK]

12 minutes ago, Thanatos_Prime said:

The thorny bit is if they were FIRST released commercially and LATER made public domain by the authors.

So, on these type of games that were originally released commercially but later given to the public domain, should we add "Public Domain/Freeware" to the list of Publishers?  I'm thinking specifically of games like the old ID Software or Westwood Studio games that later became freeware.

[Thanatos_Prime]

17 minutes ago, LonestarK said:

So, on these type of games that were originally released commercially but later given to the public domain, should we add "Public Domain/Freeware" to the list of Publishers?  I'm thinking specifically of games like the old ID Software or Westwood Studio games that later became freeware.

I would not, it will cause and has previously caused confusion and strife. If the game was ever released commercially during the normal lifespan of the platform (so a commercial 2020 release of a Vic-20 game is still Homebrew, because Vic-20 stopped being relevant in the 80's or so) this should be marked at Released and show the publisher. You could add a note to the text of the game saying on such and such a day this game was released to public domain, but that won't stop explosive reactions in my opinion, though I certainly would love to hear what others think on the subject.

Edited July 10, 2022 by Thanatos_Prime
typo

[LonestarK]

Can we get Taiwan added to the regions?  I'm currently uploading different carts and boxarts and running into unique Taiwan only images that are different from the same release in China or Asia.

[MJF]

9 minutes ago, LonestarK said:

Can we get Taiwan added to the regions?  I'm currently uploading different carts and boxarts and running into unique Taiwan only images that are different from the same release in China or Asia.

Mexico too. I've seen people mistake boxes that are clearly for Mexico and think they are for Spain, despite the fact that they have North American ESRB ratings on the label as well as NTSC on the top of the box.

[Thanatos_Prime]

30 minutes ago, LonestarK said:

Can we get Taiwan added to the regions?  I'm currently uploading different carts and boxarts and running into unique Taiwan only images that are different from the same release in China or Asia.

Requests here are probably not going to be much help. Though if we are throwing coins in a fountain I would wish to add Poland as well.

[LonestarK]

On 4/22/2016 at 6:49 PM, SentaiBrad said:

Adult games are allowed on the Database, but nudity and partial nudity is not allowed.

Can I get clarification on what constitutes nudity or partial nudity?  I'm about to send a bunch of image deletion requests through the queue for games like the Dead or Alive series and want to make sure I'm following the rules. Specifically which of the following is considered partial nudity?

1. Transparent or semi-transparent clothing
2. Pokies (nipple outlines on clothing)
3. Side Boob
4. Underboob
5. Cleavage
6. Side Cleavage
7. Deep Cleavage
8. Areola Peekage
9. Leg exposure above the knee
10. Leg exposure above mid-thigh
11. Bare feet
12. Whaletail (thongs/panties peeking out from under clothing)
13. Panties showing in any way
14. Bikinis
15. Microkinis
16. Slingkinis
17. Midriff exposure
18. Midriff exposure below the navel
19. Cameltoe (outline of labia on clothing)
20. Moose knuckle (bulge on clothing from penis)
21. Pubic hair peekage
22. Bare upper back
23. Bare lower back
24. Bare back below the back dimples
25. Plumber's crack / butt cleavage 
26. Underbutt
27. Tanga bottoms
28. Thongs
29. G-Strings
30. Bare buttocks

 

Also, I've seen someone in moderation say that we are not allowed to replace an offending image with one that is censored to meet the no nudity/partial nudity guideline, we must delete it entirely instead, and we aren't allowed to upload censored images.  I don't see that in the written rules, so can I get confirmation on that being a rule, since I'd much rather replace the images than completely delete them as planned.  Thanks.

 

Thread seems fairly unattended, so tagging peeps in hopes of an official response.

@Jason Carr  @faeran @SentaiBrad

 

 

[Thanatos_Prime]

This is saddening and somewhat ridiculous. From my perspective, I guess it would depend on the bare buttocks, but what was indicated previously was showing a man's penis, a woman's bare breasts or vagina...actual nudity. Someone in a swimsuit should be fine. If the graphic has a clear bikini top and you can completely see the areola, that probably counts as nudity.  A bare, swimsuit-less butt is possibly over the line, I guess it would depend on how it was presented. That kind of thing can be handled somewhat modestly. That said, you seem to be wanting a dev response, but here is mine. This is a pretty divisive issue and has lost us some moderators in the past, I hope we don't have a rash of prudish deletes coming our way. I realize that this is a DB run by a man of faith and I respect that, but video games embrace a lot of different mindsets and mentalities and I hope we can give those with other opinions on this matter a space in the DB to fully enjoy Launchbox as well.

Edited November 4, 2022 by Thanatos_Prime
Added a thought

[Jason Carr]

We won't be going through and approving or disapproving various types of smut. If there's a question, please don't upload it.

The games database is accessible to kids and adults alike, without restriction. If it's something that'd you be willing to show to your own kids, then it's probably safe to post. Otherwise, please don't. My faith in Jesus is indeed extremely important to me, but it is generally irrelevant in this decision. I don't think anyone in their right mind aims to share porn with kids.

[LonestarK]

18 minutes ago, Jason Carr said:

We won't be going through and approving or disapproving various types of smut. If there's a question, please don't upload it.

The games database is accessible to kids and adults alike, without restriction. If it's something that'd you be willing to show to your own kids, then it's probably safe to post. Otherwise, please don't. My faith in Jesus is indeed extremely important to me, but it is generally irrelevant in this decision. I don't think anyone in their right mind aims to share porn with kids.

Sounds a little arbitrary, but okay, I'll use my best judgement in which images to delete.

Any word on replacing an offending image with a censored image? Or should we just do a complete purge?