Moderator Guidelines and Contributor Rules

[refreshTM]

Hyperlist uses + sign:
"<game name="Blackjack+Poker+Acey-Deucy (USA)" index="" image="">
<description>Blackjack+Poker+Acey-Deucy (USA)</description>"

Should we stick to the same?

[SentaiBrad]

4 hours ago, CriticalCid said:

To be honest, I find the updated point 5 very vague and confusing. Especially your example with the “+” symbol. Just take the opposite symbol “-“ which can be used as minus but also as hyphen that appears in nearly every entry with a subtitle in its name. Of course I completely understand what your point is but I don’t see any problems when symbols like +, &, -, etc. are getting used for the facing title.

Generally what breaks the LB scraper is when characters are used that are not part of the rom set naming convention. For example No-Intro, Redump, and probably almost every other group are only using Low ASCII characters minus the operating system specific ones like /, :, etc.

Personally I think we should orientate on that set of allowed characters as well for maximum compatibility with it. Here’s the documentation of the No-Intro naming convention and it’s a very good read of you want to understand a little bit more about the structure of this set.

The Official No-Intro Convention (20071030).pdf

The + was just an example, but I figured it'd apply. My reasoning was that I do notice a lot of sets not using symbols where they can. So instead of seeing a + in the title name, the words Plus are used. I'm not too concerned about the rom sets, but I do like what No-Intro does. I don't like the idea of blindly conforming to one of those sets, because there are times where I and others disagree. Knowing that, would it be hypocritical to want to create a set of proper names for our Database? We'd just be another in a long line, and I don't know how well it'd work from within LaunchBox, meaning it's usefulness drops. If LaunchBox did it automatically, without error, that'd be great. But I don't see it happening without error without a ton and a ton of work.

If a game has a character in it's title, then I don't think there's no reason to not use it. The beauty of the Alternate Titles, is that we can have both cases. In almost every case, the hyphen (-) will turn in to a colon on the Database side, so that should never really be an issue. When a file name should have a colon, it's almost always standard practice to use a hyphen. Should we create a standard conversion for other characters? For a slash, I can see the ampersand and + signs working. I think the ampersand looks cleanest.

I'm by no means perfect when it comes to figuring this stuff out, that rule has been there for a long time and just got changed up, so I am certainly not above editing things to make them better. Figuring out what to do, now that's the hard part.

[AnonymousMOS]

I have a question that's not covered in the guidelines.  Should developer and publisher be full names, like "MicroProse Software, Inc." or just "MicroProse"? I'm asking because sometimes the company or organization can change and be a completely different group, but only have changed "Inc.", "Ltd." or something similar.

[Freestate]

2 hours ago, Ranthalion75 said:

I have a question that's not covered in the guidelines.  Should developer and publisher be full names, like "MicroProse Software, Inc." or just "MicroProse"? I'm asking because sometimes the company or organization can change and be a completely different group, but only have changed "Inc.", "Ltd." or something similar.

developer list need merging and moderation, now it's a mess.

[AnonymousMOS]

4 hours ago, Freestate said:

developer list need merging and moderation, now it's a mess.

I absolutely agree! There are at least 3 different variations of a lot of devs and pubs.

[Freestate]

I don't waste time in this and dates. When we have some acurate ok, now it's only losing time. Another moderation sickness like the pokemon names change nonsense.

[Vlansix]

Heya guys,

Aye, we're all a bit particular about how we like our games named. As a general rule, we want the game names to match the boxart, and everything else shoved into the alternate name fields.

 

As for developer/publisher/etc moderation, it's also on the list of things to do, but having a ticket open for it would make it feel more... important ;). *coughhintcough*

[Freestate]

On 20/7/2017 at 1:27 PM, Vlansix said:

Heya guys,

Aye, we're all a bit particular about how we like our games named. As a general rule, we want the game names to match the boxart, and everything else shoved into the alternate name fields.

 

As for developer/publisher/etc moderation, it's also on the list of things to do, but having a ticket open for it would make it feel more... important ;). *coughhintcough*

i open a ticket a long time agooooooo. https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/issues/87/consolidate-company-names-merge-or

[viritys]

Continuing on the old naming convention talk: So someone's been doing a lot of great work to find games with identical titles for the same platform and then renaming them with "title (publisher)", ie Alien(s) for C64 become "Alien (Personal Computer News)" and "Alien (Softgold)". 

While I appreciated the effort, I felt it was the wrong approach and rejected some dozen of those before thinking that

1) I mostly use list view so I represent a minority; identical titles could be confusing in big box?

2) People will keep on renaming or trying to rename the titles back and forth according to their preference, unless whatever "we" want is communicated clearly when submitting new games

[Jason Carr]

On 11/8/2017 at 8:54 AM, viritys said:

Continuing on the old naming convention talk: So someone's been doing a lot of great work to find games with identical titles for the same platform and then renaming them with "title (publisher)", ie Alien(s) for C64 become "Alien (Personal Computer News)" and "Alien (Softgold)". 

While I appreciated the effort, I felt it was the wrong approach and rejected some dozen of those before thinking that

1) I mostly use list view so I represent a minority; identical titles could be confusing in big box?

2) People will keep on renaming or trying to rename the titles back and forth according to their preference, unless whatever "we" want is communicated clearly when submitting new games

Sorry for the delayed response here. Yes, I am in agreement that we should not be changing the titles of games with duplicate names to include the publisher or the developer. The games database website, as well as LaunchBox and Big Box, can be programmed to solve this issue properly, such as automatically including the publisher's name in parenthesis where it makes sense if it's a duplicate title. This isn't the highest priority, but I would prefer not to rename a bunch of games in the mean time.

[Evil_Orko]

i have done one or two of those myself because when searching for the games within launchbox, it only shows one of them and not the other.  you can't even get to the other game with the matching title even if you could discern which is which because it won't display them both.

[FistyDollars]

1 hour ago, Evil_Orko said:

i have done one or two of those myself because when searching for the games within launchbox, it only shows one of them and not the other.  you can't even get to the other game with the matching title even if you could discern which is which because it won't display them both.

Same here, I've had to do that for several of the DOS games from the eXoDOS collection.

[Kriven]

On 11/8/2017 at 11:54 AM, viritys said:

identical titles could be confusing in big box?

This is one reason why I go to the trouble of editing my BB themes to display platform and publisher/developer logos in the game wheel. The other being different versions of the same game which use the same artwork across platforms. It allows me to determine which specific game I'm viewing at a glance. Theme developers might want to keep these situations in mind in the future.

Edited November 15, 2017 by Kriven

[Freestate]

Real critical bug here https://bitbucket.org/jasondavidcarr/gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/issues/371/bug-untagged-alternate-names-are-not.

This could be tragic if don't be solved soon, tons of duplicated alternate names, waste of time of contributors..

[Jason Carr]

Hey all, wanted to notify everyone about something we're doing for retro achievements. You may see some odd alternate names being added to the database by @Typhon; this is because he's trying to improve connectivity to retroachievements.org. In some cases, retroachievements.org has bad or incorrect names for the games, so our solution is to add their names in as alternate names in the LaunchBox Games Database.

So going forward in moderation, we should be careful not to allow removing alternate names, even if they seem formatted badly, etc., or at least we should check to see if it matches the games name on retroachievements.org. Also, these alternate names should of course be allowed through. Thanks all; I plan on improving moderation speed again here soon.

[Lordmonkus]

Also I would like to add that the database channel in Discord has been for the most part dead as of late. Would be nice if we had more people in there to co-ordinate and resolve any issues / debates.

[FistyDollars]

2 minutes ago, Lordmonkus said:

Also I would like to add that the database channel in Discord has been for the most part dead as of late. Would be nice if we had more people in there to co-ordinate and resolve any issues / debates.

For what it's worth, I'm in there all the time and get phone notifications for that channel if anyone says anything.

[FistyDollars]

Also, the database could really use a cleaning up of old changes to help speed it along, it's getting bogged down again.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah but compared to how busy that channel used to be it's pretty much a ghost town as of late, though there have been a couple of people on there, still not like how it used to be.

[FistyDollars]

It does feel like the database has been sidelined for other projects, so I can't blame people for a lack of excitement.