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Moderator Guidelines and Contributor Rules


Jason Carr

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  • 3 months later...
14 hours ago, Thanatos_Prime said:

I'd also like to add my request to have a copy of the rules and guidelines. I have a current question about which characters can cause problems in game names. Is the tilde ~ one of those problematic characters?

I don't believe the ~ character causes any problems.

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  • 2 weeks later...
16 minutes ago, Thanatos_Prime said:

Ok, a question for those of you who have been in the trenches a while. I see some people trying to add things like spreadsheets and PDA programs in the database. My gut reaction is that these are not games and shouldn't be in the games database but maybe I'm off-base on that. Some guidance would be appreciated.

Yes, that is correct. Only games are allowed in the games database currently.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Ok, more clarifications. I see some people submitting replacements of a game screenshot at 320x240 resolution and submitting in its place a 320 x 200 resolution screenshot of the same exact screenshot scene as a correction, sometimes with the explanation that they are submitting with the "correct screen resolution". The only resolution requirements I'm aware of are the ones for Background based art and it seems that bigger is mostly considered better. Is there something I'm missing or is this like the people that think that game names are the same as watermarks and trying to remove all text from fan art?

Also, MERRY CHRISTMAS to all!

 

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14 hours ago, Thanatos_Prime said:

Ok, more clarifications. I see some people submitting replacements of a game screenshot at 320x240 resolution and submitting in its place a 320 x 200 resolution screenshot of the same exact screenshot scene as a correction, sometimes with the explanation that they are submitting with the "correct screen resolution". The only resolution requirements I'm aware of are the ones for Background based art and it seems that bigger is mostly considered better. Is there something I'm missing or is this like the people that think that game names are the same as watermarks and trying to remove all text from fan art?

Also, MERRY CHRISTMAS to all!

 

Merry Christmas. If 320x200 is indeed the correct screen resolution for the game, then a 320x200 screenshot would be favorable over a 320x240 screenshot. Ideally we would avoid screenshots with blurring or post processing due to upgraded resolutions. I can imagine it's not always easy to figure out though, especially when you're looking at 320x240 vs. 320x200. Honestly, it's probably not that big of a deal either way in that particular case.

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Some screenshots are bad representations of what the game was intended to look like though.  A lot of CPS2 games look stretched to hell in screenshots because the machine has a very wide resolution that's squished back into a 4:3 shape.  So in MAME and on real hardware, the image is 4:3 but the screenshot is closer to 16:9.  There's another game that came up for moderation recently whose resolution was even more jacked up than that to the point where the text was unreadable.  The image was basically a thin pillar.  Maybe hard and fast rules about what is "correct" aren't going to work every time and we should be open to flexibility?

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On 12/27/2018 at 9:53 AM, strizzuth said:

Some screenshots are bad representations of what the game was intended to look like though.  A lot of CPS2 games look stretched to hell in screenshots because the machine has a very wide resolution that's squished back into a 4:3 shape.  So in MAME and on real hardware, the image is 4:3 but the screenshot is closer to 16:9.  There's another game that came up for moderation recently whose resolution was even more jacked up than that to the point where the text was unreadable.  The image was basically a thin pillar.  Maybe hard and fast rules about what is "correct" aren't going to work every time and we should be open to flexibility?

I think that's probably a fairly rare situation in the grand scheme of things, but yes, an exception should probably be made in that case, ideally maintaining the original aspect ratio. It's important to note that screenshots shouldn't really be refused if they don't obey these guidelines, unless there are other screenshots that exist that do. Any screenshots are better than no screenshots.

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  • 4 weeks later...
9 hours ago, Thanatos_Prime said:

Ok, I hope I can express this question correctly.

I see people deleting Fan Art Backgrounds because they have text of any kind in them. To my knowledge the only kind of text we are on the lookout for are watermarks, website logos, uploader images or website icons for other websites. Am I incorrect?

Generally, text in fanart backgrounds is frowned upon because it's just not very clean looking in LaunchBox and Big Box (and makes the actual text of the interface harder to read). However, I wouldn't delete fanart just because it has text in it, unless there is another better fanart background image available for the game.

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  • 1 month later...

So I was recently surprised to be made a Moderator of the Games DB, and lacking a current set of Guidelines I just have a few questions:

1. Does the Games DB include (Or should it include), Game Mods (Doom wads for instance? I'd like to add some of the more 'legit' mods that are practically unique games of their own.) What is the policy on fan-made or non-commercial releases?

2. What about Collectors Editions vs Regular Editions, would these go in as seperate entries if they were released at different times with different artwork but essentially the same game?

3. Should overviews of games be a professionally written synopsis' (such as from the back of the box or from the website that sells the game)? What is acceptable as far as a description?

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My 2 cents: For Mods I would think we'd need to be really selective (they do call Doom Wads and Megawads, shovelware for a reason), in the same way that a Romhack that simply changed Mario to Luigi wouldn't rise to the level of an entry most Doom wads shouldn't but I could certainly see having entries for those Megawad collections that had CD releases and those that significantly upgraded video, or something like the 25th Anniversary Edition.

For collectors edition, I was told that we should focus on the game itself. If the Collectors edition updated video or added more game modes then it would be a new entry. If it just came with a cool set of things external to the game like books or key chains then it doesn't rise to the level of an entry.

Overviews can be all of the above, use what you have and if someone comes along later and can improve it then fantastic. I'm often dealing with text adventure games that predate most professionally written synopses, where box copies are nowhere to be found at the moment. I'll play the game for a bit and try to write one up myself, and if someone can find an old magazine article or box description I would welcome my entry being completely overwritten by a better one. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

OK another couple of questions:

Does the WikipediaURL field need to be a Wikipedia address unequivocably?  If there is no Wikipedia entry should a URL to another website be accepted?

What kind of video should be accepted in the VideoURL field? A contributor linked to an extended youtube playthrough of the game, I assume this is not what we're looking for?

 

 

 

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On 3/11/2019 at 10:36 PM, AdamJT said:

OK another couple of questions:

Does the WikipediaURL field need to be a Wikipedia address unequivocably?  If there is no Wikipedia entry should a URL to another website be accepted?

What kind of video should be accepted in the VideoURL field? A contributor linked to an extended youtube playthrough of the game, I assume this is not what we're looking for?

 

 

 

My understanding is that the WikipediaURL is used to pull pictures into Launchbox as a fallback for images so it should not have any websites in it except Wikipedia websites. Youtube playthroughs of the game are perfect to my understanding. Anything that spoils the game too much should be avoided. If I have a choice of videos I try to pick the one that best represents the game, has good quality images and is family friendly, since you don't know the age of the person who might be clicking that link.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Ok, I have a question I'm hoping to get help with. Lately, another fine contributor, who I am deeply thankful for, has been adding more than one set of boxes for a single region. I was, probably mistakenly, operating under an assumption that there could only be a single box set for a single region like Europe or North America and was putting later European releases under a single country, which didn't feel completely correct. Functionally, how will this work with Launchbox if there are two sets of European or North American boxes?

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10 hours ago, Thanatos_Prime said:

Ok, I have a question I'm hoping to get help with. Lately, another fine contributor, who I am deeply thankful for, has been adding more than one set of boxes for a single region. I was, probably mistakenly, operating under an assumption that there could only be a single box set for a single region like Europe or North America and was putting later European releases under a single country, which didn't feel completely correct. Functionally, how will this work with Launchbox if there are two sets of European or North American boxes?

Glad you like them bro ;) Got 5.099 images left to manually upload lol it's an insane hobby we have. When there are multiple images for one category and/or region they will simply have a -01 and -02 etc. behind the image filename when scraped to your pc, launchbox/bigbox then randomizes the images to show.

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