Moderator Guidelines and Contributor Rules

[SentaiBrad]

Oh no don't get me wrong, we love the suggestions, I was just offering up what we had planned to see if that would work instead. We know that users can't see every post or BitBucket ticket, but please don't stop the suggestions. Also, you can't edit your posts after someone has posted after, it's a weird thing with out Forums and you have to get special permissions to edit after someone else has posted.

[Steve-O]

It would be helpful if there were a section of the guidelines (or perhaps a separate document) that lists out each of the different fields with a description of what should go there. For example, on the ancient Atari 2600 games I've been editing, I've noticed that previous contributors have set the Developer to Atari, while others have set the Developer to the actual programmer (e.g., Larry Kaplan). If I had something I could reference that indicated what the intent of the Developer field is (say, "the company that developed the game" vs. "the company that developed the game, or the lead designer(s) if known"), I could make better judgments as to which one to keep.

[Cebion]

I'm starting to add some obscure games but many of the developers aren't in the database yet. What should be the policy of this one? Shall the user gain the right to add developers?

[SentaiBrad]

We actually don't know if we want users to put in their own Publisher and Developer, there are pro's and con's to each. As for what we can currently do regarding them, we provide the information that they provided. Back in those days you didn't know specific Developers because they didn't want them poached to other companies, stupid but the Publisher and Developer was Atari. If they publicized "So and so Developer" then maybe we could put the specific developer. It's not that fair of a comparison, but we don't put Cliff Blazinski as the dev for Doom, we put Id. Granted, a lot more than 1 person worked on Doom, but you get the point. I am open to suggestions about this though. It's a similar idea as to why we don't assign ratings to games before rating boards were created. We're not here to create the history but to represent history.

[Steve-O]

That seems like a reasonable approach (although the many Atari developers who left to form 3rd parties back in the day might have a quibble or two). Mostly I'm suggesting that it's a good idea to have the prevailing wisdom written down somewhere so contributors can reference it when they have questions.

[SentaiBrad]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying what Atari did back then was good it was shit, but if you can even find the right information as to the developer back then that is not how it was displayed.

[Cebion]

We'll I'm talking about companies not persons. I.e. Adventure International is listed as Publisher but not as Developer.

[SentaiBrad]

Well sometimes the Publisher and Developer can be the same, but in this case yea that should be fixed certainly. So we'll probably need to add new Publishers / Developers regularly.

[CADScott]

There are a lot of submissions of new covers (Front and back) for N64 at the moment, and I would like to point out the need for close scrutiny of images that are being submitted for replacement of existing images. The images that are being submitted are in most cases worse that the originals that are in the database, but it in not obvious unless you really look at the images properly. Both the submitted and original images are approximately the same resolution, around 2100 x 1500, but the submitted images are much more highly compressed, often with file sizes of a third of the current images in the database. This leads to a large amount of detail being lost in the images, and a LOT of jpeg artifacting, which is only really obvious at 100% zoom. For example, below is a 100% crop of a back cover that was submitted (Notice the softness and artifacts around the text and the seal points): This is the same crop for the current image in the database: The existing image is a larger file size, and is clearly better quality! Please, all moderator and submitters, check images at 100% to ensure they are actually better than existing image, otherwise we risk losing good quality scans to save a few megabytes!

[SentaiBrad]

On a side note, good screen shot Developers / Publishers. :P She looks like she is having fun. :P Yea, commenting will be in soon so we can at least give reasons for rejection. Sometimes people may not notice, but this is why we are here. So yea, if you do make submissions just try and keep an eye out.

[SentaiBrad]

Updated the Guidelines.

[SentaiBrad]

So who ever is adding or editing Amiga games, and who ever is adding or editing BBC Micro games is adding cheats and puzzle answer to the descriptions. We should keep these out of the game description.

[spycat]

Hi Brad I've been adding games to the BBC Micro platform. Can you list the games which have Overviews containing cheats and answers to puzzles, so I can see if this involves any of my uploads.

[SentaiBrad]

I don't have that information anymore. I moderated them about an hour ago. There were mostly Amiga games with Cheats, and a few BBC games with solutions. Since I can't reject part of a games metadata when it is being added I had to reject the entire game. If you go in to your Moderation Status page you can see the approval and rejections and the few that were Rejected (at least by me) would be the ones. Thanks for understanding Scree, we also don't have usernames for who is making the edit, or moderating the items yet nor reasons for Rejections. Reasons for Rejections Jason is working on though. Sorry for it being complicated, it's not the easiest when it's still a WIP.

[SentaiBrad]

Ha, actually Rejection Reasons is being added as we speak.

[Jason Carr]

In fact, they're now live. ;)

[CADScott]

I have had a few new games with the cheats added to the descriptions, but I have approved them, as I feel that it is much better to have a new game added to the database that is not 100% complete. It is quite easy to fix the game later, for a simple text change, but much of the artwork that is uploaded is quite hard to get. I would rather have games added to the database, especially Amiga which is very lacking, and correct errors later.

[CADScott]

With new games, would it be possible to have a separate approval for each field, rather than the entire game at once. This would allow mods to reject parts of a new entry that are wrong, without removing the entire entry from the database. I think this would solve a lot of issues with the current approval system for new games.

[Jason Carr]

Yes, that is planned.

[Jason Carr]

Let me know all if you run into any issues with the new rejection reasons. I'm moderating right now and marking all those invalid N64 images with this: "Not a significant improvement over the existing image. Also, if the image is the same as an existing image, please Edit the image and replace it instead of adding a new one." Lol.