Moderator Guidelines and Contributor Rules

[SentaiBrad]

Well actually, most of those RetroArch video's aren't out of date. Maybe a setting changed it's place slightly, but as far as I know, all of the info is still 100% valid. I did anticipate this though, either RetroArch updates to the point where the tutorial makes less sense or some new and better technique (even within RA) comes along and I'll have to re-record the video. Even a Feature Specific tutorial may need to be retired and re-recorded. As for that Wiki, im surprised you found it. I created that over 2 years ago now thinking that we would go that route. I wasn't even apart of the team yet at the time. We honestly decided to go a different route with the video, and I was later brought on to be our video guy. I tried to delete it, but they don't exactly make it easy, and no one has asked for it since to be honest. We've actually not really considered the Wiki route before, because actually the video is a lot easier to make and shows the user the direct steps in what to do. If Jason wants to go that route, we can figure it out at some point.

 

So normally, as a YouTube creator, never download someones work to then re-upload: big no no. However, in this situation, since these are commercials and not something the user created them selves, I am a bit torn. I've done this myself: downloaded trailers or commercials and used them in some cases for the video within LB. There are websites dedicated to this sort of thing, and I would feel more comfortable talking with someone like that first, to see if they're all right with uploading the stuff they're managing. In the end, there is really nothing anyone can do about it as they don't own it, but as a courtesy to our fellow video game enthusiasts I would prefer to talk with them first. This is something I have thought about trying to do though, create a pack of commercials as an alternate and it doesn't interfere with something like EmuMovies.

[chyatt6385]

RE: the wiki

I found that by accident, really. Google is useful like that. ;-) Seriously, though, I think that for some people (including myself), having all the content organized with a table of contents and whatnot is a whole lot easier and less frustrating that having to search through the forums, because depending on how the search is defined, you may get either too much or too little information - not everyone may call something the same thing that you do. Good example: I saw, while downloading the Steam videos, that they had a .webm extension, so I went through the different conversion software I have to find something that would convert .mp4 to .webm. I couldn't find anything with options labeled that way, so I went to Google and found out that .webm is the HTML5 specification and that VLC will do it quite nicely. While I normally don't mind a good hide-and-seek for information, that wasn't the only bit I wanted to know about something related to LaunchBox, and the rest of what I wanted to know about other things I couldn't readily find. I remember the issue I had with figuring out how to include Windows apps a couple of months ago; I searched for the info and couldn't readily find it before I asked. Stuff like that could be included in the wiki.

I wonder how many other users (or worse, potential users) find themselves similarly situated and give up on a good program like LaunchBox because it's too hard for them to find out how to do what they want to do. So that's MY pitch for the wiki.

RE: YouTube stuff

From an intellectual property standpoint, I think the trailers, being advertisement and containing their characters/game ideas etc., would be owned by their corporate creators, but there's Fair Use to consider as well. I don't know if I've ever heard about a corporation being concerned about someone spreading around their advertisements. Copying elements for other uses would be a legal issue, I think. I'm no lawyer, and I don't play one on TV or in a video game . . . Almost all of the videos I've downloaded so far, as far as I can tell, were uploaded by the developer/publisher to YouTube and not something someone else threw up there. I didn't really mean the wholesale scraping of gaming videos, just the official trailers for games that somehow didn't make it to Steam - which are truly not many, overall. "Dwarfs! F2P" and "LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga" are a couple of them.

And I never got Retroarch to work using the instructions in the earlier video a few months ago. I shelved that project and went back to using the other various individual emus I already had. I'll see about picking it back up after I figure out some other stuff.

I think I have yet to download an actual video from EmuMovies. I have wondered if they even have videos. Maybe when I get finished cataloging my Commodore 64 collection I'll run across some, but I don't think I've seen any yet.

[Evil_Orko]

if you don't pay for emumovies you only get the images and not the videos as far as I know.  I paid them a couple years ago.

[SentaiBrad]

2 hours ago, Evil_Orko said:

if you don't pay for emumovies you only get the images and not the videos as far as I know.  I paid them a couple years ago.

Everything but video, and you need LaunchBox Premium as well for it to work within LB.

[alondero]

I've seen a few updates recently where someone has added an alternate name in the title (eg the Japanese name as well as the English - such as  Aggressors of Dark Kombat / Tsuukai GANGAN Koushinkyoku).

I'm assuming that the guidelines are that we use the worldwide name as much as possible, if region specific then use the region specific name - but not both as it should match the box art?

Also, I've seen some instances where the Japanese name has been translated (eg http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/15624 - which I think the name transliterated is 64 Ōzumō). Couldn't find anything in the guidelines for what is preferred here? My suspicion is that we should use the Japanese transliteration as far as possible, unless it has been specifically and widely known as something else worldwide?  

[SentaiBrad]

Honestly, I was hoping for alternate names to be set up by this point, so I didn't really ever cover it in the guidelines. However, the first name you pointed out does break a rule, scrap-ability. Someone would need to name their game Aggressors of Dark Kombat / Tsuukai GANGAN Koushinkyoku  for it to work. For now, the Romanji should probably be kept as there can still be language issues on certain operating systems for Japanese characters, and if the game was never translated to English officially then I would keep it at that. If it was fan translated, as much as I appreciate and love the work done by all those authors, the original name is still technically correct (in Romanji). Having unlimited alternate names (and then those names attached to specific alternate dates) I think is the only real solution that doesn't clutter up the Database. If a game was released World Wide, it's tricky. All of the names are technically correct, but for the time being the name should probably be kept to the NTSC name given, since that is where we are based. It starts to get stupid complicated though. I'm gonna talk to Jason about if he has any plans to work on the Database after the next official release, this is something that needs to be get implemented because for every change that's made that wont conform to the standard later, is another entry that has to be fixed / merged / deleted at a later date.

[Evil_Orko]

I read that alternate names were supposed to get its own field at some point.  I have denied a couple name changes with the note being please wait until we have an alternate titles field before resubmitting.  I denied a few and more and more kept coming up so I stopped for the time being.  I had some medical issues I just got taken care of and just didn't have it in me to come here and discuss it, so thank you for bringing it up.

[Evil_Orko]

i have a suggestion - make it so we can 'lock down' a title's data after it's been filled and verified by the community to be complete and correct (as possible)  maybe after a vote has gone through?  artwork would still be able to be changed out for better copies when found, but the data should not have to be changed, ever once it is in right.  if a title needed to be edited for some reason, there should be a giant red flag, as that title would be marked as complete.  

[Freestate]

2 hours ago, alondero said:

I've seen a few updates recently where someone has added an alternate name in the title (eg the Japanese name as well as the English - such as  Aggressors of Dark Kombat / Tsuukai GANGAN Koushinkyoku).

I'm assuming that the guidelines are that we use the worldwide name as much as possible, if region specific then use the region specific name - but not both as it should match the box art?

Also, I've seen some instances where the Japanese name has been translated (eg http://gamesdb.launchbox-app.com/games/details/15624 - which I think the name transliterated is 64 Ōzumō). Couldn't find anything in the guidelines for what is preferred here? My suspicion is that we should use the Japanese transliteration as far as possible, unless it has been specifically and widely known as something else worldwide?  

Yeah, i'm one that are sending this updates, because MAME scrapper asigns this dual names when adding roms. The special diacritics like Ōzumō must be written with spelling/fonetic style (Ouzumou) if not scrapping fails. In a database update to avoid this probably we need two types of alternate names. Some to show up regional names JP/US/EUR/ Westernized fanname/ and a bunch of internal names (typical romset names) to made scrapping 100% accurate. There's also an issue with games that have the same name, like the classic double dragon brawler of technos and the double dragon vs game that appear years later on neogeo systems. Without some kind of workarround this games fail on scrapping specially when trying to download videos from emumovies.

It's told from months ago, the database needs some serious work and priority to avoid extra work, i can't remember how many times i send final fantasy VI to delete from duplicates because the contributor don't search and find the entry Final Fantasy III (name of us release)

[Cebion]

Yep, I'm a bit on hold because of this issues. I'm not reviewing the same changes over and over again. 

[SentaiBrad]

Well Jason is still one man trying to balance the work load, and unless someone very skilled that we can trust suddenly starts donating their time to help, it has to stay this way unfortunately. Or I learn to code, and that's probably not gonna happen. If other moderators are not taking their job seriously and following the guidelines, then that is something we'll have to talk about.

 

Above all, we do very very very much appreciate contributors and moderators that are trying to uphold the rules and keep everything as accurate as can be before all the tools are in place. We do understand that it is not easy, and if we could move faster on our end we certainly would. There MIGHT be some time to be able to work on the database between the upcoming official release and 7.0; but I can not make any promises on Jason's behalf, but I will try and relay everyone's sentiment, and I have sent him the link to the recent posts.

[FistyDollars]

6 hours ago, Cebion said:

Yep, I'm a bit on hold because of this issues. I'm not reviewing the same changes over and over again. 

Once again, I find myself agreeing with Cebion.

Alternate names / regional release dates / proper game deletion NEED to happen. It seems like half the changes submitted have to do with those.

I'll keep submitting stuff as I can, but moderating will have to go on the back burner until the DB is upgraded.

[CliveBarker]

11 hours ago, SentaiBrad said:

Well Jason is still one man trying to balance the work load, and unless someone very skilled that we can trust suddenly starts donating their time to help, it has to stay this way unfortunately. Or I learn to code, and that's probably not gonna happen. If other moderators are not taking their job seriously and following the guidelines, then that is something we'll have to talk about.

 

Above all, we do very very very much appreciate contributors and moderators that are trying to uphold the rules and keep everything as accurate as can be before all the tools are in place. We do understand that it is not easy, and if we could move faster on our end we certainly would. There MIGHT be some time to be able to work on the database between the upcoming official release and 7.0; but I can not make any promises on Jason's behalf, but I will try and relay everyone's sentiment, and I have sent him the link to the recent posts.

Hey Brad, could it be possible to open source the database? I don't really know how this stuff works but maybe that could attract contributors who know how to code and Jason could decide if he merges a change or not. Like Dolphin development for example

[hubz]

I think we just need to be patient, Launchbox is already leaps and bounds better than any other frontend and is constantly updated. I don't know how Jason does it to be honest but am glad he can. Moderating with these current limitations can be tough but it's still doable and I'm sure if it were easy to do what we're requesting it would have been done by now.

I do wonder if we shouldn't do Evil Orko's suggestion though of locking down stuff we are 100% confident is correct at some point. I think that could help immensely to avoid silly changes we have to moderate.

[Vlansix]

4 hours ago, hubz said:

I think we just need to be patient, Launchbox is already leaps and bounds better than any other frontend and is constantly updated. I don't know how Jason does it to be honest but am glad he can. Moderating with these current limitations can be tough but it's still doable and I'm sure if it were easy to do what we're requesting it would have been done by now.

I do wonder if we shouldn't do Evil Orko's suggestion though of locking down stuff we are 100% confident is correct at some point. I think that could help immensely to avoid silly changes we have to moderate.

I agree with this idea as a concept, although I'm not sure of what the implementation would look like. So as to prevent possible problems with incorrect data and/or incomplete entries being flagged as complete, I would probably do something along the lines of this: Contributor-facing page has a "This entry is complete - No new information should be added for this game" checkbox as an editable field that can be sent for moderation, the same as every other field. Always unchecked while game is not marked as complete. Once sent for "moderation" along with other changes, it should increment a counter and not be shown to moderators immediately. Once that counter reaches threshold X, this should then be sent for moderation. We could then only mark entries as complete once X amount of people believe they are, and prevent any new requests for entries marked as complete.
 

if (!currentEntry.entryIsComplete){

  if (currentEntry.entryIsCompleteSentByContributor){

    if (currentEntry.entryCompleteTotalRequests <= database.EntryCompleteThreshold){

      currentRequest.entryCompleteTotalRequests++;

    }

    else{

      sendLockEntryRequestForModeration(currentRequest);

    }

  }

	// Continue to do normal database contribution stuff here

}

else{

	// How did this request get through? Do error catching and etc. Probably request that someone contact Jason with the request ID, or automatically log the incident

(I also give mad props to Jason, I'm in the same situation as him roughly and it's mind-boggling how many hats you have to wear. He handles it very well and manages to get work done in a very, very expedient manner, all without having everything else go wrong.)

Edited October 14, 2016 by Vlansix
typos again x.x

[Jason Carr]

Thank you guys; I just resolved a number of bugs with the games database earlier this week but I know it still needs a lot more. I know it's feeling like the red-headed stepchild at this point; again, my apologies for that. I'll be back to it again next week hopefully. I'm not sure how quickly we can get alternate titles in (still have a few more bugs to resolve), but that is still planned as the next new feature.

[Jason Carr]

@Vlansix I really appreciate that. What's your project?

[Vlansix]

@Jason Carr - Indie game design. My team and I have been working on a game concept for about two years and I completely understand being the man-of-many-hats. Having to learn new skills constantly that you never would have before (business/graphic design/contract law/copyright/whatever) while trying to do your main job (dev), while trying to keep everyone happy, while hoping that nothing catches fire and that the finances hold up and then never sleeping is my daily life as well. You impress me as I'd never code live in front of people on twitch. I'd be way too self-conscious and freaking out about time/peoples' reactions to what i'm doing instead of what they want/etc. Keep it up :).

Edited October 14, 2016 by Vlansix
twitch, not twitter x.x

[SentaiBrad]

6 minutes ago, Vlansix said:

@Jason Carr - Indie game design. My team and I have been working on a game concept for about two years and I completely understand being the man-of-many-hats. Having to learn new skills constantly that you never would have before (business/graphic design/contract law/copyright/whatever) while trying to do your main job (dev), while trying to keep everyone happy, while hoping that nothing catches fire and that the finances hold up and then never sleeping is my daily life as well. You impress me as I'd never code live in front of people on twitch. I'd be way too self-conscious and freaking out about time/peoples' reactions to what i'm doing instead of what they want/etc. Keep it up :).

I have a game that I've been working on myself as well. I don't do nearly as much as Jason, but I still find it hard to find time to work on everything. It is indeed hard.

[CliveBarker]

9 minutes ago, Vlansix said:

@Jason Carr - Indie game design. My team and I have been working on a game concept for about two years and I completely understand being the man-of-many-hats. Having to learn new skills constantly that you never would have before (business/graphic design/contract law/copyright/whatever) while trying to do your main job (dev), while trying to keep everyone happy, while hoping that nothing catches fire and that the finances hold up and then never sleeping is my daily life as well. You impress me as I'd never code live in front of people on twitch. I'd be way too self-conscious and freaking out about time/peoples' reactions to what i'm doing instead of what they want/etc. Keep it up :).

Is your game going to be on Steam?