Someone Adding Unknown Developers

FuleKips · August 21, 2020

Hello, how are you, until today I started as a moderator and when reviewing a game I find that a person wants to make a movement whose ideology is that old games about which there is little or no information from their developers, remain in classification "unknown"; I accepted his proposal only at that moment, because I share a certain thought, my disagreement is about:

We as a community that wants to collect as much information as possible about retro games.

Could we accept this thought as a message in favor of the mystery and disengagement of the company from the workers who were not taken into account due to the age of their creations?

I would accept it, but if this proposal is not well received by the community, then what is due is done and this disparity is corrected.

kurzih · August 21, 2020

I'm not totally opposed to the idea, but there is some stepping stones in the way. Which might be problematic for someone's collections, especially when updating metadata.

To put it simply, in my opinion:

An information field is to be filled with confirmed information. If there is nothing, then the field can be left empty.

1. Potential issue for example if someone puts "Unknown" (as temporary or final information ) in the Developer field. What happens when you want to update your metadata with the recommended settings in the hope that there is new fields/media available that you are still missing:Since the field is already occupied by "Unknown" I would think that launchbox will not be updated by a potential updated field entry if someone has found the actual developer and put it in the database.

2. In general what I would hope is that whenever we do changes and/or additions in the database is that we would not only think about our own local collection, but how it would affect everyone's collection. Putting things back and forth for example will most likely result in duplicate media files (thankfully we have the clean up function to tackle that). And the database exists because it's there to be used by the App - so thinking of how things would look in Launchbox and BigBox is good to think about.

3. We can always do changes that would only affect our own collection in the Launchbox App. For example it's quite fast and easy to Add "Unknown" Developer using the Audit function if you really, really want every field 100% filled with data. EDIT: Even faster, if you use the sort list function "Arrange by" and select "Developer", using Bulk edit takes just a few seconds.

4. I've seen also some fields that might not have been filled the way they are intended to be filled like ESRB rating. In cases like Japanese only consoles/computers the field is probably best left empty since "ERSB - Not Rated" is actually an Age Rating status given by the Publisher if for example it's not rated yet or the online functionality makes it not possible to rate. There seems to be many Japanese adult only games that have a "Not Rated" field activated, when actually the Japanese age rating counterpart does exist for them (most adult only games for example on the X68000, PC-98 games have a round "18" warning sticker on them). Even the instruction on the DB says that the Age rating should reflect what is on the Box: