LaunchBox Games Database Update - July 12, 2024

[faeran]

Hi Everyone,

We've deployed a small update to the Games Database that includes the following:

• Added ability to delete submitted changes: Users can now delete changes they've submitted within a 30-minute window under the Changes Status section. After this period, the changes will enter the moderation queue.
• Resolved search results display issue: Fixed an issue where the search results string could incorrectly display a "20%" instead of a space when using new search options.
• Game locking framework: We've laid the groundwork to independently lock games and their fields from future changes. You may start seeing the odd locked field in the near future once the infrastructure for this has been completed.

 

[Arthurcoutinho600]

hello faeran

there are a troll or account that deleting  fanart box art and carts without reason. the fan art box art and carts are allowed by the rules and have category right?

well around my moderations, there's someone that criticized the poor quality about the fan art images and criticized the database, saying that the database have some walkaround crap or bad fanarts and i reject the changes

I think the database should have some segurity about trolls and i think the database should have some more fan art category like clear logo and box 3d

Thanks a lot

[Freestate]

3 hours ago, Arthurcoutinho600 said:

hello faeran

there are a troll or account that deleting  fanart box art and carts without reason. the fan art box art and carts are allowed by the rules and have category right?

well around my moderations, there's someone that criticized the poor quality about the fan art images and criticized the database, saying that the database have some walkaround crap or retarded fanarts and i reject the changes

I think the database should have some segurity about trolls and i think the database should have some more fan art category like clear logo and box 3d

Thanks a lot

The only available categories for fan art boxes are fanart box front and fanart box back. Many users are stuffing normal categories with tons of fanmedia, and the problem is that downloading fanmedia must be transparent and optional to the users not a mixed chaos. That user is right when he says that just picking a regional priority you can't know if you're downloading real art or fanmedia if some users insist on stuffing non legit media in normal categories. Please use the categories with acuracy.

And yeah, it's not necesary to have fanboxes with a flattened and distorted image or poor quality. Fanmedia is optional not something mandatory, some entries are ridiculous with 5, 6 or 7 fanboxes with slight diferences and not overall quality.

[Arthurcoutinho600]

9 hours ago, Freestate said:

The only available categories for fan art boxes are fanart box front and fanart box back. Many users are stuffing normal categories with tons of fanmedia, and the problem is that downloading fanmedia must be transparent and optional to the users not a mixed chaos. That user is right when he says that just picking a regional priority you can't know if you're downloading real art or fanmedia if some users insist on stuffing non legit media in normal categories. Please use the categories with acuracy.

And yeah, it's not necesary to have fanboxes with a flattened and distorted image or poor quality. Fanmedia is optional not something mandatory, some entries are ridiculous with 5, 6 or 7 fanboxes with slight diferences and not overall quality.

But the category is right, around my moderations, its saying fan art box art or fan art cart so yeah that user is deleting fanarts without reason saying not official or fanmade.

[Freestate]

13 minutes ago, Arthurcoutinho600 said:

But the category is right, around my moderations, its saying fan art box art or fan art cart so yeah that user is deleting fanarts without reason saying not official or fanmade.

Sadly, some notifications in moderation that seem like trolling, end up being counter-trolling due to abuses of the database by other users. As I have told you, there are users who selfishly fill and approve the fanmedia database in all categories, driven by a personal need for all their media to be in North American format, making it impossible and unpredictable to know what type of data and of what quality you download. It is normal that some users get fed up and request deletions without giving reasons because they are tired of seeing the same things. In my opinion there are too many botched jobs in the database and very little effort to provide consistent, real and restored art by many users. For example currently the majority of SNES carts are located in the fanart cart category only because a user had a personal crusade to remove the restorations that I mostly made using a generic template. Since there is no RECONSTRUCTED category for carts I had to move them to fanart cart but other users there are really busy uploading fudges from USA cartridges and you have to upload them regionless if you don't want to have unpredictable downloads when you select regional priorities. It's infuriating. There should have been separate categories for all types of fanmedia years ago because there are users who want to customize their experience 100% and their insistence on forcing their art entry without having the proper categories in the database and some shortcomings in the download configuration turn everything into chaos.

[JereBear]

What we expect when our moderation guidelines come from post written 8 years ago with 30 pages of comments following. I think this all needs to be looked over and updated.

I also agree with needing more categories/image types

 

[Freestate]

1 hour ago, JereBear said:

What we expect when our moderation guidelines come from post written 8 years ago with 30 pages of comments following. I think this all needs to be looked over and updated.

I also agree with needing more categories/image types

 

Personally, I don't know what to do or say anymore. Without taking credit, I have to say that I've worked my ass off offering thousands of hours of work searching for and restoring covers and moderating, trying to make the launchbox database something minimally organized and of quality despite its shortcomings. But it has been proven over the years that the database and the quality of the media that is uploaded is something that either due to personal tastes or laziness is something that the developers barely touch or are interested in to the extent that would be necessary, in my opinion. Both the contributions and the moderation always end up being a war between rigorous users who make an effort and dozens of capricious or lazy users who upload and/or approve anything thinking only of their personal whim. There is no meritocracy, there is no dialogue or improvements... the database lacks adequate categories to upload the tons of fanmedia that many users insist on uploading when it is not even complete in terms of real media. I have already opened multiple tickets, I have made requests for dialogue and improvements in the forums and it is always preaching in the desert. And when you really get angry because you see that the free work you do in favor of the entire community is not respected and you raise the tone, what you get is either a sanction or the matter being closed falsely. If there were no rigorous users, the database would end up 100% invaded by custom fanmedia boxes with USA style and their logos on practically all platforms, even if they are digital platforms that did not come from Japan, arcade or whatever... there are users who do not care that the media available is real, they only want their custom box with an American design and they push again and again without any regulation... the latest has already been to start adding steamgrid style covers... which I think would be great... if we had some way to separate them and there were no "smart guys" who insisted on labeling them as real boxes or from real regions. It really kills me to try to download a custom box that's consistent with the real ones and see poster-style boxes that have nothing to do with them. The latest disaster? A user uploading custom boxes that look like real ones in the arcade section. The fanart section? He doesn't give a damn, he does his thing, with a bit of luck lazy users will approve it and he'll get away with having boxes and not having to worry about changing the import options in the app.

[JereBear]

36 minutes ago, Freestate said:

The latest disaster? A user uploading custom boxes that look like real ones in the arcade section. The fanart section? He doesn't give a damn, he does his thing, with a bit of luck lazy users will approve it and he'll get away with having boxes and not having to worry about changing the import options in the app.

This has been annoying. And they just keep submitting despite mine and your rejections.

[C-Beats]

I looked and thus far it appears to me that a large majority of the submissions that have been being sent regarding fanart deletion recently have been 3D Box art built using fan images and not representative of the official box the game released in. I saw one change request for an actual fanart that seemed fairly disingenuous request change out of the last 100 image deletion change requests. I do think for those artists working on 3D box art sets that if you're making images that aren't representative of the actual box the game was release in for the region in question that the forums are a bit better place for your artwork at this time. With the image pack importer within the app it also makes it FAR easier for fans of your artwork to actually grab/use it all en masse to help with the visual consistency I'm sure we ALL strive for in our personal collections. I appreciate your willingness and desire to share your artwork, but I do agree we have channels that are far more beneficial to yourself and those who enjoy your artwork than the database at the moment. As of right now the database doesn't even have a solid way to associate a given image to a specific artist making it difficult to funnel people to you and your other offerings. Submitting your art sets alleviates this and will allow you to build a following for yourself where your hard work can be appreciated more readily.

That being said I was also reviewing the reasons given for some of the change requests and not thrilled with some of the verbiage used in the reasons either. I can understand the frustrations you're feeling and in many ways feel it as well when I come across some fairly erroneous data/images in the database. That being said I'd ask that we all be a bit more diligent in maintaining a level of respectable decorum when submitted your requests. If you're getting to the point that you feel the need to swear or use obscenities at the random people who are going to see your request then I personally would rather you just take a break from it. If you're seeing a lot of submissions that are obvious breaks of the rules let us know and we can dig into it a bit more and hopefully get it corrected. We've been spending quite a bit of time building up various tools we can use to more quickly/easily monitor things like this and take action where required but still could use the heads up if you all are seeing trends we need to keep an eye out for.

[Freestate]

7 hours ago, C-Beats said:

That being said I was also reviewing the reasons given for some of the change requests and not thrilled with some of the verbiage used in the reasons either. I can understand the frustrations you're feeling and in many ways feel it as well when I come across some fairly erroneous data/images in the database. That being said I'd ask that we all be a bit more diligent in maintaining a level of respectable decorum when submitted your requests. If you're getting to the point that you feel the need to swear or use obscenities at the random people who are going to see your request then I personally would rather you just take a break from it. If you're seeing a lot of submissions that are obvious breaks of the rules let us know and we can dig into it a bit more and hopefully get it corrected. We've been spending quite a bit of time building up various tools we can use to more quickly/easily monitor things like this and take action where required but still could use the heads up if you all are seeing trends we need to keep an eye out for.

I think I have explained in detail that the problems of competition between criteria when moderating and contributing content is because the criteria have not been updated or expanded since the initial lax draft, and the database still needs features that have been requested for years. I can perfectly understand the challenge that this represents at the programming level or that the developer simply does not care or like to get involved. What I do not find acceptable is that at this point moderation and contribution continues to be a wild field where the troll actions of a newcomer matter as much as the work of hundreds of hours of people who really take the community seriously to keep everything in order. I do not know how to ask for it now without it falling on deaf ears that it would be appropriate for the most veteran users and those with more participation to be able to share their proposals for improvement and the problems they have encountered, to be able to agree on criteria and to expand reforms to the rules to add media moderation. For my part, it's not that I want any medals or to be the freak guardian of any dungeon, but I think it's very frustrating to continually see these battles of criteria, ambiguities, and that any dispute or difference of criteria is resolved by seeing who is more stubborn or when the moderators are more distracted to sneak in your stuff.

[C-Beats]

8 hours ago, Freestate said:

I think I have explained in detail that the problems of competition between criteria when moderating and contributing content is because the criteria have not been updated or expanded since the initial lax draft, and the database still needs features that have been requested for years. I can perfectly understand the challenge that this represents at the programming level or that the developer simply does not care or like to get involved. What I do not find acceptable is that at this point moderation and contribution continues to be a wild field where the troll actions of a newcomer matter as much as the work of hundreds of hours of people who really take the community seriously to keep everything in order. I do not know how to ask for it now without it falling on deaf ears that it would be appropriate for the most veteran users and those with more participation to be able to share their proposals for improvement and the problems they have encountered, to be able to agree on criteria and to expand reforms to the rules to add media moderation. For my part, it's not that I want any medals or to be the freak guardian of any dungeon, but I think it's very frustrating to continually see these battles of criteria, ambiguities, and that any dispute or difference of criteria is resolved by seeing who is more stubborn or when the moderators are more distracted to sneak in your stuff.

With the ability we now have to lock fields/images on a game we're hoping that we can start making this far less possible. There are some data points that obviously are correct and don't need to be touched and we can lock them down to ensure that they can't be. It will unfortunately take time as a lot of that is a bit of a manual process and one we're still ironing out. I can't get into too many details simply because I'm not in all the talks regarding DB and wouldn't be allowed to share EVERYTHING even if I was but I do know the DB has come up internally quite a bit in recent past. That being said people won't read much of any guidelines we put in place (as they've shown) and so we've been looking into more meaningful ways to address some of the quality issues we've been seeing. This is why we recently added logic to some of the image types and required them be png with transparency, and have now built the locking system, as well as better tooling for all members of the team to be able to monitor DB activity. The hope is very much so that we can not only ensure the quality and integrity of the database, but to ensure that those willing to take the time and energy to do it right don't have their time and efforts wasted. Hopefully with some of these new tools and processes (and some others hopefully coming down the pipe soon) we can make a serious dent in this.

That being said it all unfortunately takes time. Correcting course with something as large as the Games Database is NOT an easy task or one that can be done quickly. The pace I'm sure will get frustrating at times. With the amount of time you spend in the trenches of the DB I'm sure it'll be even more grueling. I ask that you take any breaks you need to keep your mental health/sanity and also reach out if you notice any obvious patterns we can try and help out with. Feel free to ping me in this thread if your starting to see any identifiable surges of something obviously not ok and we can hopefully track down the cause and see what we can do to combat it. I obviously have other stuff I need to focus on as well and so can't devote all my time on the DB but if there are some things I can handle here and there that will still make an obvious positive impact for the DB and all you wonderful people helping us with it then I'd be happy to do so when possible.