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Reisal

Quality control on /idgames/

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it takes me like 15 seconds to open a wad in XWE and determine whether it's a troll wad or not

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Memfis said:

prophet mode: Bloodshedder won't do anything about this.

I think he is already doing enough by marking Terry wads out on the archive, if people still find these a problem then I am absolutely baffled! How can these Terry wads be affecting people when they are pointed out on their bullshit clear as day in black and white.

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I think Doomworld's idgames interface should stay the same. However, I do like the idea of community tagging, with heavy moderation and oversight. Why stop at marking troll or not-troll? Why not categorize them by agreed upon "genres" of WADs?

It could operate separately from Doomworld so the admins here won't have to bother messing with the site, and so that , as well as making the admins of the tagging system purely focused on that aspect.

This could tie into the polished, modern frontend people were talking about, while possibly remaining its own independent idgames piggyback network. That way, the extra metadeta being built and managed by a community with overseers (essentially like a wiki but for wads and more brief) could be accessed with any front end that's compliant with its protocol, be it web based or a local run program.

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Chris Hansen said:

Yes, you are right. There is more effort required, no doubt about that. But that's not how it sounded from you the first time. Unless, even after having written the above, you still think that it needs a software of epic proportions to help moderating /idgames?

I never said it would need software of epic proportions, just access to the correct source port or SLADE for verification purposes. Unless of course you expect moderators to just bin reported wads without actually checking that the report isn't bogus.

To clarify what I mean, a lot of people can find time to do small quick moderation tasks if they can do so while commuting on the bus, or when on the toilet, or during lunch breaks, etc, but most of these situations don't give you access to a computer that can install the necessary software needed to verify a wad, such as a phone or a work computer you don't have installation rights on. Things like forum or wiki moderation can easily be done through your web browser and usually take a minute tops, wad verification can't, and that massively reduces the amount of people that are able to take on moderation duties.

Chris Hansen said:

Yes. But the main difference here is, that /newstuff is based on people volounteering to do so. And /idgames has to have appointed moderators. Don't draw parallels where there are none.

Are you suggesting that any idgames moderators would not be volunteers? Is the plan to outsource the moderating to India on the cheap, or are you going to force people to moderate it through threats of violence? :p

The forum moderators are similarly volunteers, even though it is not a position available to anyone. All of this stuff is done in people's spare time for no money, and the more time consuming it is, the less likely you're going to be able to find someone who can do it.

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I might like the idea of community tagging along with Soda, but otherwise I think the ways things are is completely fine. Besides, if a wad has star ratings (I think, I might be confused on who has a community star rating system) of two or less, well then it's clearly shit if TerryWAD styled or whatever, and thus can be avoided.

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I have to say that most of what is being raised in this thread could be addressed by the current system. There is a rating system. There is a comment system. Each file has a text file in a standard format that should give a little information about the gameplay type. If it isn't working, the questions are "why?" and "would another system work any better?".


As an aside, some of the time I just go direct to the /newstuff folder on one of the mirrors, download the files that seem interesting (sometimes after checking their text files) and give them a play. If I am doing that, I don't see the Doomworld interface at all. I guess I'm part of the problem. :P

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Melon said:

Are you suggesting that any idgames moderators would not be volunteers? Is the plan to outsource the moderating to India on the cheap, or are you going to force people to moderate it through threats of violence? :p

The forum moderators are similarly volunteers, even though it is not a position available to anyone. All of this stuff is done in people's spare time for no money, and the more time consuming it is, the less likely you're going to be able to find someone who can do it.


English is not my first language, so maybe I wasn't being clear enough. Yes, of course, it's volunteers in both cases. The main difference being, that one group have actually been appointed to be moderator and one group are free to review levels or not.

Time consuming!? Seriously? It's not like we are being hit by tidal waves of troll wads that require our complete attention 24/7! A troll wad doesn't have to be pulled down the second it pops up. That's not the system I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is what is essetially completely lacking at the moment: A way to let them stay in the archives and to remove them from /idgames. No more, no less. Let's say a wad is a troll wad. And after having been up for a few days, it's been marked by 10 people as a troll wad. A moderator checks it out and agrees. It gets deleted from /idgames. That's it. Hardly time consuming.

For the moment, I've said what I had to say. I feel like I'm repeating myself.

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Memfis said:

it takes me like 15 seconds to open a wad in XWE and determine whether it's a troll wad or not


Heh, and it'll take less than a single second to XWE to fuck up the poor little file, be terrywad or not.

Also you forgot Bloodshedder locking this thread in your prophet post, because this thread, more likely than not, it is giving terrywads unnecessary attention

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Random idea: why not disable commenting on Terrywads? One, it marks them out without drawing too much attention and two, it helps with ignoring them and eventually phasing them out.

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Probably the only change I'd consider making would be to restrict rating and comments in the /idgames database to forum members in good standing (not banned or losered) so people who are spamming and trolling the database can no longer do so anonymously. That of course won't prevent people from registering solely to rate wads, so forum moderation rules and penalties would probably have to apply to database comments in order to keep the posters in line.

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This terrywad crap will keep escalating until we get actual malware on the archive, mark my words. And I'm talking about an innocent looking Doom mod that can actually harm your system, by achieving arbitrary code execution through some vulnerability in a source port. A codebase the size of GZDoom or Zandronum (the most likely targets at this point) will never be fully free of such possible problems.

We already had one mod in this line come out that could corrupt your configuration file, via abuse of various ACS commands. Just a matter of time til something worse is found.

The zip bombs are bad enough. These small zips that somehow blow up into +4GB of garbage. It ought to be simple to filter such stuff out, in my opinion.

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Obsidian said:

Random idea: why not disable commenting on Terrywads? One, it marks them out without drawing too much attention and two, it helps with ignoring them and eventually phasing them out.


I imagine someone would still have to go through labeling such wads by hand. If that's an issue.

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Considering Bloodshedder already marks them out when they hit the archives, it shouldn't be too much trouble.

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If they're already marked, why not just move all of them to themes/terry already so they are not mishmashed among the normal WADs?

And Quasar brings up a good point, are we going to let it get worse or are we going to take action other than 0 rating it?

What about a large red warning stating the level is a Terrywad and you should play it at your own risk?

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Hire a counter hacker to return terrywads to their creators with special surprises for their systems if it escalates to actual malware.

Is it possible to find out where they are coming from and block those ISP adresses from uploading?

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Wiki already found out that an open editing system falls victim to those who would abuse it. If you leave doors open, goats will walk in to investigate, and they get into stuff.

New wads should not get any recognition. They should get marked into categories, size, quality, and theme.

One of the categories could be Message-themed, that being as much recognition that such deserve. The listing should indicate the message being pushed as there are always some who actually would want to see some things.

Any public marking system will get abused. If it had thousands of ratings a day they could overwhelm the abusers, but that is not the case here.

Even the current review section contains stuff that I would not consider a review. It is too much like a back alley wall to be monitored like a forum. Some just want to push their agenda on any wall they can spray paint. Even if it does not survive long, if it is forced upon enough eyes for long enough it will attract those desperate for attention. The only solution for that are teflon walls, nothing sticks until someone trusted approves it.

The rating system should be limited to trusted members. This had to be done in the Wiki system too. Suggestions can be made, but one of the trusted members has to approve for it to be made public. There can be many trusted members.

Reviews have little value if the reviewer is not rated themselves.
If the reviewers had their own validation-rating, and that validation-rating was posted with the review, and the high validation-rated reviews always were first, then the junk would be pushed to tail at least, even if they posted later or more often.
The validation-rating could use doom monsters (the cyberdemon would be the forum moderator, any unknown would be a zombie), or some else that does not look like a star.
I would recommend having unknown only be able to rate with tiny dots,
accepted reviews would rate with colored dots, trusted reviewers rating with missiles, and moderator ratings would be with BFGs.

The download it and throw system does not work for me. It can take me 15 to 20 minutes to download one of those wads.

A 0 rating does not tell me anything. It just means that no one played it yet, or did not bother to rate it yet. It is too inclusive of too many reasons for it to be 0, even less informative than that "check engine" idiot light on a dashboard. There needs to be a distinction between unrated and a rating of 0.

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I trust Bloodshedder when he marks a new wad as a terrywad, so there's no reason to comment on it further to bring it back to the front page.

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TimeOfDeath said:

I trust Bloodshedder when he marks a new wad as a terrywad, so there's no reason to comment on it further to bring it back to the front page.

This.

But then we can't account for the anonymous accounts that enjoy telling Terry how much of a bad person he is so maybe anonymous voting should either restrict you of comments or not be allowed at all.

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And Chris: don't comment on the trollwads in the archives. You're giving them the exact reaction they're looking for and therefore encouraging them to produce more puerile garbage.

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While there are some good ideas here, I think we still have one big problem: how can we tell which ones are the troll wads, which ones are just unintentionally bad wads, which ones are joke wads... I think you know what I mean. I'm aware that I've been repeating this a lot, so I'm going to give some examples:

32.wad
daffie.wad
64.wad
doomjr.wad
etinetiq.wad
mock2.wad

Which ones are troll wads?

Before you say it, yes, I'm aware that mock2.wad was intended as a joke wad IIRC, and I know that some respected mappers got involved in the project. And even then, I don't consider it a funny, entertaining or quality work. But I would never consider giving it a different treatment than the rest just because I don't like it (I apologize if this sounds rude; I have a lot of respect for every mapper involved in these and other projects - after all, they are all people who invest time, work, etc. producing something so we all can just enjoy/have a laugh...). And there's also the fact that some people really enjoy troll/terry wads. Should we ignore their opinion? Some people, for example, don't like puzzle levels. With that in mind, would you consider this a troll wad?

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Zed said:

Stuff

The difference between those wads and Terry wads are that not only is a Terry wad actually unplayable and is designed to be a pain in the literal arse (with its oh so hilarious rape rape rape PewDiePie formula of "a joke"), Terry wads are actually becoming malicious.

Take this into account: A shitty 90's wad isn't going to fuck around with you settings, shit out a 4Gig file without warning or create as much autosaves as it possibly can, it also will not try its best to insult certain people via big flashy text or custom monsters/textures of said individuals or crash your sourceport.

It's not about quality or content at this point, it is about them trying to piss people off (for me, it ain't working because I don't even bother with touching shit, but clearly it has a lot of people jimmies rustled right about now) and to abuse the archive.

When they finally get round to making an actual system compromising wad and upload it to the archive, a lot of people are gonna get fucked by this wad (because despite the warnings they all seem to get, they still dive into the shit), so it would be great to try and prevent that fuckery from happening (It will happen BTW, they already know how to fuck certain source ports up)

These fuckers are very organized for a bunch of trolls, what a perfectly pointless waste of useful potential.

(Also it would be great if a certain Youtube individual wouldn't keep advertising Terry wads for personal gain and thus creating more of the Terry wadders themselves but there is no stopping that shit now it is too late, GG dude)

-

Anyway, a little off topic, but does anybody actually have a clue who these guys are? Something tells me they are one of us (They know a lot about us and a lot about what happens here) or they are doing this for some sort of political reason (Like some extreme case of butthurt by some guys who got banned).

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mrthejoshmon said:

The difference between those wads and Terry wads are that not only is a Terry wad actually unplayable and is designed to be a pain in the literal arse (with its oh so hilarious rape rape rape PewDiePie formula of "a joke"), Terry wads are actually becoming malicious.

Take this into account: A shitty 90's wad isn't going to fuck around with you settings, shit out a 4Gig file without warning or create as much autosaves as it possibly can, it also will not try its best to insult certain people via big flashy text or custom monsters/textures of said individuals or crash your sourceport.

It's not about quality or content at this point, it is about them trying to piss people off (for me, it ain't working because I don't even bother with touching shit, but clearly it has a lot of people jimmies rustled right about now) and to abuse the archive.

When they finally get round to making an actual system compromising wad and upload it to the archive, a lot of people are gonna get fucked by this wad (because despite the warnings they all seem to get, they still dive into the shit), so it would be great to try and prevent that fuckery from happening (It will happen BTW, they already know how to fuck certain source ports up)

These fuckers are very organized for a bunch of trolls, what a perfectly pointless waste of useful potential.


I agree with this, but I would like to clear something up: in my opinion, malicious wads should be deleted, period. No warnings, no "terry treatment", just deletion. They have no place nowhere in the archives, so I think they are obviously out of the question.

Now, let's suppose we succeed and eliminate every malicious file in the archive. Then what? I mean, once we get rid of all that shit, we have no reason to take further action, given that the rest are not malicious wads, maybe just some really low quality stuff. And wouldn't it be a better idea to just make the opposite? Like, instead of focusing so much in the bad material (if I'm not mistaken, we've had this discussion at least twice last year) why not just create some sort of a "Community Approved" folder, where people can download any wad in it without taking risks?

mrthejoshmon said:

(Also it would be great if a certain Youtube individual wouldn't keep advertising Terry wads for personal gain and thus creating more of the Terry wadders themselves but there is no stopping that shit now it is too late, GG dude)


I was referring to this. Some people just like those wads. Why? Who knows, but it's a fact.

mrthejoshmon said:

Anyway, a little off topic, but does anybody actually have a clue who these guys are? Something tells me they are one of us (They know a lot about us and a lot about what happens here) or they are doing this for some sort of political reason (Like some extreme case of butthurt by some guys who got banned).


Wouldn't it be possible to make some kind of built-in "malware detector" in source ports, so if you try to load a corrupt wad in, for example, ZDoom, it can be detected and rejected automatically?

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General Rainbow Bacon said:

Hire a counter hacker to return terrywads to their creators with special surprises for their systems if it escalates to actual malware.

Let's stop doing things by half measures - launch a Kickstarter project to hire an assassin or two! ;)

Is it possible to find out where they are coming from and block those ISP adresses from uploading?

Maybe. If they're in the dynamic IP pools of one or more major ISPs there's probably not much that can be done without also blocking uploads from other less controversial mappers.

mrthejoshmon said:

Something tells me they are one of us (They know a lot about us and a lot about what happens here) or they are doing this for some sort of political reason (Like some extreme case of butthurt by some guys who got banned).

They've probably all been banned from one or more of the major Doom forums, but could keep tabs on what's going on here (including the hidden Blogs forum) as Registered Lurkers without drawing attention to themselves. I suspect most of them started out on the Skulltag forums and their posting careers have gone downhill from there.

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Zed said:

I agree with this, but I would like to clear something up: in my opinion, malicious wads should be deleted, period. No warnings, no "terry treatment", just deletion. They have no place nowhere in the archives, so I think they are obviously out of the question.

Now, let's suppose we succeed and eliminate every malicious file in the archive. Then what? I mean, once we get rid of all that shit, we have no reason to take further action, given that the rest are not malicious wads, maybe just some really low quality stuff. And wouldn't it be a better idea to just make the opposite? Like, instead of focusing so much in the bad material (if I'm not mistaken, we've had this discussion at least twice last year) why not just create some sort of a "Community Approved" folder, where people can download any wad in it without taking risks?

Good idea actually, just get rid of the dangerous wads and leave the others to rot. As for the "Community Approved" idea, that would also be good but it would take considerable amounts of effort to set it up and maintain it, it would also take the same effort to do it to the "Bad" wads as well. Overall it could be easier to just let em shine/rot on their own (Also wouldn't the newstuff become redundant if this happened or am I looking at it too hard). But then again the feature could be used to highlight the best of the best on the archive (Which is hard to find with all the 90's DM maps with 0 ratings on the archive)? There is negatives to both sides and I am not sure which would more beneficial :/

I was referring to this. Some people just like those wads. Why? Who knows, but it's a fact.

Oh this guy who I was talking about claims he hates them, but as long s he gets that Youtube fame he is going to keep "Suffering through them"...

And sure there is people who enjoy weird things, but I doubt they will miss the malicious ones right?

Wouldn't it be possible to make some kind of built-in "malware detector" in source ports, so if you try to load a corrupt wad in, for example, ZDoom, it can be detected and rejected automatically?

That would take a fair bit of worthless effort (Because if they are flagged down or removed the only people really going to be effected are those who downloaded it themselves knowing the risks), if hidden cleverly enough (giving examples would be like telling somebody the blueprints for a bomb at this point) they could do some damage. But wouldn't trying to insert malicious code into ZDoom and such require an entire rewrite of most of the code? That would be seen a mile off.

GreyGhost said:

They've probably all been banned from one or more of the major Doom forums, but could keep tabs on what's going on here (including the hidden Blogs forum) as Registered Lurkers without drawing attention to themselves. I suspect most of them started out on the Skulltag forums and their posting careers have gone downhill from there.

This would explain the strange obsession with Skulltag wads they have, either that or they are still upset about it's death.

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The email verification that Ty has set up is a sensible response to the problem of fake email addresses. It's sad that it's even necessary (it hasn't been until now).

I don't have any good solutions. It's just a real shame that we can't have at least one corner of the Internet without idiots doing dumb shit.

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mrthejoshmon said:

This would explain the strange obsession with Skulltag wads they have, either that or they are still upset about it's death.


Pretty much all Terrywads, not by Terry, use Skulltag because that's what Terry used for his original lineup of shit. Actually now they moved on to Zandronum. Maybe it was initially to push their WADs as being by the man(child) himself, but nowadays it seems more like just for tradition.

Some of these are by people who are obviously members here and/or ZDoom forums (same username, etc). The rest are probably by these same people under different names.

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This repeating most of the subject of Malware and virus problems.

It is done for the same reasons as any malware and virus, to see how far they can extend their influence, and eventually for some financial gain.

These wads:
1. Should be restricted so the general public cannot download them.

2. should be restricted so that others do not learn of the techniques.

3. Should not be deleted because knowing the virus methods is necessary to virus prevention. If there is any wad that can get through the protections in DoomLegacy I want to know how it is doing it.

DEH is a security hole. Every port should have some protections against abuse. No DEH text string should ever be used as a format, only as a string to a "%s". The original code did not do this safely and it needs to be fixed where ever that code was copied. Every port should fix this.
DoomLegacy has some more checks to close the security holes.

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