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Memfis

idgames discussion totally unrelated to maintainership

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The Green Herring said:

I will use neither position (/idgames or Community Chest) to influence the other.

Will you accept an upload named cchest5.zip? ("Council on Certification of Health, Environmental and Safety Technologists, part 5") I've been always wondering why are there no trolls doing stuff like that with the names of popular series.

Hmm, will the new maintainers also be more anal about permissions? :( Ty didn't really mind stolen textures, ogg music, etc. If that changes, I won't be able to upload anymore.

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Memfis said:

Will you accept an upload named cchest5.zip? ("Council on Certification of Health, Environmental and Safety Technologists, part 5") I've been always wondering why are there no trolls doing stuff like that with the names of popular series.


Memfis you and I should make Hell Revealed 3

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Memfis said:

Will you accept an upload named cchest5.zip? ("Council on Certification of Health, Environmental and Safety Technologists, part 5") I've been always wondering why are there no trolls doing stuff like that with the names of popular series.


I can't see why they shouldn't. It isn't against the rules, and if you reserved every possible name for every possible sequel to every existing project, there'd be no more names left under 8 chars in length.

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Jon said:

I can't see why they shouldn't. It isn't against the rules, and if you reserved every possible name for every possible sequel to every existing project, there'd be no more names left under 8 chars in length.


Heh, reminds me of the time some morons tried uploading an abyspe16.wad to the archives. They probably should have considered making it out of more than malignant ACS scripting.

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Memfis said:

Hmm, will the new maintainers also be more anal about permissions? :( Ty didn't really mind stolen textures, ogg music, etc. If that changes, I won't be able to upload anymore.


The only thing I wouldn't mind if we just have the Terrywads nuked off the archives and outright banned but keep all other existing rules the way as is. Perhaps this will give incentive to these idiots to make actual playable levels, even if they are poorly designed but beatable.

Also, what's stopping us from expanding outside of 8 character length filenames? Eventually we will run out of name and number combinations in the future and rules regarding that will have to be expanded to allow long file names.

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Memfis said:

Will you accept an upload named cchest5.zip? ("Council on Certification of Health, Environmental and Safety Technologists, part 5") I've been always wondering why are there no trolls doing stuff like that with the names of popular series.

Hmm, will the new maintainers also be more anal about permissions? :( Ty didn't really mind stolen textures, ogg music, etc. If that changes, I won't be able to upload anymore.


I don't think they can be anal about that without nuking a large portion of the community's history in the process

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Glaice said:

Also, what's stopping us from expanding outside of 8 character length filenames? Eventually we will run out of name and number combinations in the future and rules regarding that will have to be expanded to allow long file names.

Mostly convention, I suppose. Even DOS can read extended file names.

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Linguica said:

Mostly convention, I suppose. Even DOS can read extended file names.


I think it wasn't so much DOS file names, but the CD-ROM format of the day having 8.3 files, and only 8 directories deep. cdrom.com offered copies of the FTP on disc, and ISO 9660 Format 1 would read on every CDROM drive, so the decision was easy to make.

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Glaice said:

Also, what's stopping us from expanding outside of 8 character length filenames? Eventually we will run out of name and number combinations in the future and rules regarding that will have to be expanded to allow long file names.

If the DOS filename limit is lifted, expect to see lots of filenames with crazy punctuation and inconsistency in their titles.

Second, it's impractical with vanilla Doom. And in general spaces are annoying at the command line.

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printz said:

If the DOS filename limit is lifted, expect to see lots of filenames with crazy punctuation and inconsistency in their titles.


"File names must be alphanumeric characters only. No spaces or punctation marks, other than the single '.' before the extension."

Pretty trivial to RegEx that.

Not that I think the 8-character limit is in danger of being exhausted any time soon. There are over 2,000,000,000,000 unique combinations available just in full eight-character names alone (not all of them meaningful of course, but I don't mind downloading D12X943Z.ZIP if people I trusted on here were telling me it was good :) ).

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Capellan said:

Not that I think the 8-character limit is in danger of being exhausted any time soon.



That's not the issue. But 8 characters often lead to cryptic and non-descriptive names.

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Graf Zahl said:

That's not the issue. But 8 characters often lead to cryptic and non-descriptive names.


Well you got a TXT file to hold all the details... Think of ZIP file as just a pointer or something. We're working in 8.3 address space and not even close to running out of memory. :-)

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I agree with Graf. The 8.3 restriction is just archaic and obtuse. DOS simply isn't important anymore (neither is ISO-9660 without Rock Ridge or Joliet extensions).

The file names themselves should be descriptive, it's not very helpful to be required to peek into every *.txt file of oddly-named files just because they have to fit into eight characters. There are limits; they shouldn't be excessively long, and perhaps some restrictions can be in place anyway (ASCII characters only, no uppercase?), but "community_chest_5.zip" would be a lot easier on the eyes than "cchest5.zip" -- and it avoids the possibility of clashes with "Chocolate Chest 5" (for example).

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How about 32 characters max? Ample space, and anything beyond that is unsightly. Definitely no "inconvenient" characters, either.


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As for Terrywads, I strongly disagree with Glaice on this. I don't enjoy Terrywads, but I nevertheless respect them as a form of expression. I'm strongly against the archive regulating taste. It's there to preserve history in as detailed a form as reasonably possible. Censorship flies in the face of what the archive should be about. It was a mistake to have created a "file ghetto" in the first place, as it sets a very bad precedent.

Besides, acknowledging them as "exceptional" in some way (even negatively) gives them exactly what they want; recognition and attention. They already have been trying all sorts of loopholes to get their uploads in the regular sections, wasting the maintainer's time arguing over semantics, when they could be attending to better files. Trolls would be more starved of attention if they're tossed into the sea of countless other files than given their own dedicated pedestal.

They're not "flooding the archives", non-Terry stuff eclipses their minimal presence. Throwing questionable "solutions" at a nonexistent problem isn't good. Does it really ruin one's day to download a WAD to find that it sucks? Just delete it or something, don't rate it, don't comment on it, don't even look at its page. If other people want to comment on it, you can just as easily ignore that too.

Who defines what a "troll wad" is vs. a "crude joke wad"? Why even censor based on that criterea? I want to see a commitment to objectivity and non-bias. I want no unwritten rules; if a submission conforms to clear requirements and guidelines, it should go in, no second thoughts. If a rule cannot be cited as to why a submission was rejected or buried, then there's no good reason to reject or bury it. And there's no good reason to bury at all, if it's not "good enough" for the archives, reject it and don't host it at all.

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TL;DR version:

If something's defacto banned, don't pussyfoot around it and just clearly state that it's banned. Also, don't ban things for reasons that don't hold up to scrutiny and otherwise directly conflict with the core philosophy of the archive. The archive should be above community politics, and should not be needlessly curated, as that denies people outside of the community (including future generations) access to those files.

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I'm with Sodaholic on this one. Regardless of the demographics of people that do or don't like terrywads, your methods are directly counterproductive to your goals. If you really wanted to silence terrywads, it'd be as simple as ignoring it. Making a whole effort to discriminate is merely an invitation for actual exploits.

Also, it would be wise to remember that if you can be told what you can see or play, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think.

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chungy said:

I agree with Graf. The 8.3 restriction is just archaic and obtuse.


Fortunately, none of this matters.



With regards to terrywads, Ty already had a warning text file in the directory - the idgames doomworld frontend should read in that file and warn users of terrywads. Simple, right?

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Just talking about 'em here is giving them more attention then they deserve, so let's not. :) Also I'm still kind of puzzled as to why GreyGhost posted a picture of bicycles.

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chungy said:

I agree with Graf. The 8.3 restriction is just archaic and obtuse. DOS simply isn't important anymore (neither is ISO-9660 without Rock Ridge or Joliet extensions).

Say what? Vanilla Doom runs under DOSBox! Which means you still have to provide short wad names.

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Csonicgo said:

Fortunately, none of this matters.

You should read the post I was agreeing to: "8 characters often lead to cryptic and non-descriptive names."

I would say that matters a lot.

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Sodaholic said:

stuff


I agree with this. As Ty himself said:

Ty Halderman said doomworld.com/vb/post/1324324]in another thread:
Quality is not a criterion for inclusion, which I've said roughly a million times, give or take.


I strongly dislike terrywads. But please don't reject them. We may don't like them, but they are an important part in Doom's history, for better or for worse.

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Perhaps they can stay in /terrywads/ then, but otherwise reject the ones that have really nasty ACS or other game changing settings.

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Glaice said:

reject the ones that have really nasty ACS or other game changing settings.

I think that was already being done on the basis that they bordered on being malicious software.

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Glaice said:

Perhaps they can stay in /terrywads/ then

No, the contents should be moved to the proper directories, and /terrywads/ directory itself removed. The archive exists to be of use to its users. It should not be deliberately inconvenient to get to certain files. The only real exception is x-rated, but for good reason, and it's obviously not that difficult to penetrate its interior as currently implemented.

Glaice said:

reject the ones that have really nasty ACS or other game changing settings.

But any submission like that violates the rules anyway, so what difference does it make?

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@Everyone

What about a curated tagging system similar to Steam for the DW frontend? It could be useful for categorizing gameplay genres and all sorts of other things, plus maybe additional credits not in the text file. The text file itself would be parsed as metadata tags as a basis to work with.

You could browse by author(s), date, engine, IWAD, and of course user-generated tags like "slaughtermap" "weapon mod" "scripted machinima movie" (if anyone ever makes something like that, I know Quake 1 has one), "jokewad", "texture and sprite resource pack", anything really. Perhaps have it list other files needed if there are dependencies.

Maybe even hook it into the forum accounts more, have preferences and stuff, a "favorites" list, and of course browsing by tags. Obviously, tags would need to be curated by select people and have public discussions a la Wikipedia talk pages, describing why the suggested and pending tags are or aren't relevant to the file.

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Sodaholic said:

No, the contents should be moved to the proper directories, and /terrywads/ directory itself removed.

But if you remove /terrywads/, then there is no proper directory for them...

Sodaholic said:

The archive exists to be of use to its users. It should not be deliberately inconvenient to get to certain files.

Yes, which is why they ended up creating the terrywads directory. These files do not advertise their nature in their text files, so searching the database interface for them is hard. By putting them neatly in a single theme folder, getting to these terry files if you want them is extremely convenient for the user.

Capellan said:

"File names must be alphanumeric characters only. No spaces or punctation marks, other than the single '.' before the extension."

Pretty trivial to RegEx that.

Pretty sure ! and _ have already been grandfathered in.

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Sodaholic said:

Who defines what a "troll wad" is vs. a "crude joke wad"?

I'd say, if you don't see the difference, it's your problem.

If something's defacto banned, don't pussyfoot around it and just clearly state that it's banned.

Looks like you're living in a world of black and white. It's not banned. The whole point of the /terrywads directory is to allow these great masterpieces to exist in the archive without being confused with the wads of other genres.

"But Da Werecat, lulz, the whole point of creating a terrywad is to confuse and annoy the common users of the archive!"

Oh!! Now I get it!!! We should totally advocate for the people's right to confuse and annoy other people!!1

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Glaice said:

Also, what's stopping us from expanding outside of 8 character length filenames?

Probably the lack of any need to do so. The database on Doomworld provides a convenient means of finding out what's inside zips with obscure names and what others think of it.

In any case, the 8.3 limit only appears to apply to the .zip and .txt files, anything else inside the zip can have a long filename.

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Sodaholic said:

The archive exists to be of use to its users.

I'd argue that that is why segregating files like these to /terrywads is a good idea.

As solutions go I think it's a pretty good one. Less liberal maintainers would have just rejected / removed files like these entirely.

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