troll wads

GreyGhost said:

QFT.

Well, I'm not convinced by this in the slightest. In fact, I'm pretty sure that most of the time they get brought up but the trolls themselves. They write all sorts of negative comments and they respond to them. If you want to stop them, you'll have to kick them off the playground. Ignoring will not really work here. In general, from my experience ignoring problems rarely solves them.

Well, I'm not sure it's a good idea. I have a couple of reasons, but I think the most important is the fact that there's really no good way to draw the line. I mean, we all agree that, for example, Doomguy2000's or Terry's wads are crap. But what about Ruba's Killing Adventure? Or The Puzzler (id=6420)? Or Maze of Frustration (id=14562)? What about those ones that have mixed reviews? How to tell the difference between a troll wad and a genuine effort gone bad, or a joke wad? Not all of us like the same kind of things, so maybe what for me is an average/good map, for someone else is crap/troll and for a third person is excellent. Now, I'm not saying there aren't really bad material there, but before deleting anything I think there should be some kind of 'consensus', and I think that's the real hard part.

Now, about LodiB88's suggestion (not allowing comments/ratings for troll wads), it doesn't sound that bad, but then, what's the point of having the option of rating something with 0/1/2 stars? Should we be allowed to review/comment only the ones with a 3+ rating? Again, it's a 3+ rating for who? I know it's a touchy issue, but I have to second Xaser's opinion: It's as simple as not feeding the trolls. They will eventually get bored of not receiving attention, or talking to themselves in the reviews, given the case.

Actually, I reckon the DG2K ones should stay: they're not inherantly malicious, as opposed to Terrywads(screamers, code that screws with your settings, etc). And considering Bloodshedder labels the Terrywads when they're released on the archives, it can't be very hard at all to target them.

Memfis said:

Well, I'm not convinced by this in the slightest. In fact, I'm pretty sure that most of the time they get brought up but the trolls themselves. They write all sorts of negative comments and they respond to them. If you want to stop them, you'll have to kick them off the playground. Ignoring will not really work here. In general, from my experience ignoring problems rarely solves them.

Now that the reviews are colour coded I tend to skip the pink ones, so it doesn't much matter to me if a troll's having an "Anonymous" versus "Anonymous" argument with himself. If Bloodshedder tires of the fake drama I've no doubt he could weed them out fairly quickly with a search'n'delete by IP address.

Imback55 said:

I'm going to go with no because that would be censorship. Then again isn't the Doom community about censorship? Looking on the brightside of thing they at least no longer get reviews on The Newstuff Chronicles and get zero star ratings from Bloodshedder labeling it as Terrywad. That should be enough shouldn't it? Of course if you guys would do as you claim to say and that is "ignore them", then this thread would not exist.

Lots of autism in that quote. 10 bucks on doomguy2000 multi.

Yeah, I got a distinct DG2K vibe from this guy as well. Heh.

at least its not the roblox community

Zed said:

I have a couple of reasons, but I think the most important is the fact that there's really no good way to draw the line.

How about wads that contain scripts depicting ass raping gets removed?

j4rio said:

How about wads that contain scripts depicting ass raping gets removed?

That might include It Only Gets Worse, although I'm not quite sure if there was any consent. :P

Heh, they can't even categorize vanilla vs. ports wads properly right now. What makes you think that filtering out troll wads is going to be done with any higher degree of accuracy? Try this experiment: delete all your advanced ports, and for the rest of the year play only with doom.exe and/or Chocolate Doom. Now download only the "vanilla" wads that get released into the top-level /idgames/levels/doom*/ directories, and avoid the Ports subdirectories entirely. You'll find that a significant percentage of current releases either:
a) crash immediately when you try to play them, or
b) crash sometimes later in the game (VPO, etc.), or
c) become unplayable sometime in the game (some door doesn't open, switch doesn't activate, etc.), or
d) plays well enough the map can be completed but with tons of glitches along the way.
I actually don't mind the last one, as many 1994 wads were like that, but today we have much better level editors, and so although the symptoms are similar, the cause is actually different: testing in wrong engine (e.g. ZDoom instead of vanilla), and miscategorization of the wad when it get uploaded, so that it gets archived in the wrong place (doesn't belong in vanilla section).

This isn't actually the fault of archive maintainer, because he doesn't have time to test vanilla compatibility. Just like he can't test every wad to see if it's a troll (and as Zed mentioned, this isn't always clear-cut). It's not like we're paying Ty to sit around and admin the archive. People have lives, and sometimes they don't even play DOOM for months, or even years on end.

My solution is simple: mostly play wads for which I've read the forum thread, or /newstuff review, so I know if there's any chance in hell it will run in vanilla. Even then sometimes there are problems (like that recent Door To Cthon remake with 0-tag lift) but it minimizes them.

Refusing to host something on the internet is not censorship

/idgames is the main repository for Doom stuff. Being banned from there essentially throws you out of the public sphere. If that's not censorship, I don't know what is.

who gives a flying fuck if it's censorship or not? it's a privately run service and if unrepentant trolls are deemed unwanted, they can go to hell and maybe cry about it. just report them for deletion and don't draw attention to them with dwf threads.

hex11 said:

What makes you think that filtering out troll wads is going to be done with any higher degree of accuracy?

Bloodshedder doesn't seem to have any problems identifying them.

I don't like the idea of just ignoring the troll wads/comments anymore. Sure, you can do that but I personally don't feel good in a place where morons are allowed to do whatever the heck they want. It annoys me.

So http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/ is public place and http://www.doomworld.com/vb/ is not? why? If users can be banned on forums for misbehavior, then they should be banned on idgames too, if they purposely lie, upload troll wads etc.

I wonder if Phml is one of the trolls who upload the insulting pwads..
He seems like a troll from what I have read on the forums. (eg: back to the saturn x thread)

Idea: Since Ty Harderman (sorry cant remember the name) does not want to delete the troll pwads, then you could at least flag them in doomworld.com/idgames..
Reasonable staff members like Bloodsheder, Grazza, Fraggle etc.. would have ability to flag a pwad as trollwad, which would pernamently reduce its stars to zero and force first comment to be "This pwad contain malicious content, download it on your own risk" in red letters... and the whole background for the pwad page would be orange like in post hell.

There is no doubt that pwads which contain insulting messages and lie about themselfes in description to trick user into downloading (or even change his settings without premision, contain viruses etc..) are not made to enrich doom community.

Phml said:

/idgames is the main repository for Doom stuff. Being banned from there essentially throws you out of the public sphere. If that's not censorship, I don't know what is.

And that's the problem. Considering it's the main site for uploading doom stuff, it didn't take too long to notice loopholes and start steadily filling archive with junk.
And no, waiting won't solve anything. It's soon going to be yearly anniversary of crap steadily flowing through idgames.

Btw my first post was just a stab at memfis - http://www.doomworld.com/vb/post-hell/62189-this-crap-ends-h . I don't even remotely mind some healthy idgames filtration.

All I really want is for a certain (group of?) dumbasses to quit posting "terrywad" comments on legitimately good WADs. Everything from Eternal to Epic 2 has received comments like this, and while they get removed quickly enough if you report them, it's tedious to report every single one...

WildWeasel said:

All I really want is for a certain (group of?) dumbasses to quit posting "terrywad" comments on legitimately good WADs.

That's probably the same group of people who make these troll wads.

So http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/ is public place and http://www.doomworld.com/vb/ is not? why? If users can be banned on forums for misbehavior, then they should be banned on idgames too, if they purposely lie, upload troll wads etc.

I didn't say doomworld.com/idgames is a public place. I didn't say there was anything fundamentally different between doomworld.com/vb and doomworld.com/idgames either. Doomworld is essentially the Doom community public sphere, which has nothing to do with whether the site is publicly or privately owned...

It's almost as if you have this very black-and-white view of censorship being unequivocally bad (a perspective I share to some extent, but I know it's a wrong one to have); but at the same time, in a very hypocritical way you want things to be censored here, so you try to convince yourself it's not censorship and perceive any comment on the nature of censorship as an attack against the suggestion /idgames should exerce some censorship, even though those two things are clearly unrelated.

I don't care for troll wads and I wouldn't mind if there was some sort of filter added to /idgames (in a way there already is anyway, some wads are rejected for various reasons), but I'm not going to delude myself into thinking it wouldn't be censorship, nor am I going to call a cat a dog because anything else would hurt your feelings.

Truth be told, it seems like a waste of effort, as common sense is enough to detect troll wads with perfect accuracy in my experience browsing doomworld/idgames. But then, if you can't even understand a forum post consisting of a whole three sentences, picking up on tell tales in text files might be a tall order. Sucks to be you.

Nah, it does not suck to be me. I never play any troll wad.. there are many hits which point to it as potentialy malicious pwad.
And, when in doubt, I can always just download it and open with Slade.
The problem, which I have with those troll wads, is that they waste space (screen space, because they are usually very small in Bytes) on archive and make it harder to navigate, while looking for new pwads to play.

hmm another IDEA: if no actions are going to take place against the trolls.. then the people who dislike them, could always host a new archive overlay which would have less tolerant rules for comments and pwads. Something like /troll-free-idgames

It is totally possible to rid the Internet of trolls. Hasn't happened yet because they're so fun.

j4rio said:

And that's the problem. Considering it's the main site for uploading doom stuff, it didn't take too long to notice loopholes and start steadily filling archive with junk.
And no, waiting won't solve anything. It's soon going to be yearly anniversary of crap steadily flowing through idgames.

Actually it took a very long time, because this wasn't a big problem in the 90's. People made maps, some of them got uploaded, and some of those got played. There were some good ones, some bad ones, and a lot of average ones (that will never change). But even the bad ones were legitimate, in that the mapper tried to make something cool, even if it didn't turn out that way. Stuff like wow.wad was pretty unusual, but even that one you can't be certain if it was deliberately "lamed down" or if the author just thought the concept of exploiting the HOM effect was cool. Heck, I didn't even hear about that one until recent years, or for that matter the concept of jokewads. My favorite site was DoomGate, and they only listed a small number of wads, the rest I downloaded randomly, or after reading some related Usenet post.

@Memfis - no, trolls need an audience. It was nothing like today. Many mappers didn't have an email address or even any Internet access, they had to upload to local BBS or something else. Even the TXT file template was different, and in fact many maps were created before there was one. It was just a bunch of people excited about being able to make actual DOOM maps, with such primitive tools as DEU.

But what if most of 94' wads were actually made by trolls? That would explain a lot HAHAHA.

kind of reminds me of my early days at newgrounds, where shitting up the flash portal was fun because it would often incite walls of rage-text from other users and the site tracked 'worst' entries for each week. There were actually sub-communities dedicated to trying to get these "turd of the week" awards, in addition to generally being annoying and submitting spam videos.

I usually only pick up new wads based on dwf threads instead of browsing the archives, so I don't really have a horse in this race or any useful opinions regarding the apparent influx of troll wads. But I'm kind of surprised /idgames gets notable shit-spam activity, seeing as the audience is a hell of a lot smaller and the responses don't seem anywhere near as entertaining.

I still would go with nuking the trollwads/terrywads or putting them in /Trollwads because they do nothing but have the same old tricks and do nothing useful but piss off the player.

We do need some sort of QA for the archives be enforced, I can totally understand keeping super amateur or poorly made levels but not crap in the vein of a Terrywad.

Has Ty commented on this yet?

hex11 said:

Actually it took a very long time, because this wasn't a big problem in the 90's. People made maps, some of them got uploaded, and some of those got played. There were some good ones, some bad ones, and a lot of average ones (that will never change). But even the bad ones were legitimate, in that the mapper tried to make something cool, even if it didn't turn out that way. Stuff like wow.wad was pretty unusual, but even that one you can't be certain if it was deliberately "lamed down" or if the author just thought the concept of exploiting the HOM effect was cool.

And how many contents of those wads specialized in ass raping?

I'd say it's just about time to draw a line. Idgames currently pretty much works as a good way of scaring off newcomers, if it's the only part of doomworld they happen to keep checking.

I've got a bit of an idea for a compromise that should satisfy pretty much all parties: keep a portion of the original Terrywads from a few years ago and delete the rest. This gets rid of as much crap as possible while still maintaining archive integrity. The ones we should keep are:

UAC Military Nightmare
Secrets of Hell
Spooky Woods
Vortex of Evil
Forest of Agony
Demonic Revenge
ATG VS Humans
Unholy Demise
Nukage Processing Plant
Chemical Depot
Infected Base
Temple of Chaos

I'm a little iffy on Spooky Woods and Forest of Agony considering that they're probably duplicates, but that should cover it. I'd probably add Caustic Laboratory to the list as well considering it's not your standard run-of-the-mill Terrywad and actually has work put into it.

Cherry picking here is a terrible idea. How about deleting everything of that sort and reuploading into single /idgames entry? No integrity harmed, no censorship, removed complete mess.

j4rio said:

Cherry picking here is a terrible idea. How about deleting everything of that sort and reuploading into single /idgames entry? No integrity harmed, no censorship, removed complete mess.

I mostly picked these ones because they were before the rush of imitations we got later on. It's not that selective.

Obsidian said:

I'm a little iffy on Spooky Woods and Forest of Agony considering that they're probably duplicates

They are not.

crashhelper said:

They are not.

Interesting that this is the last post you've made since CSonicGo brought up Terrywads a few months ago. But I will have a look at these myself to discern the truth. In SLADE3. Heh.

EDIT: Looks like they aren't. Yippee skip.