Why are so many wads put up on mediafire, dropbox, zdoom forums etc instead of idgames?

1 hour ago, Xaser said:

it looks like it means "don't used ripped resources", but it doesn't -- that ship has long since sailed

So that rule isn't enforced at all? If my WAD contains a sprite ripped directly from Hexen with only color palette modifcations, it's good to go on idgames?

10 minutes ago, RDETalus said:

If my WAD contains a sprite ripped directly from Hexen with only color palette modifcations, it's good to go on idgames?

Idgames hasn't cared about shared resources for a long time, just unmodified resources for the same game your PWAD is already loading from. Besides, changing the colours means by definition you've modified them, anyway.

This etiquette only applies to the Doom engine games and not the maps, just FYI.

11 hours ago, Endless said:

slow process than can take days or weeks,

If you email the upload guys the filename (x.zip, for instance) of the wad you've just tried to upload, and confirm that it was you uploading it, it goes much quicker.

Thank @Clippy for his wise wisdoms.

13 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

Or on a site like moddb it just gets drowned in the noise, never to be found by those who try to find some Doom stuff.

THAT's so true. We had this sign for many years on the door to our server's room:

(For the English readers: "Big Brother is not the enemy. The enemy is millions of little brothers who are depriving me of good information by filling it with tons of data garbage")

14 hours ago, Somniac said:

I wonder exactly how many files there are on there these days. The most recent thread (2015) I can find on the subject has it at upwards of 40,000 files at almost 40GB.

As of 2023-01-01, there's 19,873 unique zip files, surely many more inside them.

8 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

3.- Maximun filesize is more or less 50-60 mbs, so yeah, bigass GZ megawads nor Mods can be here.

There's no file limit restriction as you can see, but like @Edward850 said you need to warn the maintainers beforehand if you want to upload a file that's over 50MB.

9 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

Sorry for doubleposting, offtopic and such but...

NO FUCKING WAY THAT YOU ARE THE AUTOR OF THAT WAD! Man I still have the wad when it was released. Was really fun and liked it a lot when I was using Doomworld just for downloading wads and no talks lol

Also the MIDI kickass!

Glad you liked it! :D If you liked the MIDI check out the composer (and full disclosure my girlfriend) Noyemi K's stuff on Soundcloud:

10 hours ago, Edward850 said:

12.3 characters in length

When did it go from 8.3?  I could swear that the last time I used idgames for any amount of time, it was still 8.3.  This would have been 2 years ago at the most.

Who uses /idgames for temp stuff? Its a known thing that /idgames is used for a final resting place. In that sense, ''Putting it on /idgames'' is more of a token trophy: The last crusade of a made WAD.

What about in-dev stuff? There's Mod.db for that (good luck with that) or, better alternative, Doom Shack.

I literally use /idgames only for preservation/archival purposes: Stuff long lost to time to find a semi-permanent home. Everything can be lost, but gamers.org/Idgames have existed since 1994, have had several mirrors, and represents the late Ty Halderman's legacy.

11 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

1.- idgames is a pretty slow process, first you need to upload your what, then wait for be approved manually by a mod, and wait to appear on idgames database.
2.- they have plenty of rules like not copyrighted material (at least, not unedited Doom 1 nor 2 textures)

As it should be. The REJECTS page gives plenty of reasons why there is a manual overseer and rules because many people take way too many assumptions at bay (Surely i can use unmodified id Soft resources, no? Indeed, NO. Surely i don't have to respond to any confirmation mail, right? NO, you should.) and thus their work gets rejected.

I know the drill, i have been through motions myself aswell and i have made errors too. But in a way the process is there to ensure what you upload is solid and not just garbage. On average, approvals are done every 4-5 days, so if you upload something, its likely processed within a week. Is that slow in your eyes?

Surely i do not want this:

added because people think /idgames is there to post trollwads.

11 hours ago, Herr Dethnout said:

3.- Maximun filesize is more or less 50-60 mbs, so yeah, bigass GZ megawads nor Mods can be here.

Perhaps this needs to be reconsidered.

10 hours ago, Xaser said:

It would be great if some resident programmer folk could get together and figure out what it would take to get some sort of authentication process into the uploader so it'd be possible to whitelist "trusted" users to upload things directly (with some sensible filesize & rate limits), or at least update their own wad once the first version passes inspection. Obviously not a trivial task, but that's the biggest thing holding it back right now.

I'd wager that takes effort, and mostly -time and money. It is the same with the Wiki. A lot of infrastructure can be improved, but there is simply not enough money and/or time. I am doing my part financially, but i can't speed that up. Just that i should write more content so that the wiki becomes even more invaluable :P

In reg. to Bloodshedder/Green Herring, i am sure they have their jobs too. But in order to give some hope on this, perhaps @Xymph can take a look if wanted? Given Xymph's track record on collecting stats and automating... crazy idea but some kind of derivative of XymphBot that checks a emailadress as valid and then performs the needed update?

Speaking personally, my project uses Doom 1 textures in Doom 2. Even if I remove duplicate entries, I'm probably going to run afoul of the "no unedited IWAD content" rule unless I go out of my way to make some changes that somehow don't break the visual flow of my maps.

Do I think it's a valuable site and the best archival method? Yes. Would I love to upload to idgames once completed? Absolutely. But that's going to depend on if I can manage all of the work needed to clear the hurdles. I understand why the hurdles are there and don't begrudge them, it just might be too much of an obstacle for the juice to be worth the squeeze in some cases.

And then there's the reviews. idgames reviews can be some of the most soulsucking pits of despair ever (or the height of hilarity).

For me its literally just because I'm too lazy to try. XD

1 hour ago, Redneckerz said:

I literally use /idgames only for preservation/archival purposes: Stuff long lost to time to find a semi-permanent home. Everything can be lost, but gamers.org/Idgames have existed since 1994, have had several mirrors, and represents the late Ty Halderman's legacy.

I did this with Heretic/Hexen stuff for a while and found it a far more frustrating experience than just trying to upload my own WADs.

- First it generally required re-fitting all of the relevant data from the text file into the modern template (and guessing at any missing data, like assuming the file timestamp is suitable for a release date when not given).  Then at some point (probably after management passed on from Ty) they started demanding that the text file in the .ZIP match the external one, so I started needing to include a renamed version of the original TXT in addition to a copy of the updated one.

- Occasionally a DOS-valid filename had to be renamed to be accepted (eg. MIKE&KIL.WAD).  I guess it's so as not to annoy POSIX systems with a character that requires an escape sequence?

- There are a few sets that have a mixture of original levels with the occasional modified/converted IWAD level, leaving me with the choice of mutilating the WAD by removing a level or just not bothering to upload it.  I went with the latter.

- Ditto verboten sound replacements, though I'd feel less bad about stripping a joke sound effect from a WAD than a whole level, I would still prefer not to mess with someone's WAD for reasons other than game-breaking bugs.

- Finally there are those WADs for which I couldn't find any text file at all, due to sloppy shovelware CD manufacturers or who knows why else.  These were also ones where I had to shrug and give them a no-go regardless of if they seemed to have any value worth preserving.

I guess on the preservation front, there's an argument to be made that it's better for the file to be preserved at all, and in a few cases where the TXT allowed it and there were fatal bugs in the WAD I added a bugfixed version since there's not much point in a WAD that can't be played, but another part of me feels there should be a collection that keeps the releases as pure as possible to the originals, no "uploaded by so-and-so" tags, no edits to meet this or that demand of a particular archive's rules.

Given my current circumstances, it's somewhat of a moot point as it's unlikely that I'm going to be working on anything related to these files any time soon, but if someone wants me to gather up the remaining known or suspected lost stuff I've been sitting on so they can do their own preservation efforts, they're welcome to message me.

8 hours ago, bofu said:

Speaking personally, my project uses Doom 1 textures in Doom 2. Even if I remove duplicate entries, I'm probably going to run afoul of the "no unedited IWAD content" rule unless I go out of my way to make some changes that somehow don't break the visual flow of my maps.

 

Do I think it's a valuable site and the best archival method? Yes. Would I love to upload to idgames once completed? Absolutely. But that's going to depend on if I can manage all of the work needed to clear the hurdles. I understand why the hurdles are there and don't begrudge them, it just might be too much of an obstacle for the juice to be worth the squeeze in some cases.

 

And then there's the reviews. idgames reviews can be some of the most soulsucking pits of despair ever (or the height of hilarity).

Dude, just leave a note to the maintainers. "Out of necessity, this wad uses some Doom 1 textures despite targeting Doom 2. Could I please be granted exemption in this case?" - works every time for me. The idea that any lawyer would go after a Doom2 wad for having some Doom1 textures in it is crazy and the maintainers know that, so they'll generally grant an exemption (unless you've just gone hog-wild and used the full texture packs from like 6 full games or some shit)

9 hours ago, bofu said:

And then there's the reviews. idgames reviews can be some of the most soulsucking pits of despair ever (or the height of hilarity).

well, it's a good thing that the reviews for newer uploads are broken :p

3 hours ago, Doomkid said:

"Out of necessity, this wad uses some Doom 1 textures despite targeting Doom 2. Could I please be granted exemption in this case?" - works every time for me. The idea that any lawyer would go after a Doom2 wad for having some Doom1 textures in it is crazy and the maintainers know that, so they'll generally grant an exemption (unless you've just gone hog-wild and used the full texture packs from like 6 full games or some shit)

Oh, that's great news. It's good to know that they do make exemptions. I know that I've seen projects with stuff from Doom 1 or other games in them before, but I just figured that they slipped under the radar somehow.

That just leaves the "actually finishing the damned thing" as a concern, then.

RDETalus's and bofu's posts demonstrate the need for clarity on the duplicate-resources rule -- folks are still confused in this thread even after my attempt at explaining it. :(

Take 2: the rule means that your wad can't contain lumps from the same IWAD you're targeting -- i.e. if your wad is for Doom 2, then it can't contain any identical lumps from doom2.wad. It's totally fine to yoink something from, say, hexen.wad or a texture patch from doom.wad that doesn't already exist in doom2.wad. The d1gfxd2 example I posted is because it accidentally contains a single patch (PS20A0) that already appears in doom2.wad, which (annoyingly) fails the check.

There are some exceptions -- music, for instance (e.g. you can copy a music lump and rename it to D_RUNNIN to put custom music on your MAP01 and it's fine) -- but I don't have an exact list because it isn't written down anywhere. The best rule of thumb is to run SLADE's function ("Archive -> Maintenance -> Remove Entries Duplicated from IWAD") since that's exactly what the maintainers use to check. Or look at the SLADE source code, I guess. :P

This rule made some sense back when /idgames was founded -- the original doom EXE has a bug/quirk/whatnot in the sprite loader which prevents custom sprites from working unless a wad contains every single sprite from the game* (i.e. not feasible if you're wanting to replace, say, just the imp sprites). Standard practice at the time was to upload a wad with just the custom sprites and include a batch file that uses DEUSF or NWT or some similar tool to append all the missing IWAD sprites to the wad (or at least instructions on how to do so), so the end user would assemble a "playable" version of the wad on their local machine. Meanwhile, the /idgames rule was added to prevent people from saying "fuck it" and just dumping all the IWAD sprites into the wad to make it work -- or worse, try and distribute an entire IWAD with just one or two things changed. It's fine to have something in place to catch egregious cases like that, but most of the time it's a vestigial stumbling block.

[*There's also a lesser-known DEHACKED sprite-renaming trick that's used in a few wads like STRAIN, D2TWID, and KDiKDIZD, but not too many folks seemed to know of it.]

Just my two cents...

Last time I checked uploading to the archive required an FTP client like FileZilla or something like that. FTP clients require a direct connection to the FTP upload server and will not work through a proxy server. Most ISP's in the states and modern browsers prefer using proxy servers and will not allow direct connections to FTP sites. My ISP even prevents from downloading files via FTP because they favor SSL and nothing else.

I cannot even download anything from my nearest FTP (Idaho) mirror anymore. Over 10 years ago, when they had an FTP mirror in Texas, I was able download files fine back then. Now I have to use the SSL mirror in New York to download from idgames anymore. There are a small portion of modders, designers and developers who are digital nomads. They have to use their nearest library or coffee shop to use the internet, which complicates the issue further.

Ever since 2010 we have lost a ton of finished and in-progress projects from our community.

- Negatives

New Doom - There was a couple of in development projects hosted at New Doom that I was interested playing over 10 years ago. All of which either never got finished, nor I cannot find anywhere to download.

Wads In Progress - WIP was a site that mappers can post projects that are still in development. It hosted hundreds of screenshots and was a great way to build engagement and excitement towards future projects. Due to a user posting inappropriate feedback and comments most of the project pages were deleted entirely. The site never recovered and was shut down many years ago.

Raven Games - RG was originally a site started by the community that hosted community projects for all games released by Raven Software. These included wads from Heretic and Hexen. It was 'bought out' by Activision and then used to promote the COD games instead. :(

ZDoom Forums - Compared to Doomworld the ZDoom Forums seem a little dead or has a lot less activity than it once did. I stopped using it years ago for personal reasons.

Realm667 - Everyone here knows what happened, I don't want to flog a dead horse.

Here are some lessons and suggestions that I want to share.

+ Positives

ModDB/IndieDB - The good thing is ModDB and IndieDB aren't going anywhere soon. If it is appropriate, I think someone should start a thread here at Doomworld and pin it. That thread should have links to any mods, maps and other files found on those two sites. That way we can have everything all in one convenient spot.

Itch.io/Steam - Both these sites host mods and full games sometimes. Often times for free. You just have to do a lot of digging to find them.

Quaddicted - Not Doom related, but I think we can learn a lot from the Quake community. There is a thread at QD called "Tracking new releases" that one can post links to finished projects and any other maps that are not found in their archive. It was started by Spirit to track what files he uploaded to their archive. If memory serves Spirit is one of few who actually upload directly to their archive. negke then uses it as a guide when he generates their download and review pages. I wish there was a thread here at Doomworld like that, where someone could take charge of unloading the files for us. I understand that would be a hard thing to ask because that would sometimes be like 1K files per day. That would be really hard for anyone to handle on their own. For every map created for Quake there is probably over several hundred maps created for Doom every year.

I probably gave you a dollar and a half, but these are just my thoughts.

On 1/27/2023 at 7:43 AM, invictius said:

Why are so many wads put up on mediafire, dropbox, zdoom forums etc instead of idgames?

Because Idgames isn't for Gameplay Mods, OP.

I had issue uploading to IDGames, in fact I about went crazy for it because i had to hotfix and I'm still finding small tiny things I could have done better on that official map I did. I had to give up on my paranoia, but I did get close on my upload and its a pretty good map if you ask me. IDGames comes off as an official thing and everything else is whatever. I think for most its a professionalism thing. You want to give them good stuff. The wait and the delay is nerve wracking. The reception of the map can be bigger than everywhere else. All the bad elements of map making can be amplified in all that.

Yes, you build big and your re edited textures come back to haunt you. Theres nothing you can do but do it right the first time, which is hard.

i upload to mediafire cause what i been working on is a massive work in progress, which mean everytime i update the last release becomes obsolete, hell today i uploaded a new update just to realise there was an error i had to fix up , meaning i needed to replace the mediafire link straight away only hours after the upload, when i know my megawad is finalized thats when i would apply to have it on a more official platform like id games.

1 hour ago, Halfblind said:

 

Realm667 - Everyone here knows what happened, I don't want to flog a dead horse.

 

 

i dont have any idea what happened, do you mind flogging that dead horse for the more ignorant amoungst us?

8 minutes ago, Aku said:

i dont have any idea what happened, do you mind flogging that dead horse for the more ignorant amoungst us?

I don't want to. Just look up Tormentor667 and what happened with Blade of Agony and go down that rabbit hole. I really don't want to get into trouble.

1 hour ago, Halfblind said:

Last time I checked uploading to the archive required an FTP client like FileZilla or something like that.

This hasn't been true for the past two years or so.

5 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

This hasn't been true for the past two years or so.

Thanks, I had no idea. I have a chronic illness, so it has been really hard to keep up on things. Thaks for sharing that, it makes it super useful especially for newer mappers.

On 1/27/2023 at 9:21 AM, Codename_Delta said:

If you email the upload guys the filename (x.zip, for instance) of the wad you've just tried to upload, and confirm that it was you uploading it, it goes much quicker.

 

Thank @Clippy for his wise wisdoms.

This has been in the upload instructions for many years, near the beginning of https://www.gamers.org/pub/idgames/README.INCOMING (also linked from the upload form):

"To speed up the process a bit, you may email us ahead of time at idgmaint@gamers.org (please start the subject with DOOM-FTP: so your message won't be nuked) to state which files you have uploaded. The email address you use to send your message must match an email address listed in the text file, or the files will be rejected."

But nobody RTFM's of course. ;)

3 hours ago, Halfblind said:

ModDB/IndieDB - The good thing is ModDB and IndieDB aren't going anywhere soon. If it is appropriate, I think someone should start a thread here at Doomworld and pin it. That thread should have links to any mods, maps and other files found on those two sites. That way we can have everything all in one convenient spot. 

Gamebanana could be another option as a mirror. It has a Doom and Doom II page which aren't very active at the minute (latest uploads are from 3 months and 1 month ago respectively).

In my opinion, the site's structure is more intuitive for browsing mods: sections, subsections, and it has tags now (which were updated from the old attribute system), apart from the search function and filtering options of course.

I don't know how's the process goes on ModDB but, uploading mods on GB can be a little disorienting at first with how many options there are to choose from, but it offers so much control on how you want to present your mods. Hell, you can even create your own sections and subsections if you really need to.

17 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

But in order to give some hope on this, perhaps @Xymph can take a look if wanted? Given Xymph's track record on collecting stats and automating... crazy idea but some kind of derivative of XymphBot that checks a emailadress as valid and then performs the needed update?

Not to side-track this topic, but that misconception continues to need debunking. XymphBot is not some kind of autonomous entity, or a tool that can be instructed to do all sorts of things by itself, in- or outside the wiki. XymphBot itself is simply a wiki user account with bot status, meaning its (many many) updates do not clutter Recent Changes, unless you chose to view them.

The account is used via a myriad of scripts, each performing a defined task, but all related to the wiki -- nothing there can or will directly affect the idgames archive, which resides on a different server to begin with.

It is suggested for people to host wads on sharing sites if they are only showing a WIP, alpha/beta or release candidates, as sharing wads on idgames is mostly for finished products and releases, this is because hosting on the database is a tedious and long process that should not be done always. The problem with the idgames archive is that you can't update wads once you uploaded them, so updating them hosting them in another site is a better practice.

Other problems with people uploading their finished wads on other sites is that, not all people know about the existence of the archive itself, and this happened to me and other people from the community outside doomworld back in the day, where people from elsewhere uploaded things on wadhoster archives like fathax or just sharing sites like megaupload, mediafire or 4shared. This is bad since, most of the wads uploaded to now-unexistent sites are, technically, lost media.

22 minutes ago, DJVCardMaster said:

The problem with the idgames archive is that you can't update wads once you uploaded them

Wrong. WADs and other releases are updated all the time, within days or after many years; whatever the author/uploader submits and is accepted, will be replace the previous version.

But you do need a little patience because, as observed before, Bloodshedder and TGH do have lives and jobs.