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Posted By

Luca
on 2008-04-29
16:24:13
 Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

Any added material or info should be well come on this site, but my acid mother childish messiah role here forces me to ask about an early sketch for a Plus/4 World's guidelines text, in order to keep the quality up, and not to use single pages as a mere 1996 usenet stuff.
It would regard used language, for example, or linking, or material's adding and so on.

An early example. Today someone added a note to Paddle Shooter's page. That untitled note contains a plain text link, personal opinions (like it has been a forum!), and it answers to a somewhat transitory matter. Again, Commodore paddles, in-cre-di-ble to believe, are in the hardware page just here since months, and, for example, Terra-X uses mouse too, but we don't need a link from that game to the Commodore mouse page! (I guess... happy )

In the past months, I fixed several stuff of this kind (but many other personal opinions are anywhere yet, "I like this game", "a real good game", pure crap", wrong link to unfit game solutions etc...), in the borderline cases I needed to annoy Csabo too in order to decide what to do.
Nowadays, after the magic moment I received in the last weeks as wonderful final prize, I'm scared of every single cleanin'up, of every little decision.

Solution: let the user decide, and choose between a warm freedom or some annoying mother-ish guidelines happy

Posted By

Patrick
on 2008-04-30
14:33:57
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

a warm freedom, offourse!! keep up the good work!!

Posted By

Luca
on 2008-04-30
15:01:09
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

Eh no, you applied an oxymoron: "a warm freedom of course" is "ok then after the news and other stuff I drop the addons too", and "keep up the good work" should mean "no one will add crappy stuff deliberately beyond some simple guidelines".
Choose, I said.

Posted By

Degauss
on 2008-05-06
04:35:03
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

To be honest, i always was totally happy with how this site has been maintained. If guidelines are really necessary, i suggest you write down your own guidelines, because you, csabo and the others really did a good job all the time.

Posted By

SVS
on 2008-05-06
07:06:40
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

Good said.

Posted By

Csabo
on 2008-05-06
20:27:54
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

Let me chime in with my 2 cents then. I guess we did do a good job of keeping things open, the goal always was so make the site by everybody - for everybody. It's a community site. If it depends too much on any single person, when that person falls it takes the site with him. So score one for the good guys - that ain't happening.

As far as to Luca's suggestion, I think it has merit. I also think we don't have to rock our brains too much, 'cause this stuff have been figured out by others happy I say we look to Wikipedia. Now there's a huge and successful site, which is completely open. Will no-one mind if I compare ourselves to them? wink My point being, we're not quite there yet, because our site's framework only has rudimentary forms of content management/version control.

So the long term goal for us is to be able to track who changed what and when. Then, stuff can be easily tracked down, reverted, etc. (And of course a select few will wield a mean ban stick.) If anyone has PHP and MySQL knowledge and free time, let me know, there's work to be done.

Second issue: some initial guidelines WOULD be good for people who just got editor access. Just some basic stuff as to what goes where, how to submit files, where to ask questions etc. Any volunteers to write them up?

And then one more bonus one for the end: have you guys ever thought about what would "layman" person see when they first visit our site? I know I have, because I've visited other sites that dealt with topics I knew nothing about, it was a bit weird to be greeted by a news section (like our site). I do know that we have some stuff to offer for non sceners... it would be nice if we could polish Plus/4 World a little bit to make that first ever visit a bit more friendly experience.

Posted By

reuben
on 2008-05-07
01:23:53
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

like luca, dr. death, csabo
have stated going to sites with language and nothink to do or little to do with the game/site often leaves the user with "not going back there again". personaly i love this site its got me back doeing stuff for my own site. guide lines people should listen to that, what do i mean, walk in to a shop and take an item with out paying. aaahhhhh, i had a forum on my site until peeps where stupid now i don't. this site is truly the best out there for the commodore 16, plus 4. and no im not part of this team of dedicated peeps, these guys keep me happy. as for this game im gona have to look at it and map it if i can.
;-}

csabo, polish this site any more it will be to bright to view.
;-}

Posted By

Luca
on 2008-05-07
09:31:19
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

Back from workplace (aaah Firenze on bicycle is wonderful in springtime, there's a deep rose smell anywhere, and 23°C!), eating my spicy spinach special dish, I'm collecting these guidelines first, as first aid to the site:
- capitals usage in the entries names;
- don't leave an addon window without a title!
- no personal notes ("I like this one!" etc...) or transient referring ("this is the most recent demo he did"), hence we should use a different policy for "nice game!" "great game" etcetera too...
- a group or user has to be added when needed for a certain relevant release, or for at least (3) releases;
- filenames guidelines: for "Aaa Bbb V2.0", aaa_bbb_v2_0.prg (no capitals and underscores for spaces, no special chars like "."; images are gifs for screenshots, or jpgs for real pictures like hardware or covers; images should be: aaa_bbb_v2_0.gif (160x100 preview gif, indexed colours, bilinear scaling), aaa_bbb_v2_0_main.gif (main screen), aaa_bbb_v2_0_title.gif (title screen when needed), aaa_bbb_v2_0_01.gif (aaa_bbb_v2_0_02.gif aaa_bbb_v2_0_03.gif aaa_bbb_v2_0_04.gif) (gallery screens when needed); aaa_bbb_v2_0_map.gif (map) and aaa_bbb_v2_0_preview.gif (map preview when needed), aaa_bbb_v2_0_cover.gif (cover and other materials, max width 900 pixels, if bigger it won't be shown but still downloadable), aaa_bbb_v2_0_thumb.gif (cover's thumbnail, best is 64x100, at least respect height 100 pixels); if hardware, aaa_bbb_v2_0_thumb.gif is the thumbnail and has to be 120 pixels in its max side length;
- language and punctations at their best, please wink ;
- respect the right folder, when you put something in!
- no plain links; if you aren't allowed to add links, please contact someone who can do it;
- if someone with higher access level than yours deletes or changes your entry (usually after some classic democratic contacts :D ) he shouldn't be pointed out as a crying mother or some sort of weird retroware messiah :D

Mmmm, lemme eat this stuff, and after I'll have some others...maybe...

Remember! The bigger work on this site lies unseen under its skin! Some examples from me: I'm collecting games'finals in .FRE format, allowing to see your prefer game's final directly on YAPE (did you see every game's entry should have its own GameEnding Type? let's contribute then!); thanks to Csabo, I did a little diskcovers gallery (tnx Chronos! tnx Unreal!), which's asking for new donations...

Posted By

Chronos
on 2008-05-07
15:36:39
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

hey, i have more oldie diskcovers.. a new pack is coming happy btw there will be a subcathegory: votesheets happy

Posted By

Luca
on 2008-05-07
15:55:33
 Re: Plus/4 World usage guidelines?

Ah yes true!



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