Now that we're open for everyone, I expect we will get a lot of the same questions over and over, so this thread is where you put those questions.

Let's just get a couple of quick ones out of the way first of all;

- No, you cannot edit the Notes fields. If there is stuff that you want in there, or something is factually wrong, tell us here and we'll get it in. We'll have a much more elegant solution down the line.

- We should have the results of every party with a results file on scene.org. No, this is not the same as results for every party EVER. We know that. We're working on that bit.

- We support screenshots of any resolution, and any number. We prefer them to be as native as possible. Pretty please, don't reupload screenshots from other sites. If you click a screenshot, it will pop up in its native size, or as large as your screen will allow if resolution is larger than your screens'.

So, there. Any questions? Have fun.

Would be nice to have a RSS. Don't you think? I do! :)

Hi Grogon, and welcome! :)

What exactly would you need an rss feed for - new productions? News items?

I think a channel with the new additions and updates would do the job.

How do you chargé the real name of scener? Or make anonymous?

Change... €$#% iPad

Fred: Whatnow? If you're referring to a mobile experience, then yeah - we don't have that yet. One of the many, many things on our list. :)

Ah, stupid me - I just read your LAST post, not the first. Only admins can edit real names - if you want anything changed, just let us know and we'll fix it.

Awesome site.

Can we add a music or graphic as a separate production even if that gfx or module/mp3/etc was used in a demo or intro?

It makes sense to me as one can release a music and make a demo using that music years later.

How can we add a soundcloud link to a music?

OK. I just found the answer to my last question.

Can we add info like "this music was used in that intro" somehow?

As for a good example of nice RSS feeds - http://csdb.dk/ has it done nicely.

menace: Sorry, was unclear. It was the iPad that was autocorerctnig. The site is great. And even _works_ on the iPad.

So, how do we privately contact admin? ;)

How can we add a platform? (for instance, GP2X platform is missing)

ham: Yes, you can add existing and new soundtracks to demos on the demo page.
Also, platforms cannot be be added by normal users.

ham: To elaborate on what Saga_Musix wrote; on a demo's production page you can press teh "Tell us something" box and add a soundtrack. It may be an existing piece of music, already in the demozoo database, or a new one. Please do search beforehand to avoid dupes.

On the matter of the platforms, then please - if you can make a compelling argument for us adding one, please do. We do try to be economic about this, so platforms with three productions will likely be sorted under an umbrella platform. GP2X may have a lot more than that though - please make a forum post if you feel it is valid as an individual platform. :)

Oh, and I resolved Fred's issue over email, so that has been handled. :)

What's the reason not to allow screenshots that are already used on other sites? This creates a lot of duplicate work when adding entries that are already in for example CSDb.

(Not to mention me having to create two distinctively separate screenshots for every new release...)

radiantx: I will explain everything in a separate forum post. Give me two minutes.

Screenshots discussion continues here: http://demozoo.org/forums/7/

I understand that it is all new and improving over time and I am very happy with that. But the one thing that bugged me most over at Pouet was the lack of a proper forum engine with categories and all that which is offered by phpBB, MiniBB, vBulletin, or the like. Personally I regard the Pouet forum as a mess. Seeing that Demozoo currently uses a quite flat and minimalistic forum as well, I would like to propose switching over to using a fully fledged forum engine at some point in the near future. Seeing that you use Django, maybe this http://support.djangobb.org could be worth having a look at (but I haven't tried it for myself).

Just FYI, gasman hacked the forum together from scratch yesterday, as far as I know. So yes, there will be most likely be improvements on that side.

Pouet has a forum? o_O

hey, the answer is probably *somewhere* but i plan to update my page soon and i'm a bit confused by 'productions' and 'credited in' so can anyone clarify that? if i coded a prod and i'm in the credits, is it a production or just 'credited in' or what? thanks for all ya hard work!

The differentiation is done automatically, depending on how the data is entered. A member production is a production that is linked to a member of a demogroup (e.g. Foo by Pro/Nuance). On the other side, if you work on a demo that is done by multiple people (e.g. Bar by Nuance), this demo is listed under "credited on" on all involved scener profiles.

To give an example from your scener page:
ungol by Noisefever and Pro and Raven / Nuance
The demo has three authors. If you add proper credits for each of the three, it would make sense to reduce the author to simply "Nuance", otherwise it would turn up both in member productions and the credits section of each of the three members.

How does one enter a prod which is made by two "group-less" persons and a third person who does belong to the group? Ideally, I'd love to have "diver/4d + g0blinish + introspec", but the system would not let me input something like this.

This is (currently) not possible. Optimally, you'd put the groupless persons first at the moment.

I tried doing this, but then it is shown as if all three people belong to the same group. Or is it just a temporary glitch?

No, it's not possible to express this with the current database scheme. I know I've brought this up before, but I think the consensus was that this wouldn't be changed at least for now.

I just tried it on one of my pics. I got NAME1 and NAME2 and NAME3 / GROUP. That can be understood in two ways, yes. But that is the only way we have it as we currently are. There might be a fix available to remove the whitespace between NAME3 and GROUP, which would make it seem more like what introspec is after. But these cases are ultrarare where this functionability is needed, so....

The real group affiliations (on the scener & group pages) don't get affected by this, it's just an unlucky optical appearance. I hope this will get fixed at some point, but it's not top priority I guess.

But in all fairness: if you make a prod that is three names of one group, it is generally attributed to just the group

Guys, this is not a matter of a single whitespace. When I enter "diver/4d + g0blinish + introspec", I get "Diver + g0blinish + introspec / 4th Dimension" as the output, which is definitely _not_ what I meant to say. And since the order of names cannot be controlled, the only currently available solution seems to be "4th Dimension + g0blinish + introspec" and further clarification in the credits. This works, but seems a bit ugly.

what happens when you enter "diver / 4d + g0b + introspec" ?

ah now I understand, you want it in that order. Yeah, we dont have that yet

I'm all for the sceners' real names... I understand it "could" be controversial a few years ago, but today?

I have been entering the results (by hand) of the Music Contest 6 intermediate and veteran (rookie coming up when I have time), and having the real names on the list would have been great to match existing nicks to authors (specially when there were several people of the same nicks -sometimes even in the same country-). I think I didn't make any mistakes, but it took quite a while... usually meant checking all dupes for country, and if there was dupe country, checking if those exact nicks made music around the date (late 90's).

PS: if anything, I'm ok with showing my name on my profile.

Hi Jcl, and thanks for your continued efforts in helping out and suggesting things :)

Right from the get-go, we have opted to have a strong focus on privacy, and we try to be smart about whose real names we surface and which we do not. This policy is not something we're willing to compromise on. Taking people's privacy concerns seriously is important.

As for your job in entering the music competition (which is great - keep doing those, please! :) ) we do surface the nationality (when known) and group affiliations in the dropdown menu, and we have recently had talk about how we can improve that experience even further down the line, so selection will be even easier and less prone to mistakes. But for now, yeah, we work with what we got.

Plase, how to add two authors (from two different group) correctly? Example
Agemixer / Scallop + CreaMD / DMAgic
it doesn't recognise nick after + sign. Thanx for help.

CreaMD: Not possible right now but it's on the list.

How can one get one's upcoming party to appear on the front page when it is close enough to do so, and how does one submit the banner image to appear with it?

I suspect this answer involves liquids. Note: Yes, I am bringing that maple whiskey to Revision again.

metoikos: Quite simple really: You talk to us. :) Either on here, or by email or on irc (#demozoo on ircnet). Banners are 1008 x 350, teasers (the little boxes underneath with pictures) are 300 x 180. it helps to know beforehand that there will be text overlaid.

I usually keep a close eye on what parties are upcoming, and decide on a schedule beforehand, at least for the top banner, but feel free to let me know about stuff I may not be aware of.

Having said that, I'm all open to whiskey. Find me at Revision. :)

Rather awesome. : D

Emailing Gasman the files now (your email is harder to find, and I can't go on IRC atm).

Thank you. And I will indeed look for you at Revision (thanks to Slengpung, I now know what to look for).

Thank you!

One question. Where are the data content rules? What belongs here and what doesn't. There was talk in Nectarine's chat today about the scope of music entries. One person suspected that you are only supposed to add music that participated in a music compo at a party. I said I haven't seen any such rule anywhere. And it wouldn't make much sense, because it would leave out probably half of scene music, and many classic tunes by legendary scene composers.

Another thing. What is a "subgroup"? Under what conditions should something be modeled as a subgroup? I checked some subgroups and it doesn't seem to be a "subset", which would have been my initial guess. I guess there is no corresponding concept "supergroup".

yzi: As for what music is "valid" for inclusion, I think gasman answered that in a way I will not be able to better in the discussion about including music on Pouet very recently - so I will just quote what he said (source: http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=9735&page=1 );

"I'm afraid Demozoo has no plans (for now) to cover albums and other music released outside of demos / competitions, mainly because there's no clear way to draw the boundary. If we include albums by demosceners, it's going to naturally expand to 'demoscenish' music (e.g. the chipmusic scene, and other releases from netlabels that have a strong demoscene connection) and then to any electronic musician who wants a bit of free promotion. Before we know it, we'd be running an indie music database with a bit of demoscene content on the side ;-)"

Subgroups were a common thing in the 90s Amiga demoscene at least, where a small number of people would be a subgroup of a larger one - most famously perhaps Virtual Dreams / Fairlight.

http://demozoo.org/productions/212/

I'd like to put a note there. Something like:
"Tungsram is/was a light-bulb manufacturer from Hungary. As an unofficial part of Haujobb's Licht (= Light) series of intros, it was released at Jumper '98, held in Hungary." :)

tomaes: added.

Re the scope of music entries: it's worth adding that my quote above is more of a guideline than a rule. If a piece of music is clearly part of someone's demoscene activity, even if it never appeared in an actual demo or competition - for example, an Amiga MOD that someone made for fun around the time they were most active creating music for demos - then it belongs here. Examples of things that don't belong here would be: music that a demoscener made for a commercial game, or tracks from albums released on Bandcamp. A lot of scene musicians today are involved in music beyond the scene, so we shouldn't assume that a particular track is a demoscene release just because the author is (or was) a scener.

Another note request:
http://demozoo.org/productions/5619/

"Demo needs a 16bpp desktop to run (use "-windowed" parameter, as it won't work in fullscreen anymore). Press the application key on a windows keyboard to access the hidden part. Was featured in the Japanese magazine Windows 100%."

I would like to have the rules explicitly written on this site, numbered, named and managed, so that they can be talked about and adjusted if needed. And also tied to object types. It should be possible to automatically get a list of governing rules for the content of each and every field and object type.

What comes to music, I think it is possible to define the scope clearly and explicitly in such a way that we can have practically all of "demoscene music" included and practically all of non-demoscene music excluded. If this is not possible, then much of this site becomes pointless.

How about this. I'll try to list some initial rules, and let's see what their intersection or union is. This is only a start. Please comment and edit.
- Intended audience. Demoscene music is primarily made BY demoscene people FOR demoscene people. If it ends up being listened to by the general public who don't identify themselves as belonging to the demoscene, then it is accidental and not the musician's original intention.
- Creators. Demoscene music is made by people affiliated with the scene, who identify their making of that piece of music as a scene activity, adding to the scene's common heritage (?)
- Free not-for-profit distribution. Demoscene music is meant to be freely shared and copied between demosceners, without profit.
- Commercial, for-profit, music is not demoscene music. (Except maybe if the same song was also freely released as a scene song, but I don't know if this is actually possible and relevant in practice)
- Game music, ie music distributed as part of commercial games, is not demoscene music. (Except if it has for some reason achieved a cultural demoscene status and acceptance. C64 game music maybe?)
- Covers of game songs (or other commercial songs), if done by scene musicians as scene music for the scene, might still be demoscene music. Even though the distribution of such music files might be a bit questionable... But Demozoo is only a database, a canonical listing of things that exist.
- Most Amiga 4ch music could be considered demoscene music, I don't have a problem with that... Anything thats in Modland or AMP... ?
- Demoscene music should preferably be downloadable from a well-known demoscene file archive site.
- Things entered to demoscene music compos are demoscene music.
- Demozoo maintainers have the right to declare any piece they want as demoscene music.

In short, I'm drawing the line in terms of the intended cultural context where and for which the music was made and used and shared. It's subject to discretion and moderation of course.

Your comments?