* What about pictures with the nickname.

* I also need "released at party..:" then adding prod. to Groups.

* Some kind of Anti-spammer options then making a user and login.

As far as I know you can add a production to a compo at a party-page. Then the party&rank should be shown on the prod-page.

But according to the thread-theme:

- Now, that comments are possible, how about showing the amount of comments next to the prod, so that you can see if there are comments without going to the prod-page.

- Please make a pulldown-option (or another ui-element) for sorting the prods at a group-page by type (demo, music and so on)

- On prod-pages Vimeo-links will have an automatic generated vimeo-icon. On the group-pages this is not working.

Two ideas:
1. Add some link on web to send some additional info.
2. Maybe good feature is provide 'group/prod admin' - privilege level for full edit for own prods

http://demozoo.org/parties/1912/results_file/855/
Bitching quite a bit here, but wouldn't it be possible to display ascii files the right way?
Cheers :)

The system is quite limited. Only thing I truly like so far is how party results are displayed. I miss photo for scener (why all entries doesn't use the same kind of "image for entry" system). Also don't know how to add real name (I saw in gasman's entry that it is possible). There is no possibility to sort links, also the links that aren't standard (twitter, csdb, pouet? etc) are displayed as "WWW". If I wanted I could probably continue forever in making requests, so I will stop here. It's generally a nice frame for a nice site, but it's in very early stage I would say.

Ah.. one or two more things. I think entries need kind of "wiki-like" debate/talk TAB where the problematic edits and debates about them could be resolved. Another thing is, that if this grows too fast, you will need a lot of supervising editors/mods, because it has much bigger scope than your average "scene" databaase and it seems like it's quite easy to mess with data here. Do you at least have some sort of roll-back feature if you fins someone is messing with the edits on large scale? Make that soon, if not.

CreaMD:

Foto-for-scener option is not available for good reasons. Many sceners would prefer not to have a mugshot next to their (possibly at some point illegal) activities. I alweays found it quite puzzling that CSDB allows it. If people want to see how a scener looks like, they can still go to slengpung.com.

Same thing with the realname option: only admins can alter it. And we only add realname either if we get direct permission from the scener, or if we see it in a place where we can know for sure that the scener is okay with displaying his realname (pouet profile, personal webpage with both handle and realname, etc.). Having been confronted with year-long cyber-stalking and harassing by a "fellow" (ex-)demoscener, I would strongly argue for keeping it that way. Perhaps we should open a thread where people who are comfortable with displaying their realname would signal this to the admins.

As for the other things, I very much agree with you - having been a long-standing moderator at discogs, I know that debating and/or reverting problematic edits is essential. I hope our coding team soon implements a thing like this.

I agree with part about scener names. In that case, it would be nice to have feature to have scener's database entry (profile) verified (confirmed as real) and linked to registered user. If that happens, user will have right to add/edit other personal fields like real name, and photo. I understand that some sceners are shy, or have other personal reasons, but I understand "demozoo" as legal scene site, so there is no reason to have this option completely unavailable.

I propose replacing the thread-based "fix me beautiful" mechanism with a ticket mechanism. In my experience this has proven several times to be more efficient and less stressful for everyone involved.

Thanks for everyone's suggestions so far! I am in the process of composing a long, elaborate email to the internal mailing list, so we can triage and process all your requests. A lot of them have previously been discussed and even have tickets in our tracking system, but it never hurts to know what are the most requested features.

Keep 'em coming :)

Proposing the disabling of the "post reply" button once clicked to avoid double-posts when it takes longer than necessary (just happened to me on the screenshots thread)

If I am not very much mistaken, the order in which credits are given is currently alphabetical. I am not sure if this is always the best approach.

introspec: All approaches have their advantages and their drawbacks. Please make a compelling case as to why any other method would be better, and we'll happily take it under advisement.

OK. In my experience, the order of credits is not always alphabetical and can, sometimes, reflect the relative contribution of members of the team. If the system could leave the ordering of contributors to the order in which people were entered, this would still allow alphabetical ordering in cases where it is appropriate.

One more thing: I noticed that short YouTube links (youtu.be) are not recognized as belonging to YouTube at the moment.

So I played a bit with demozoo since yesterday, and here is what I'm missing/having problems with:

- the search box should be filtering out all punctuation and do neutral casing search: I basically recreated TTZP because the find box did not match with the T.T.Z.P that somebody had added earlier. (And the group page is just a list of 230 pages without any letter searching page so it's basically useless as it is right now).

- would be nice to have the equivalent of CSDB production notes/goofs, right now you have to ask an admin to post informations about the prods, most people will just not bother.

- no way to enter NFO's ?

- we (Atari ST people) need a 'package/compil/megademo' feature which would allow entering individual demozoo entries for demo screens which are in a megademo or compilation pack, each with their own screenshots, credits and group attribution, but also a link back to a main demozoo entry with the main demo and the list of subscreens/entries. Right now in pouet we have things like The Phaleon Gigademo which are just one entry by 'NeXT' despite being on four floppies and containing entries from about 20 different groups in total.

Guess that's it at the moment :) Globally looking good, just need to fix the usability/error inducing issues.

Regarding the credits order:
<_Dbug_> That irks me to be before Xia in his own demo just because I happen to have optimized a routine and appear in the credits
<Saga_Musix> that's why you can specify credit details, too
<Saga_Musix> e.g. "Dbug: code (optimization)"
<Saga_Musix> and "Xia: code (main code)"

I do think that the extra details for each credit can solve this problem in most cases.

Saga_Musix, your approach assumes that the specific contributions are known and easy to specify. In the case of an old demo, however, it will mean that the database will distort the currently known "importance of contribution", as indicated by the non-alphabetically ordered credits in, say, an *.ifo file.

How would you be so sure in that case that the "importance of contribution" scheme was used, though? The names could just as well be given in a random order, or they could be grouped by function (code,music,gfx)...

Well, I cannot possibly be sure. Hence, my thinking is: the closer one can get to the original presentation order, the better. I agree with you that this is not always important, but in some (many?) situations it may well be.

pictures with your nick can be optional ;-)

slengpung is for pictures of sceners ;)

slengpung my ass, plz. that's not an argument.

A few ideas:

* Ability to edit/delete comments. If that's not wanted, then at least being able to do this for a limited time after posting.
* A production type for source code.
* Being able to name or add a comment to downloads and external links would make it easier to add alternate versions of a release for example.

...and..

*Would be nice to be able to choose which of the screenshots randomize from for display in lists etc.

:)

* Being able to have 4k Exe Graphics in a competition of 4k Intros (with the proper type). See http://demozoo.org/productions/23398/ -> part of the TUM 4k Compo, but really is a 4k graphics.

^^ it seems to be possible for new competitions?

Unlock, this is actually something that can be fixed, please repost it into the "fix me beautiful" thread

Provide some dictionary for TAGs to prevent use 'demo', 'Dmo', 'DeMoS', etc...
Allow also people to add new tags to that dictionary.

Unlock: Fixed procedural graphics thing. It's totally possible to name a release any type at initial enter (regardless of the compo it competes in), but after the fact it can only be changed from the normal interface within its socalled 'supertype' (production, graphics or music). Just let us know, and we'll fix any entries.

Just a little something... please add the thread name on "discussion" to the webpage's title. There's no way to know which thread you are in, unless you scroll all the way up.

Jcl: Good suggestion! I've forwarded the idea.

Being able to search for tags, or otherwise browse them without manually mingeling with the URL.

noname: You can actually search for tags in the searchbox at the top, but it's not too intuitive :) Will make a note of that. We do have plans to revise our tagging system. Stay tuned.

Jcl: Implemented. https://github.com/demozoo/demozoo/commit/493d5de590a471ca4188f3ba53918a39f98d3fa7

What about letting us switch trough all screenshots added to a production when displaying them at the full resolution (after click on the screenshot). I currently have to close the full res display, switch to the next screenshot, click it and so on.

Unlock: Yes, aware that is a bit of a pain, and I agree. I'll forward the request.

Thanks Menace! I have another idea, that I think would be helpful, especially when trying to update/add/check data for "local" groups/prods: An advanced search system where I could for example search for all sceners from Switzerland (that would help to check for completeness, or update certain persons and so on). The current search result listing is a bit of a mess if you search for "Switzerland" :-)

Some things I think would be great to have:
- Add prod, group or scener from existing information in another well-known site like Pouet, CSDB or Nectarine. Instead of having to re-mistype and re-misinterpret everything to yet another database, and forget some fields and throw away work and information (namely, the results of the work I first had to do, finding out the database object reference in one of the said databases), I could produce higher quality information with better reuse potential with much less work.
- Import and display metadata in the actual music files. Like... platform, format, size, playing length, number of channels. Basically the stuff that Nectarine already has.

I mean, how is it even possible that there is a production entry that does not have a Pouet link, if the same prod is already modeled in Pouet.
http://demozoo.org/productions/97165/
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=62352

Did I get this right, people are expected to manually enter _everything_ again, to yet another system? That doesn't sound entirely sane.

The way I would have thought this to work is, by default as the first choice, supply a URL to Pouet, CSDB or something, and only if such a URL cannot be found, resort to a manual entry.

What I miss is a AKA field, I've added : http://demozoo.org/productions/97283 which has also the name "Amazing" but I have no option of putting this.

yzi: We have deliberately left out importing stuff from Pouet because it's known to be often wrong or incomplete or bad in some other way.

How about a proper support for BBS'? Currently the boards are attached to the main sysop, but I reckon they should be an entity in their own right. BBS were really important for the scene :-)

Saga_Musix: Um, have we? :-) I'm not against the idea: I'd rather have imperfect entries than missing entries, and there are lots of prods on Pouet that will probably never find their way here otherwise (such as the TV Noise fad...).

Like everything else, though, it takes time. And throughout this project I've been constantly amazed by people's enthusiasm for data entry, so I'd say it's possibly not as urgent as yzi makes out :-)

gasman: Right, I was thinking more about the actual information bits, not about the demos themselves. Though of course for demos that can only be found on pouet, it would be difficult to check whether the information that can be found there is correct or not...

I checked some prod lists on Demozoo, and there were lots of errors and stuff missing. Fortunately it's easy to fix the mistakes over here, unlike Pouet where everything goes via the Fix me beautifulllll thread. However, I have no motivation to start manually entering _everything_ from scratch. Claiming that forcing manual entry produces better quality information, is... just not true. Complete manual re-entry may be necessary in some hopeless cases where the potential data sources are either non-existent, or so full of crap that no automatic data cleansing is possible and full manual re-entry is actually the smaller effort.

The way I would imagine a sensible workflow for adding, let's say, a prod is:
1. As the default first step to start adding a new object, the user provides a URL to the corresponding prod info page in an already existing database.
2. The system retrieves the page and automatically figures out from the URL and the page contents, what database and type of object it is, and uses pre-defined translation rules to extract basic information. Prod name, type, authors, release year, etc. Whatever is available from the particular data source.
3. Then the system automatically does a lookup to its own database, to see if a potential match is already there. If there is, the system shows it to the user.
4. If not, the system pre-fills an "add new object" form with the basic information extracted from the source system, and lets the user check and fix it and add missing things.

If adding stuff automatically feels too scary, it would be great if the user could at least just drag&drop URL links from Pouet, CSDB, Nectarine, Janeway/Kestra/Bitworld. That's something I might even do, for things I know about. But I will not type everything from scratch, that would be nonsensical.

My two cents on the "automatic importing" thing; Where I came from when I started doing this project, was I wanted to do it RIGHT - having been involved in a few projects before, I'd done my part of trying and failing, and I felt I knew enough about how these things usually played out to know what not to do.

Dumbly copying information from other sites, inheriting their mistakes and inaccuracies, and in the process actually sort-of validating the information because it is in two places now - it MUST BE TRUE, THEN - is not what I envisioned.

So, if some productions are not on here because no-one bothered entering them, then I'm more fine with that than importing mistakes and erroneous information.

This is also a reason why I strive to include source of information in my info box writing.

Well, yeah. I agree with that. The big hole of missing productions is composed mostly of things _not_ released at a party. Hence, a lot of diskmags and music disks are missing.

But automated importing means to fix a lot of stuff that broke in the process or was never right to begin with (we have a lot of fun fixing the csdb import mess at pouet). So yeah, getting it right should be the top priority. :)

Perhaps something for a subsequent date, but how about a favorite-button on each prod/music/gfx etx. so people can collect their favorites (and other people can watch this list, too). Like the »likes« on soundcloud.

Don't know if it came up already, but the download sections can get pretty messy sometimes, take this entry for example:

http://demozoo.org/productions/9287/

For the uninitiated, all those download options look the same. There should be some kind of indicator, what those links actually are for.

Yes, this has been discussed before the launch already, but hasn't been considered to be a feature absolutely required for going live. :)

menace: ok, it seems to be based on the assumption or belief that manually entered data is better, and that by only allowing manual entry you create a somewhat independent information source. I can kind of see the logic, but it feels questionable how you can attract enough people to keep doing this manual work, and then how do you know they didn't just copy/paste from other places anyway, how do you convince a reader that THIS place is now a more trustworthy database than some other. I'm more inclined to believe in automated procedures, systematic rules and evidence. What are the rules and principles here? What's your plan and process for enforcing the rules? You seem to have an underlying principle about validating information by being able to trace its origins and comparing data sources. That's good, but it could perhaps be enforced and supported better. Where can an automated machine see the source of each bit of information? As far as I see, now you effectively hide or obfuscate the information chain. Instead of storing the actual path and sequence, "such-and-such field was copied from Pouet's record bla-bla as of date y-m-d, and user X declared to have checked its validity and correctness to the extent possible for her at the time". Instead, now you just store that user X entered the information. WHERE they copied it from, is not explicitly stated.

For example, Marq's picture "Fall gal" for the Abduction 1994 graphics compo had the wrong name "Fallcal" in Demozoo. Most probably it was copied from the party's results.txt, mistakenly typed from hand-written paper submission forms by the party organizers.
http://www.kameli.net/fit/history/history.html
http://www.kameli.net/fit/productions/productions.html

Anyway, I'm not convinced it's possible to get enough systematic, careful, dedicated manual workers to do all of this without automatic machine-based data comparison and cleansing. The problem with, say, Wikipedia is starting to be that the amount of information (pages, text) is getting way too big compared to the number of people actively working it, according to the governing principles. But hey, it's your site and your rules. :)