cover/scan/etc questions/suggestions

Hello,

I'd like to contribute a bunch of box photos and cart scans that I've got sitting around, but a few questions have come up and I feel like I could make a few suggestions for improvements so people wouldn't hit the same stumbling blocks I am.

After talking to Manuel and some others in #openmsx on IRC, it seems the guidelines are rather loose (ie. "upload what you can, we want more media!"), but none the less, some guidelines to image uploads could stand to go in the FAQ. Things like "photos are ok, but actual box scans are preferred", target resolutions for images (or at least lower boundaries maybe), formats, etc. Oh, and a definition of "complete" would probably help. Manuel explained it's a fully unfolded slipcover, but I would have possibly considered it to be a picture of the box and everything inside (like a spread of the box, manual, cart/disk, any additional contents).

On the user side of things, when submitting a cover shot we only have five options, and from what I understand, they might be different from what the backend recognises, so this paragraph of feature suggestion might double as a bug report (if so, sorry about that). When submitting a cover image, my options are: front, back, side, complete, manual. I have cart scans, but I'm assuming with the exception of manual, the others refer to a box. I've been trying to think of other ways to represent the menu for choosing what type of image the user is submitting and I keep going back to VGMdb. I'm not at home right now, so I'll try and get a screenshot up of that as soon as I can.

Regardless, it would probably be useful to be able to submit front/back/side of both box and at least front/top of the (or multiple) media, as well as possibly submitting scans of the entire manual, and perhaps the registration card or stickers or anything else that may have come in the box. I'm told the current types of cover scans are not stored as freeform strings and I don't know how hard it would be to let the user specify their scans as such, or if that is desired.

Anyway, please feel free to correct me if any of this information is wrong / not representative of your goals for the site. Just trying to be helpful and figure out if there's anything I *shouldn't* upload. =]

Hi,

thanks for your suggestions. I updated the upload form for covers with some more information and also added the missing cover types in the dropdown :) The reason that I use the dropdown is to make sure everybody uses the same types.

About what kind of covers we prefer, in the past we only accepted scans, but then I got some mails from people who didn't have a scanner and wanted to contribute some covers. Since then we also accept photo's. Also for some games it's very hard to get the actual scans because the games are very rare. And when I see a photo of it on an auction site I will upload them so people can see how the cover looked like. And when somebody uploads the real cover scans we will remove the photos.

I did have a look at the VGMdb, and saw how they handle the uploads. I will see if I can update the form in something like that, but not on a short term :)

Regards,

Sandy

Ok, cool. I'll get to work as soon as I can.

By the way, of the image submission form on VGMdb, really the only part I'm referring to is the pulldown with the text blank after it. So, for example, I'm recommending that you allow the user to select "Disk" from the pulldown, but then type the disk number in the field after it.

As far as all of the other fancy stuff, like flash uploading, multiple image uploading, previewing, renaming once uploaded, etc..... I'm not requesting any of that, and I don't think it should be a priority for you; I feel it'd be unreasonable of me to ask or expect for it to be completed any time soon.

Just to make sure, I should upload (for example) any manual scans as the same type of image ("manual") and one will not overwrite the other, right? So if I upload multiple pages, they should all be the same type? I would check to see how the pulldown was updated, but I can't seem to access any softwareinfo pages.

Hi,

there was a small problem with the server that causes the white pages, but that is fixed now.

And if you upload multiple files of the same type you will not override any image (Each image that is uploaded will receive an unique name and need to be reviewed first before it appears on the site).

Sandy

Excellent, thank you!

I also see the new/added guidelines, also a nice help. I noticed the "only front and back of manual" guideline, and just wanted to ask, is there any reason you do not want things like manual contents? Space constraints?

Well, I'm about 40% through my scans directory. Hope these are useful to somebody. =]

If the person that did the scans is out there, I'd also like to thank them, none of these are mine, it's just a folder on my machine from when I got download-happy/off of a torrent/who knows. But some of the scans are outright gorgeous.

ok! most of my scans are up. some of the cart scans and a few of the box scans aren't the best, far from it, but I guess they're better than no scan at all =] and they can always be replaced by someone with better scans later.

A quick question about uploading stuff on this site...
I used to upload using attachments in forum threads, but sometimes I use the tools provided by a single entry (upload missing screeshots, etc...).
But many screenshots I uploaded time ago are not displayed, yet...
And statistics on my name are not updated (I'm "freezed" at 45..).
So, what's the right method to upload screenshots and informations???
Thankyou.

Don't worry about your uploads they are still in the queue, but it has some problems when I need to change some information (for example if a photo is uploaded as front cover instead of photo). After the change the record in the database gets corrupted because of the way I once decided to store images on the server. Also some entries (i don't know if it are yours) contains some comments which I have to check and then clean them because they don't tell anything about the image but the software it self.

In the latest version which i'm trying to install on the server these problems are fixed.But it will take some time before it will make it to the live site, because I have some memory problems on the server (I need to upgrade it first).

Regards,

Sandy