rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-31, 18:19:
computerguy08 wrote on 2023-10-31, 15:29:
All this makes me thing that you expect the vogons thread to be the main channel for board submissions
Nobody wants nor expects others to waste time manually cut&pasting unstructured data from emails or chat clients.
Nobody wants _any_ web forum to be used for submitting data.
The thing is, user submission is one side of it, the other side is "board hunting" from old manufacturer sites/archives/forgotten sites or physically owning said board. By comparison, anything structured with all the needed informations is a godsend.
Emails are better than a single thread in a forum, because like I said everything gets mixed together and it's easy to forget about someone.
rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-31, 18:19:
Even the most rudimentary web form right on the page would be more user friendly than current situation. If Im reading Necroware https://dosreloaded.de/forum/thread/3599-the- … 0742#post140742 post right such system was in place on http://www.win3x.org/uh19/ :
> Alternativ ist, wenn Du direkt auf der UH19 Seite ein Mainboard suchst, welches nicht da ist, dann bekommst Du einen Text angezeigt "Können Sie ein Mainboard nicht finden? Klicken hier um es hinzuzufügen." Da kannst Du dann den Link anklicken und Du landest auf einer Formularseite, wo Du das Zeug auch einreichen kannst.
Discord has forums too now, adding a forum of our own would mean more moderation, more work to split, two ways is already enough, and with discord for those that want to have a more direct talk, or emails for people that don't trust discord/don't care if we respond after 3 days, it feels like a good compromise.
rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-31, 18:19:
Looks like uh19 ended with drama
>>http://www.win3x.org/uh19/ leitet aber nicht um...
>Nein, die leitet leider nicht um. Es gab wohl einige Differenzen unter den Entwicklern und das Projekt ist umgezogen. Die alte Seite wird von dem Domänen Inhaber eine Zeit lang online gehalten, aber wahrscheinlich nicht mehr weiter entwickelt. Ich möchte da nichts falsches erzählen, aber das ist, was ich weiß.
It's a long story, yes, it is true. But to summarize it, win3x' owner wanted us to make what is now TRW fully compatible with IE4.0 and 5.0 at all costs. Be it worse SEO, having to convert data to older formats that are supported by windows 9x, etc, before any other features. We chose to leave to make sure we can make our own decisions, and it seemed that we left on good terms. However it turned out the owner ahd backstabbed us by archiving his copy of the site to archive.org and made 301 redirects to that archive, making google think that this was the new location of the site and thus shadowbanning us. Asking him to change it lead to nowhere and I had to write a DMCA to archive.org to get it removed.
Had this DMCA failed, the project would probably have died because of his pettyness. Everyone would have thought the project was dead and there would be nothing we can do about that.
This is also one of the reasons why there was no such system from the get go. At the time "the forum was good enough" and "if you make a submission system it has to be ie4 compliant". Not sustainable, waste of time, and also it means that it hadn't been added early, making it harder and harder to add as time passes.
rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-31, 18:19:
Changes dont have to propagate to main page by default. Nobody is asking for rights to directly edit database.
Its about sane submission method - Form right on the page and some indicator of backlog (X edits awaiting action). Bonus points for button to show pending proposed changes, but that would require basic login to cut on spam.
Email/discord submission process should have stopped a year ago, or rather should never have happened in the first place.
This is the main issue, this is what we struggle with at the moment, because the system is made to edit the main database itself. There is no intermediate state, we have to program one, which implies many deep changes in the system.
I was willing to work on such system for a while, but have faced personal issues for the past year that had impacts on my time and motivation I could dedicate for such a big overhaul, meaning that while I worked steadily on the first 3 years on the project, I have only contributed by small bursts for the past year. On a brighter note, things are getting better for me, and computerguy has contributed a lot recently, and the rest of the team made some tremendous work as well, increasing the size of the motherboard db by close to 33% https://web.archive.org/web/20221102162309/ht … heretroweb.com/
More positive things will come soon.
rasz_pl wrote on 2023-10-31, 18:19:
People are frustrated by black-box nature of submissions. Instead of getting angry at each other let us help you.
This is only true for the now closed vogons thread, which was another good reason to stop it.
I don't see why you think it'd be different with a system integrated to TRW, uploads won't be made public (just in case someone uploads nasty stuff) and you will also need an account to participate. The only differences is that the interface would be exactly the same as the one we currently use, and you won't register your account to discord.com or your email's provider, but to us instead.