RF Generation Message Board

Leave any feedback that you have here, including things you'd like fixed or added. Go wild with any of your suggestions - you never know what we'll have time to look into.

Completed
Clear smf_attachments table to prevent random images from appearing in new posts.

Extra Media Submission - Missing Carriage Return after View Game Page (http://www.rfgeneration.com/forum/index.php?topic=9389.msg138225#msg138225)
Image links for Thumbnails always return .JPG for File Extension (http://www.rfgeneration.com/forum/index.php?topic=9389.msg138226#msg138226)
Find Missing Info (http://www.rfgeneration.com/forum/index.php?topic=9389.msg138243#msg138243)
Populate More Fields When Adding Variants (http://www.rfgeneration.com/forum/index.php?topic=9389.msg138252#msg138252)
Display Rotating Flag Images for Related Games/Variation Tie-Ins instead of Region Flags
Display Rotating Flag Images for ALL Submissions for Review instead of Region Flags
Add Link to Entry for ALL Submissions for Review
Fix Annoying Issue Where Approved Hardware/Screenshot Images Don't Render After Approval, along with Formatting
Maybe Pretty Up the Screenshot Thumbnails with a Slideshow instead?

Extra Media Submission - Missing Carriage Return after View Game Page

View Game Page Submit a Box Front Image for this entry
Submit a Box Back Image for this entry
Submit a Game Scan for this entry
Submit a Manual Scan for this entry
Submit an Extra Media Scan for this entry
Submit a In Game Screenshot for this entry

Image links for Thumbnails always return .JPG for File Extension

I think I mentioned this earlier, but it would be nice to have a tool that showed DB entries that were lacking pieces of info and what they were, similar to the Find Missing Images function.

I could do that, but the most often missing piece of information is likely to be Release Type, Rating, or Media Quantity until we fill those out.

It would be nice to have the followings fields carry over when submitting variations:

Genre
Subgenre
Players
Control Scheme
Media Format

IIRC, Developer, Publisher, and Game Rating do carry over.  I could understand Media Format not always carrying over, but the others I have listed 99.9% will not change between variations.

Completely forgot about that. That's a simple fix and would help tremendously when adding Variants.

It would also be nice if related games would transfer over to variations also.

Adding a "Add Variation" link on each game page would help tremendously.

That's by design. Honestly, we should re-work how Related Games works period...


Definitely need to add that.

I think my suggestions might be on the wild side, but since you asked:

Fuzzy search in the database. Unless you type in a title, or part of a title, exactly, it won't show up. This sometimes makes looking up games with stylized apostrophes and dashes and the like, on the box art, hard to look up. It would be nice for other reasons too.

More choices in the Collections Checklist. I would like to be able to print out lists with only the games I have or only the games I don't have for a particular console. Say you own 50 NES games, or only have 50 left to go, and you don't want to carry, or view, the list of all the games. And I would like to be able to change how many games are on a page, personally I don't mind tiny font so I would print lists with 75 lines or something. This would be great on the Odyssey^2 page were the whole US list takes up one page plus one more page with only 2 games.

It would be nice to compare two collectors collections. Say nupoile wants to trade with nupoile^2. There could be a list that somehow highlighted games they had in common which would make finding games to trade the other doesn't already own easier. Or this, I have a good sized Odyssey^2 collection, it would be fun to see how I compare to other O^2 collectors. Which sort of leads into my next suggestion:

Have more options in the All Collections page. Right now you can sort by members name and total games owned, for sale and on their wishlist. But when you go to any particular members page you can sort it out by console. What if you could sort out all collections by console? So you could see were people fit in with other NES collectors or O^2 collectors.

Make it easier to see if you have items with missing images in the database. This would be a list of all the things you own that could use a submitted image. I started to look at the NES list that shows which games need images but currently the list simply shows all NES games. I want one that just shows what I own and is also missing images. I imagine this would be a much smaller list to look at and would save me from having to look back and forth from the one list (games with/with out images) to the other (what I actually own).

Nothing is too much of a stretch, honestly. Fuzzy search is something I asked about a long time ago, along with comparison of member collections and the ability to see what I could upload from my own collection. I've had many, many ideas since I first signed up here, and it's now time to implement what I can get to.

EDIT: That random picture issue too...

Things I've been thinking about since I joined the staff as a developer:

- Basic social networking integration
Facebook Like, Google+, Tweet, etc buttons on game pages and blogs to make it easier to share our content and drive in traffic. Also, better support for Open Graph metadata when posting to Facebook. Currently our game/hardware detail pages do not get read very well by Open Graph, and there are easy to use meta tags out there that we can use to guide it better.

- Revamp the activity feeds on the right side of the main page
Oh cool, this game updated... What about it updated? Is there a new picture? Is it new to the database altogether? Who contributed it? Oh cool, a new blog! Who wrote it? Hey, theGrue updated his collection... I wonder what he added? You get the point. Right now the information here is very rudimentary, but with a little bit of an overhaul, could really enhance the community within the site by seeing who's active on the site and what they're doing.

- Achievements!
Who doesn't love gamification? When I finish my N64 collection, I want a spiffy badge. I haven't really thought about this one much, but it could be fun to implement.

I agree. When I want to relate NES games to their FDS counterparts there is no efficient way of doing that right now. When I am looking for games on Famicom sale lists, often can't tell by the title if it got a NES release. Right now I have to use Google-fu to find out.

Also, for the Forums it would be nice to have a "What's New" button to see all the new posts since your last visit.

Lol, I love badges!!

We need to either remove the Features tab at the top of the page or get a blog schedule up for us lazy bloggers and revamp it or something. There havnt been features in YEARS now.

It'd be really nice to have Related Games available on the Title Addition form. Any time a new title is submitted, I search the DB to make sure the submitter didn't miss it and often times the search gives me a list of other games from the series or the game on different consoles. It'd be really easy to just copy/paste over the ID's before approving the title addition.

I don't know whether or not this has been brought up or not, but it would be nice to be able to determine whether a game is licensed or not licensed (especially in the search results).  I'm mainly speaking from experience in putting together my NES collection and am not sure whether this is an issue with collecting for other systems.  Just a thought, if it can't happen, too much trouble, or not even worth the time, no problem. :)

Maybe if Licensed, Unlicensed, Homebrew, etc. could be a particular field in the database and could then be searchable.

Do we track Homebrew games?

Ones that got officially published, yes. See the RetroZone titles for example. Homebrews are currently indicated by the Genre "Homebrew." I don't think that is a good way to track them though, as that is not a game genre and doesn't describe the gameplay itself.

Homebrews yes.

Hacks and repros no

Very cool, didnt realize that.

Agreed. Hacks, repros, and pirates are all in the same bucket to me. While I do own some, I don't consider them a legitimate item for this database.

I am glad that we support homebrews though. Expanding the market for older systems and providing new content is a great way to enjoy this hobby.

Technically, those need to be moved to Release Type instead. That's a TODO though.

I kind of like the idea of marking entries as either licensed, unlicensed, or homebrew. It'd be similar to Release Type, but separate. It would be nice to be able to quickly see all the games from each category released on a system. But, like the Release Types, it would require us to go through every single entry in the DB to label them, which as we've discovered is a lot more time consuming than previously thought.

So People have been going crazy with suggestions so I will keep mine short. 
1.  Add a option where I can see my overall total of my collection including doubles.
2. When you add a game to your collection have it automatically redirect you to the search screen so you can add games to your collection at a faster rate.  When it redirects have it save the last highlighted video game system you chose,  so if you are adding like 40 nintendo games it speeds up the process.

Could all titles be labeled licensed by default? I would think it would be much faster just to go and change the few that are unlicensed/homebrew.

Yeah, that would be the intention - add a Release Type of Unlicensed, Homebrew, or Pirate (should we have official Pirates in the database for whatever reason...perhaps Air Raid, but that's a whole 'nother debate)

I'd like to see a page where I can view ALL blogs by time posted.  AFAIK, there is no current way to do this, so I end up missing out on reading some of the blogs.

I'd also like to see some kind of feature that could help me with HTML for DB pages.  I basically known next to nothing about HTML, so it would be awesome to have a page containing useful code, and maybe some examples.

My wild suggestion would be to expand the game credits field into a sub-database where every person credited would have their own entity/page, sort of like IMDB for gaming. It sort of leaves the scope of game collecting, but would make RFG an even greater resource.

You can view all blog posts by clicking the My Blog link in your blog area, and there is also a RSS feed: http://www.rfgeneration.com/blogs/blog.rss

So I could have my own page? ;D

Which published games did you work on?

I've been in the industry since April '05.

Head Coach (PC, Xbox, PS2) - QA Tester
Tiger Woods 07 (PC) - QA Tester. Quick Trivia: Play the career mode. I'm in it.
Superman (PS2, Xbox) - QA Tester
Def Jam: Icon (Xbox 360, PS3) - QA Tester
Madden NFL 08 (PC) - QA Tester
Madden NFL 08 (Xbox 360, PS3) - QA Tester (Development Tester)
EA Sports GameShow (Cancelled Project, PC) - QA Tester (Development Tester)
Automation Scripting for Tiger Woods 09, Madden NFL 09, NCAA Football 09, and NASCAR 09
NCAA Football 10 (Xbox 360, PS3) - Software Engineer
NCAA Football 11 (Xbox 360, PS3) - Software Engineer
NCAA Football 12 (Xbox 360, PS3) - Software Engineer

I would like to see you have a link somewhere on site where I can download the Android App without having to go through the Google Play Store. That way I can side load it into my Kindle Fire. :)

I'm loving the idea of badges, I've thought about something similar when people get 1000, 2000, etc games. But didn't even think about for complete system libraries. We could even do 100, 200, etc for each system. It'd be really awesome to not only have these show on our collection pages, but also give people the option to put them in their signatures on other sites.

Please make the search results searchable when adding a variation.

Link: http://www.rfgeneration.com/forum/index.php?topic=9053.0

Would you even need that if there was a "add variation" link on game pages?

Then ya, you would have your own page =)

When I do that, I just get the same results that I see on the sidebar of the forum (Hot Community Entries and Hot Blog Entries) with about 10 blogs listed under each heading.

All it takes is to copy-paste the existing code (when doing a regular DB search) to the variation game search. Being a programmer, I'm sure Shadow could do it in like 10 minutes.

I've been asking for this for a while, btw.

The problem is, those are not written in the same file, and they're different functionality. It's not a simple cut/paste.

I would love to see the value and rarity of each game. I dont know if there would be some way of pulling the information with a site like Digital Press. It would be neat to see what entire collections were worth.

I second the notion of adding the estimated value of a game in the DB.
There's one game merchandise website (Gameswag, I think?) that approximates the value of items using ebay auctions, that's not very accurate but still a start.

I think I can honestly say that we will never add rarities and monetary value to our database. Even though we have a tentative partnership with Digital Press, it is not our expertise. Also, via personal experience, PriceCharting is a great reference for relative cost, and they also have a partnership with Digital Press.

Lastly - the only reason why I can pull up RFG on my phone while on the hunt is that it's not a rarity or price check, which the vendors I've explained this to greatly appreciate.

Last Blade and King of fighters r-2 are mentioned as variation while they are two different games

can somebody fix it

http://www.rfgeneration.com/cgi-bin/getinfo.pl?ID=U-070-S-00100-A

Badges?  BADGES?  We don't need no stinking... okay that is actually a cool idea.  Maybe something that would show up under our forum profile, as bragging rights in the collecting world are pretty important.

I know you don't like this sort of thing, Shadow, but adding price paid for a particular database item would be nice.  While I can do this now in the "Comments" area, it would be nice to have a dedicated field for entry.  To be clear I'm speaking specifically of a detail that would only appear by clicking on either "My Collection" or by accessing a member's collection via profile.  I would like to make an argument for having an average price paid per item in the database that would show when doing searches (since RFG is a game collection website that seems to enjoy The Hunt, the price paid for a particular item would be more of a red herring than a boon), but that would skirt quite close to showing actual collecting value rather than the "bragging" value, which you have expressed your distaste for, which I respect.

Please put that in the appropriate thread. This is for feedback on site features and broken things on the site, not database errors.

I hope rarity and value never gets added. We do not have the staff to do such things.

Even if we had the staff to do those two things I wouldnt want to see them included. Value is meaningless, and rarity is a an estimate in too many cases. I'd rather we dont touch either.

I agree.

I vaguely remember a thread about adding value/rarity to the DB. In the end it there seemed to be concensus that the site would then thread to closely to Digital Press and that it would be impolite.


Personally, I'd prefer not to have rarity/value added. Many of the rarest games are absolute crap, whereas many of the best games ever created are incredibly cheap and common. Focussing too much on rarity flies in the face of true gaming spirit.

Adding "value" seems pointless to me, aside from the fact that it would take a tremendous amount of work initially, it would require constant tweaking as we all know games fluctuate in price over the years. The only way I could ever see us adding that to our DB is if we had some kind of partnership with another site that did all the legwork and we just had it displayed here. And even that's pretty far fetched.

Rarity is something I think we could do, but not in the foreseeable future. Right now, we have about 2500 members with collections listed. If we had say 10 times that many, we could probably use the stats of how many people own a game to say with some accuracy how rare it is.

Both of these, while it would be nice to have, would require a lot of work upfront and over time, and since there are already great sites that do both of these, I don't see a point in having them here too. I wouldn't want to see the site get into something just to have it be sub-par to what's already out there.

Seems pretty unanimous to me.  While I was thinking more of adding competition rather than actual value (more of a "Holy crap, I can't believe Crab got that game for only $1.00" than a "I wonder how much this game is worth,") I now understand the work attached to this may be a bit unrealistic for such a small thing.  Not a bit deal, as I maintain a separate game database to retain personal value to my collection.

Since I tend to collect more what I want to play these days, I just don't care about rarity at all.

Going back to badges for a second, it'd be cool to have a "top submitter for X month" badge to give out every month.

I'm digging the badge idea. Who do I have to flog to make that happen ;D

Fairly certain that SMF doesn't support badges, but it doesn't mean that it can't be done. It looks like there's an Awards section, but I think that's just text.

If we can't have them on the forum itself, maybe on our collection profile page?

I'm not entirely sure how to word this correctly, or even if it's already been suggested, but maybe adding a feature to group all the games of a certain system together, sub-categorized by the region instead of them having their own count totals.

Basically, you want to be able to filter by region for each console?

More so, have a single stat count for each system by having all the regions combined, and then having it broken down by region underneath. 

These are times when I wish I had rendering skills, but I guess it would look something like this:
Sega Genesis -- 20 (5%)
  -[Region Flag] 5 (Percent of total collection and/or percent of system total)
  -[Region Flag] 4 " " so on and so on

i'd like what kida suggested too, it would be nice to see the total count for one system actually be in one place in those bars on the profile at least

A small feature that I would find handy is to make the people/users named in the Page Credits section of each entry a link to their profile.

Haha thanks, I guess I should have specified that I was talking about collection profiles rather than search features.