Blogger Archive: NES_Rules 
[img align=right width=400]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/repository/17701thank-you-key.jpg[/img]
It's that time of the month again! No, not that time, the good time where we thank all those awesome members of our wonderful little site that have helped to grow our most prized possession, the Database!
I'll start off thanking some names I didn't recognize, though they have been around the site since 2013, so thanks amprice5474 and josulli3 for becoming active and making over 100 submissions. And then there's a couple regulars, CoinCollector, Furnessly, and Sauza12 who also each made over 100 submissions. But the real butt-kickers in August were Shadow Kisuragi with over 500 submissions, ae.tc with over 700 submissions and ApolloBoy with nearly 1000 submissions. Thanks to all of you and everyone else who made a submission in August.
But we can't forget about our awesome staff members who work tirelessly to make sure all those submissions are being reviewed and approved. Izret101 and Tynstar each had almost 300 approvals. ApolloBoy had almost 800 and Shadow Kisuragi had almost 1000 approvals. Thanks guys for keeping the gears of the RFGen running smoothly and getting those submissions taken care of.
Did you know our annual PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS contest ended already? Apparently, it ended almost two weeks ago. And I apologize its taken me so long to get this written up, but its just been hard to find the time to give this the full attention it deserves (more on that later).
Enough of my rambling, lets get down to business and announce those winners! We'll start off with the winner of the donation drive. And that winner is YOU! Because everyone wins when someone donates, without those crucial donations, we literally can not exist. Even though we are non-profit, our server host is most definitely not. But I did offer a prize to the individual donated the most during our donation drive, and the winner of that prize is none other than Razor Knuckles, who donated an astounding amount, more than anyone since I've been in charge of the finances around here at least. I won't disclose here how much exactly he donated, I'll let him do that if he so wishes.
And of course, there's the matter of who won the PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS contest. The winner of that contest is our very own Not-So-Secret Santa, Zagnorch! He not only won the submissions contest, he destroyed the contest, raking in more than twice as many points as the second place member, Flee. Who, in turn, got more than twice as many points as third place ae.tc. Good job guys, you kicked butt this year. And a big thanks to everyone who participated in the contest, you're all winners in my book.
As for the prizes, as it turns out, its a little harder to come by a pair of 1990 NWC carts than I thought, so I'll have to make a little substitution to the prizes for our two winners. Luckily, I never mentioned specifically which gold colored NES cart would be the prize, so no harm no foul, right? So Mr. Zagnorch and Mr. Knuckles, send me a PM with your address and your prizes will be on their way as soon as possible.
And finally, I have one more little announcement. After nearly 5 years, I will be stepping down as Site Director of RFGeneration. Now, it has nothing to do with an affair, scandal, or anything like that. My life has just become too busy for me to make this site a priority, and that's what it needs to be for a Director. So rather than just stick around making people wait on my response to things, I'm simply taking myself out of the equation so the remaining Directors can efficiently keep the site running. Now, I won't be leaving completely, I'll still be around on occasion, just on more of an unofficial capacity. In lieu of a retirement gift, you can make a donation to webmaster@rfgeneration.com
First off, I want to give a big "Thank You" to the 9 members who have taken the time to donate money to the site during our annual donation drive. So Thank You Tadpole13, Razor Knuckles, Raidou, Nupoile, Zagnorch, OatBob, and Wempster. Together you guys have raised over $600 to keep the site running. And unless someone tops your donation in the next couple days, you'll be receiving an ultra-rare gold colored NES game. If you're not one of these fine gentlemen, and want to help keep the site alive, you can send a PayPal donation to webmaster@rfgeneration.com or just click the little Donate icon at the bottom of this article. Either way, your contribution is only used for paying the hosting bill around here, which is around $100 each and every month. If you don't know how much to donate, donate whatever you can, whether its $5 or $5000, every little bit helps. But for reference, the average donation amount this year has been $77.21. I'm not saying you must donate that much, but if you want to conform to the standard, you probably should.
And of course, I must thank all of you out there that are PAINING YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS! In may, the most PAINED WITH SUBMISSIONS member was Zagnorch, with 2190 submissions. Next was ApolloBoy with over 1000 submissions, and each with over 500 submissions were Flee, MrMeek, Aeroc, and ae.tc. Thanks guys, you are obviously taking this competition seriously, and you should be. One of you is likely to walk away with another copy of that super-rare gold colored NES game.
If your name isn't listed here, don't worry, you can still win this thing. But you better get your butt moving, Zagnorch really wants that game, and you wouldn't want him to get it would you?
But don't forget about those poor souls who tirelessly sift through all those submissions to find the ones that are worthy of approving into the database. Without them, we'd have a database full of incorrect information and stolen images. May's biggest Approver was Shadow Kisuragi with an astounding 3468 approvals and who knows how many rejections. Next up was Tynstar with just shy of 1000, and ApolloBoy with 733. Thanks guys, you have been doing an awesome job at keeping that queue down this year, I only saw it above 100 once this year.
Thanks to everyone else who has contributed in May and during our annual contest so far. It really is true that every little bit helps. Whether its a page edit to fix a typo or a donation of $500, we truly appreciate it all.
Click the button, you know you want to.
April 28th, 2004, do you remember where you were? I was a sophomore in High School, if you're just old enough to be a member of the site, you may have still been pooping your pants. But if you were Michael Collins, Mark Hartholt, Eddie Herrmann, Laurel Settee, Mike Leon, or Rick Kuethe, you were giving birth to the THE Classic and Modern Video Game Database, better known as RFGeneration. Yes, that's right, today marks the 10th anniversary of this wonderful little site.
A lot has happened in the last ten years here at RFGeneration, we've gone from a meager little database with a couple thousand entries to one with over 86,000 software entries alone (which means we're averaging about 25 new entries every day) and more than 150,000 images. Yes, you read that right, one-hundred and fifty-thousand images. If you printed all those images out at 4"x6", they'd stretch out over 85 miles. Unless my math is wrong, which it probably is, nobody double-check it. If that doesn't impress you, then think about this, between all the collectors on this site, we own over a million games and hardware pieces (though I think Slackur throws off the average since he owns about half of that).
As most of you know, we have a little tradition here at RFGeneration, one where instead of you giving us gifts, we give them to you! Yes, that's right, its time for the PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS contest, where you give us many, many submissions and you can win cool prizes. So I guess you do give us stuff after all, but those submissions are what sustain us. Without any new submissions, the gerbil running on the wheel that powers the site gets bored and starts to think too much about what his role in the universe is, and any time that happens, the site crashes and nobody wants that to happen again.
So, here's how it works. From the time this article posts (April 28th) until June 8th, you make as many submissions as humanly possible, maybe more if you want to hire a couple of immigrant workers to crop your scans for you. Our poor database staff reviews an absurd number of submissions 24 hours a day, and at the end of it all, one of you gets a sweet prize package. And we really do give you a good prize, not just a pencil eraser and a sticker like those fundraisers you did in Elementary school. You get your choice of $60 worth of gaming goodness, basically, you go on a shopping spree on GameGavel, eBay, or Amazon and we'll pick up the tab, as long as it doesn't exceed $60 and its gaming related. Maybe it that new PS4 game you want, or maybe 6 classic NES games, or 120 copies of Pac-Man on the Atari VCS, we won't judge you. And of course, so you can be coolest kid on the block, you also get an official RFGeneration Ringer T-shirt. And new for this year, you can win one of the rarest and most sought after NES games ever made. I can't tell you what the title is just yet, for if I told you, it will surely cause too many people to go crazy making submissions. But I will give you a hint that its shiny and gold colored and its not The Legend of Zelda.
That's the gist of it anyway, the details are a bit more complex.
Here's how the point breakdown will work:
Title Addition: 5 Points
Variation Addition: 6 Points
Page Edit*: 2 Points
Review*: 50 Points
Overview*: 20 Points
Image Upload: 10 Points
Submission Review**: 1 Point
Blog Post*: 30 Points
Blog Comment: 1 Point
Forum Post: 1 Point
Forum Karma: See Explanation
*Regarding the asterisk: For page edits, if it is noticed that you are consistently only adding one field per edit multiple times for a single title just to up your points, you will be disqualified. Any review or overview completed will count as a page edit as well the points for an overview or review. To get the points for an overview or review you MUST contact me via Personal Message so that I can keep a tally. In addition, the review or overview must be on the actual game / hardware page. A review or overview of poor quality could result in less points than stated being granted. The same statement holds true for blog posts.
Regarding Forum Karma: Because we want the forum to be a lively place of fun and interesting posts, we're enabling Karma during this contest. Karma rewards members that make good posts and smites those who do not. Your Karma will play a wildcard role in posts. Positive Karma at the end of the contest will increase your point total by a factor, while negative karma will decrease it.
As with any contest, there is fine print. Any submission that you make must adhere to the RF Generation Policies and Guidelines. We wrote these policies and guidelines for a reason, and well, we'd like everyone to adhere to them. Failure to adhere to the guidelines could result in a disqualification.
Any point reduction or disqualification can be contested. In the event that you wish to contest, you must explain why the reduction or disqualification is unfair. If you win the contest, we'll restore your greatness, but if you lose, you shall be pelted with figurative rocks and garbage.
Everyone, except for the directors of this site, is in this contest. Because staff members get that extra point for each submission review, and those staff members will have thousands of submissions to review in addition to their own submissions, their total score will be halved to make things a bit more fair and lively.
Now before you go and warm that scanner up, I have one more thing to mention, and it also involves a prize, so you better read it, and I'll know if you don't. As most of you probably noticed, a couple months ago, our site performance was pretty bad, in fact it was slower than a turtle in a molasses factory. It took a lot of work from our awesome staff to get things not just working again but working better than ever before. You see, what happened is that our members over these past 10 years have been so awesome that we simply had more information than our host could handle. We were breaking hard drives left and right. They'd give us a new one and you guys had it filled up within a couple days. So we had to cut that host loose and find a new one, one that could handle our awesomeness. One that could keep up with our growth now and in the future. But of course, with all this power comes the downside, and that is that it costs money to keep the lights on. Luckily, it's not terribly more expensive than our old host, but we still need to call on our members to get those billed paid. Most of you know that we generally have an annual donation drive around Thanksgiving/Christmas, but I didn't feel right asking for any money while the site was running as poorly as it was during that time. So now that's running properly, I'm asking for money to keep the site alive.
We're not a greedy bunch here, we'll gladly accept any donation amount you wish to give, if you've never donated before and aren't sure, just donate $1, it really does help. Or if you're feeling more generous, a $5 donation is great too. And $20 is phenomenal, any more than that, and you're just being a show-off (which by the way, we love show-offs).
So what do you get for donating? Well, first and foremost, you become a part of the elite group that helps to keep this site alive financially, without donors, we would simply not exist. Secondly, you get access to the top secret section of the forum created just for donors. You'll also notice that we don't have any ads anywhere on the site, if you have AdBlocker, disable it for a moment and you'll notice nothing changes, that's because we really don't have ads, even little ones. And trust me, we get offers from companies that sell ads on a regular basis since we're probably the last site to not have any ads. Your donations are what keeps me deleting those emails and this site ad-free.
And lastly, if you donate from now until June 8th, you'll have the chance to win a prize. For the person who donates the largest total amount in that time period, you will get another copy of the same game the PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS contest winner will receive. That's right, we're not only giving away one copy of one of the rarest NES games ever made, but two. You can either win one by making a ton of submissions, or just give a bunch of money, or go for both and give one away for Christmas next year.
Looks like 2014 is already 1/12th over. Despite off and on connection issues, our dedicated members have been hard at work makin' those submissions. In fact, you guys made over 2600 submissions in January. Which is very commendable considering the sporadic outages we've been experiencing. And if those outages have been keeping you away from making submissions and from the site in general, I've got some good news for you. There will be more info once it's all done, but rest assured everything will be lightning fast again by the end of the month.
So who made all those submissions in January? Well, it was mostly ApolloBoy with 757 submissions! ericeskapade had over 400, and HungryMoose and Shadow Kisuragi each had over 200. And of course, there were another 63 members who together made another 1000 submissions. So thanks to all of you who helped out this January, I know it wasn't easy with the downtime and sluggish load times.
As always, I'd like to thank our dedicated submission-approving team that has to deal with all of those submissions every month. Our top approvers in January were Tynstar and Shadow Kisuragi with over 700 and over 400 approvals respectively. Paully3433 also had over 100 approvals in January.
Thanks again everyone, and if you've been putting off those submissions because of our site issues, be assured it will be getting better, but as always, good things take some time, so expect things to get speedier by the end of February, and possibly sooner, depending on how smoothly things go. We're definitely trying to roll out these changes as quickly as we can.
Happy New Year! Its hard to believe another year has come and gone, and just as I was getting used to dating stuff with 2013...
2013 wasn't an easy year for RFGeneration, with temporary outages and performance issues have been occasionally plaguing us the last couple months, but nothing worth doing is ever easy. Luckily for us, things don't have to be so easy when you have hundreds of awesome members helping out. With so many people each doing a small share, we no longer have to employ a dozen children in China to fill in the tedious information. But who needs them when you have slaves members who will work for free? Kidding aside, we really do appreciate all the work every one of you do here at the site. Whether its just a small page edit to fix a typo or adding every game for a system that's been neglected.
And boy, did we ever have a lot of submissions in 2013. How many, you ask? 44,373 total submissions if you must know. The best part of that IMO is that more than half were images, which are always awesome to have more of.
So, who submitted the most this year? It was our very own DB Reviewer, Bildtstar with a truly astounding 5542 submissions this year, that averages out to more than 15 submissions every single day in 2013. I tip my hat to you sir, and I suggest everyone else does so as well.
Up next, we have DB Editor ApolloBoy with 3909 submissions. Thanks man, you've been here since week #6 and have made over 20,000 submissions over the years, more than all but one other member.
Next is a fairly new member, joining in only November, he has somehow managed to rack up 3331 submissions. Keep up the pace Kaysow, and you'll do just fine here.
And our last member to get over 3000 submissions this year, the world famous Crabmaster2000. Somehow, between shoveling a mountain of snow 9 months out of the year, co-hosting the greatest podcast of all time, and running his own store, this man has managed to make 3280 submissions this year.
As an honorable mention, I'd also like to thank Shadow Kisuragi not only for his 2910 submissions this year, but for his tireless and never ending work on keeping the site running. He and bickman2k are out there every day in the code trenches fighting bugs as well as trying to bring new functions and features to the site.
But that's not everyone, I'd also like to thank the following people for making over 1,000 submissions in 2013. Tynstar, ericeskapade, CoinCollector, thegreatska, Sirgin, and Razor Knuckles. And thanks to the other 240 of you who made another 14,500 submissions.
If you're sad that your name isn't listed here, there is a simple solution, just submit more. Its simple to do and is even a bit addictive. Start out simple with the games you know well and then move onto things you're less familiar with.
And if every game page you look at it is full on information and pictures but you still want to help out, there is always the option to help us out financially. We haven't started our annual donation drive yet, but that doesn't mean you can't beat the crowds and get that donation in early. Just hit the button below and chip in a few bucks.
The 2013 Pain Yourself with Submissions Contest ended the other day, June 8th, to be exact. That date is the day this wonderful site went live to the public nine years ago. So Happy Birthday RFGen!
So now you're probably wondering why when the contest ended on the 8th, it has taken 5 days for me to post this. Well, the reason is simple, we just wanted Crabmaster to sweat it out for a few extra days to see if anyone could out-submit him in the last few days of the contest. And unfortunately for him, I'm going to make him wait a bit longer by announcing the other top ten before saying who got the #1 position.
#10: Madir
#9: douglie007
#8: Zagnorch
#7: ixtaileddemonfox
#6: Tynstar
#5: A8scooter
#4: Bildtstar
#3: techwizard
#2: ericeskapade
But who got #1? Did Crabmaster keep control of the lead, or did Aeroc come from nowhere in the end just to win it all again? Tune in next week to find out!
Oh wait, after reviewing this article, it doesn't look quite long enough, so I'll just announce the winner now. The winner of the 2013 Pain Yourself with Submissions Contest is . . .
CRABMASTER2000!
So congrats to Crabby and everyone else who submitted anything during the contest. You guys kicked some major butt and added a ton of new info and images to the database this year.
And as always, keep it tuned to Channel 3! (There just may be another contest coming sooner than you'd think).
Over 8000 submissions this month? What could have possibly created such a huge influx of submissions? Maybe it has to do with that contest thing going on. Yeah, that's probably it. With the awesome prizes, I don't see how anyone could resist making hundreds of submissions, or in Crabmaster's case, thousands of submissions...
Apparently, Crabmaster really wants another RFGen T-shirt and his choice of a game valued up to $60. Because he was the top submitter in May with 3,272 submissions. But, if you want that shirt and game, there's still hope for you in the contest. You have until June 8th to make more submissions.
Crabmaster isn't the only competition this year though, plenty of people have been kicking butt this month. Rounding out the top ten this month for submissions we have Bildtstar, Madir, ApolloBoy, ericeskapade, Tynstar, Izret101, ixtaileddemonfox, Shadow Kisuragi, and Addicted.
As always, all those submissions would just sit in submission limbo without our crack team of reviewers. The top reviewers this month were Tynstar, Bildtstar, and Shadow Kisuragi.
So thanks to everyone who has submitted and reviewed submissions this month.
And if you're wondering what your odds are of winning the contest, I'm not telling you. But I will let you know who is winning, but you'll just have to guess how far behind you are from the leader. And if you want to win, just keep those submissions coming, you've got a few days, which is actually enough time to make enough submissions to win. You may have to give up some sleep and food, but you can still submit while you're using the toilet, we won't even know the difference.
The ten members with the highest scores as of this writing are as follows: Crabmaster2000, techwizard, Bildtstar, ericeskapade, ixtaileddemonfox, Zagnorch, Madir, Addicted, h1ghw1nd, and A8scooter. If that's you, then congrats, you're doing pretty good so far. But if you want to do better or if your name has a "2000" in it, you should keep those submissions coming in, you never know when you'll get passed up in this intense competition. And if your name is absent from that list, you still have a shot, don't be discouraged (hint: screenshots are a great way to get a ton of points). That T-shirt can still have anyone's name on it at this point!
RF Generation is turning 9, isn't that fine?! Actually, I think its better than "fine", I just wanted the opening line to rhyme. I don't know about you, but I think any website making it nine years is still a huge accomplishment, and given that we're entirely supported by donations, it makes it even more special. How many other sites out there can say they have stayed alive and independent for this long? I guess we just have one thing all those other sites don't have, the awesome community. Whether its cash to pay for our server bill or just raw data for our database, you guys are always willing to step up and give. That attitude is the reason our site has grown to include more than 75,000 games, nearly 140,000 images, and well over 5000 members from all over the world.
To help show our gratitude to all of you, we like to hold a little contest here every year. The winner of this contest will not only receive all the fame of being the 2013 winner, but real, physical prizes, including an RFGen shirt and their choice of a game. So, what do you need to do win these awesome prizes? If you've been watching our front page like you should be doing, you already know what to do. But if you missed it, scroll down for the full rules regarding the contest, which starts right NOW!
Its that time of year again! Time to PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS! Yes, that's right, its contest time, where you can win awesome prizes, including an RFGeneration T-shirt and a game of your choice! Isn't that nice of us? We think so, but we do it for you guys, for all the hard work you put in through the year to make this site so awesome.
Our veteran members are probably very familiar with how the contest works, but for all the new members, the basic premise is very simple. Just be active on the site, get points, and if you accumulate enough points, you win! That's the gist of it, the details are a bit more complex.
Here's how the point breakdown will work:
Title Addition: 5 Points
Variation Addition: 6 Points
Page Edit*: 2 Points
Review*: 50 Points
Overview*: 20 Points
Image Upload: 10 Points
Submission Review**: 1 Point
Blog Post*: 30 Points
Blog Comment: 1 Point
Forum Post: 1 Point
Forum Karma: See Explanation
*Regarding the asterisk: For page edits, if it is noticed that you are consistently only adding one field per edit multiple times for a single title just to up your points, you will be disqualified. Any review or overview completed will count as a page edit as well the points for an overview or review. To get the points for an overview or review you MUST contact me via Personal Message so that I can keep a tally. In addition, the review or overview must be on the actual game / hardware page. A review or overview of poor quality could result in less points than stated being granted. The same statement holds true for blog posts.
Regarding Forum Karma: Because we want the forum to be a lively place of fun and interesting posts, we're enabling Karma during this contest. Karma rewards members that make good posts and smites those who do not. Your Karma will play a wildcard role in posts. Positive Karma at the end of the contest will increase your point total by a factor, while negative karma will decrease it.
As with any contest, there is fine print. Any submission that you make must adhere to the RF Generation Policies and Guidelines. We wrote these policies and guidelines for a reason, and well, we’d like everyone to adhere to them. Failure to adhere to the guidelines could result in a disqualification.
Any point reduction or disqualification can be contested. In the event that you wish to contest, you must explain why the reduction or disqualification is unfair. If you win the contest, we’ll restore your greatness, but if you lose, you shall be pelted with figurative rocks and garbage.
Everyone, except for the directors of this site, is in this contest. Because staff members get that extra point for each submission review, and those staff members will have thousands of submissions to review in addition to their own submissions, their total score will be halved to make things a bit more fair and lively.
So now that you know all the rules and have the scanner warming up, you probably want to know what you can win. Well, don't worry, its quite a substantial prize. The winner will receive their choice of gaming swag (not to exceed $60) plus an official RF Generation Ringer T-shirt!
The contest will begin on April 28th at midnight Eastern Time and will end on June 8th at midnight Eastern Time. There will even be an announcement post at that time so even if you're outside the Eastern time zone, you'll know exactly when to start submitting.
So get that scanner fired up and start stockpiling scans and submissions!
The 2013 Donation Drive has now concluded. Our goal was to raise $1000 in just over a month's time. But were we successful? Well, yes, but not quite technically. In the time frame of the donation drive, we received $995.78. But, we also received an additional $40.75 from the auction of the guest interview spot on the Collectorcast. And another $6.00 from some Atari games I donated to the cause. And then we received an additional $60 donation just after the deadline. So we did receive enough to keep the site alive for another year! But since we didn't reach the goal within in the time frame of the donation drive, there won't be an all-expense paid trip to Hawaii for the donors like I was planning. Oh well, guess there's always next year.
Seriously though, I'd like to thank everyone who helped us out this year, it really is greatly appreciated. Just like we rely on members for our DB information, we also rely on our member donations to pay for our server. We really mean it when we say we wouldn't be here without our devoted members.
So thanks to all these people who donated this year:
- Sack
- Engel 762
- OatBob
- Bildtstar
- Razor Knuckles
- nupoile
- Techie413
- slackur
- moonraker_fats
- bum-man
- CoinCollector
- singlebanana
- Wempster
- RetroRage
- Sauza12
- ryanflucas
- ericeskapade
- Johnny Nintendo
- fatken53
- monkees19
- Barracuda
- DaveMMR
- Silver80
- pwpcody
You 24 may now proudly tell everyone that you helped support THE Classic and Modern Video Game Databases financially.
And of course, there are the matter of some prizes to be handed out. First off, if you've been listening to the Collectorcast, you've been hearing all about the donors as they donated, and there's still plenty more to come in the next episode.
If you've been keeping up on the Podcast section on the forum, you've probably already heard that nupoile won the auction to be on a future episode, so we've all got that conversation to look forward to.
And the biggest donor we had this year was Sack who donated an astounding $200! This awesome donation entitles him to have his choice of any two items from the RFGeneration Store.
Again, thanks to all who donated this year, and in past years. If you wanted to donate but didn't have the extra funds to do so, don't worry, you can donate at any time. Just click on the little "Donate" toward the top of the forum page. Or you can shop at our store, each sale price includes a percentage that goes back to us.
[img align=right height=325]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/repository/14618donate.jpeg[/img]
The 2013 RFGeneration Donation Drive is nearly over! Have you donated yet? If you have, thank you, it is very much appreciated. Your money is hard at work keeping us online for everyone to enjoy the database and forum, ad free. If you haven't donated yet, you have until February 1st to get this year's extra special prizes, but you can still donate any time of the year. If you're not planning on donating, we may send our most dangerous Canadian, Crabmaster, after you. And we wouldn't want that to happen.
If you're on the fence about donating, here's some reasons why you should donate.
- This site is completely free for everyone to use, and its 100% ad free. Something I'm sure everyone knows is incredibly rare these days on the Internet. What other websites do you know of that don't have any ads?
- Our Database is huge and its expensive to host. It costs us about $1000 a year to pay for a host that keeps this site up and running at a good speed. It takes a lot of storage space to keep 80,000 DB entries, and 150,000 images.
- You don't need to donate a lot. Whatever you're comfortable donating is fine with us. Whether its $100 or $5, every little bit helps. If everyone who reads this donates just $5, we'd likely meet our goal by February 1st.
- If we meet our $1000 goal, you won't have to look at any more of these messages for another year. If we don't, expect another round of these we start running low on funds.
- You actually get something for your donation. Every donation will get you the coveted Donor rank on the forum which gives you access to a special forum board where you can read about upcoming features and just chat with fellow donors. And if you're the top donor this year, you'll get any two items from our Cafepress store. And thanks to the Collectorcast, you can donate $5 to have your name read on the podcast, donate $20 and have all your pickups read, or donate $30 to get access to the "pilot" episode of the Collectorcast.
- You can donate without actually donating. If you'd rather get something in return for helping us out, you can buy some merchandise from our CafePress store. You can buy some awesome products, spread the word of RFGen, and 10% of sales go back to us. If there's nothing there you can't live without (which I doubt, because that Beer Stein is amazing) you can also bid on our GameGavel auctions. You can win a guest interview spot on the Collectorcast, (next bid is only $38.50) or you can win a great starter collection of Atari 2600 cartridges (next bid is only $6.50).
And to show everyone who the cool kids are this year, these are the awesome members that have already participated in the 2013 Donation Drive. If you want to see all the people who have donated in past years, click here.
- Razor Knuckles
- pwpcody
- monkees19
- ericeskapade
- fatken53
- ryanflucas
- slackur
- Sauza12
- Techie413
- Engel762
- Silver80
- moonraker_fats
- Barracuda
- RetroRage
- Wempster
- Bildtstar
Those 16 people have donated a total of $560.78, making the average donation about $35. I won't say you should try to match or exceed that amount, but if you did, it would be awesome.
And if you're looking to "win" this donation drive, there is currently a tie for the top donation of $100, so please exceed that so we don't have to decide who gets the prize package. If you've already donated, the prize goes to the top total donor during the drive, so you can donate more to add to what you've already donated.
Well, we made it, the Mayans were wrong and we survived December 2012, we'll say it was because you guys were kicking butt in making submissions. Surely, the world couldn't end with so much being done to the DB, it just wouldn't have been fair. December was the fifth straight month of increasing total submissions. And this was our best December since we started keeping track of submissions in 2006. And it goes without saying that it was so much better than what happened last December.
So what were the 5175 submissions in December you ask? Most were actually images, over 1600 to be exact. And boy do we love getting images. So who made all those image submissions? Quite a few people actually, but the majority were submitted by ericeskapade.
But of course he wasn't alone in the war on empty DB entries, the other top 10 submitters in December were Paully3433 (1444), ericeskapade (619), Sirgin (493), Shadow Kisuragi (314), Bildtstar (260), thegreatska (170), aeroc (158), CoinCollector (157), ApolloBoy (126), and raffa1985 (123). Thanks guys, you did an awesome job!
And of course we have to give some recognition to our tireless staff that approves all those non-staff submissions. In December, with over 100 approvals we had Paully3433, Shadow Kisuragi, and Izret101.
So you're all pretty familiar with what can happen in a month's time here, but you ever think of how much gets done in an entire year? Well, its roughly 12 times as much  In 2012, there were 59,374 submissions! Over 27,000 of those were images, over 12,000 new DB entries were added.
The top 10 submitters for 2012 each had over 2,000 submissions, with the top spots having 2-3 times that many. The top 10 submitters for 2012 were, Crabmaster2000, aeroc, Paully3433, Shadow Kisuragi, Sirgin, Tynstar, NES_Rules, raffa1985, Bildtstar, and ApolloBoy.
And the top staff reviewers, each with over 6000 reviews, Shadow Kisuragi, Paully3433, NES_Rules, Tynstar. Thanks to all of you who have submitted in 2012, December, or any time in the past. Every submission, however minor or seemingly insignificant helps us out. And if you haven't made any submissions, then what are you waiting for? Its really easy to get started and we have a wonderful staff and members that will help you out with everything from the most basic questions to the incredibly advanced.
I have one more "thanks" to give before I end this. And that goes to Shadow Kisuragi for going through and fixing dozens of little errors that have been occurring on the site. Some of them have been around for as long as I can remember, and I'm sure most of the RFG veterans, like me, don't even notice them anymore. But once all these bugs are squashed, we'll be able to actually focus on bringing new features to the site!
And lastly, I'd like to remind everyone of the Donation Drive currently in progress. The official Drive will end on February 1st, so if you want to get in on the action, you have a couple weeks to help out. By donating, you not only help keep us alive, you'll also be eligible for some sweet prizes, click here for more information. As of this writing, we're about 42% of the way to our goal, so don't be shy and toss a few bucks our way, you'll feel good and we'll still be here!
Welcome to 2013! 2012 is now in the history books and what a year it was! A ton of new games, hardware, and images were added to the database. But more than that, we've added a lot of "behind the scenes" features and fixes that will help us out in 2013 and beyond. We've also learned a lot, like how important frequent backups are. So what else happened in 2012 you ask? Well, I'll remind you.
- Shadow Kisuragi took charge of fixing the regions in the European PS2 section of the DB, for the second time since his original work was lost in the outage.
- We added two new DB Contributors, Bildtstar and Raffa1985.
- TheGrue was added as a staff Programmer.
- We moved from a VPS with 1GB of RAM and 20GB of drive space. To a dedicated server with 4GB of RAM and dual 500GB drives.
- We switched the site to support only Android devices.
- We switched back to supporting other devices.
- We reached 80,000 scans in the database.
- The RFGeneration Collectorcast was introduced.
- Aeroc won the PAIN YOURSELF WITH SUBMISSIONS contest...again.
- Sirgin and Aeroc were added to staff as DB Contributors.
- We reached 70,000 titles in the DB.
- Shadow Kisuragi and his team finished fixing the regions on Euro PS2 and Xbox games.
I'd say that's a pretty good list, and it doesn't even mention the countless little things that have been tweaked or fixed over the year. So now that you've been reminded what's been happening around here. I'd like to take this time to remind how you can help the site you love. As always, you can help us become even better by simply making submissions to the DB, whether its an image or some information, it all helps. If you've already submitted everything you could and still want to help us out, you can help with the gift of a donation, as we are one week into our annual donation drive.
During the donation drive, we raise the money that is needed to keep the site online. This is the reason we have no ads on the site and can afford to have a server that can handle a database the size of ours. We're one week into the drive and have raised just over $100, or about 10% of our goal, so we've still got a ways to go. But don't worry, you know we love you, so we won't just take your money and not give anything back. Every donor gets the Donor rank on the forum and access to a special board on the forum. You also get your name forever immortalized on the Donors page. And thanks to the RFGeneration Collectorcast there are some extra special prizes. Everyone donating at least $5 will get their name mentioned on the Podcast, those donating $20 or more will have all of their scores mentioned in the next episode, and those donating $30 or more will get the download to the Episode 0 of the podcast. And best of all, the highest donor during the drive will receive an amazing prize pack including two items of their choice from the RFGeneration store, plus some other goodies that will be donated by staff members.
So please, donate to the cause if the thought of ads plastered on RFGeneration make you sick. Or if you just want to help out a friend that's always there for you.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone in RFGeneration Land! I hope you're all enjoying your time with family and friends, or maybe just a day off work or school. And I know you're going to be tracking all those new games you get right here at RFGen. After you add them to your collection here, you can brag about your holiday scores on our forum. And then you can use your new found games to fill in some missing info in our database. Heck, you can probably spend all day right here, and you know what, in all that time you'll find many things, but there's one thing you will not find, advertisements. It's true, you can turn off your Ad Block Plus and nothing will change, no annoying pop-ups or banner ads. I wish I could say we can do this because it doesn't cost anything to have a website, but unfortunately, it does get rather expensive paying for a host that gives us as much storage space and speed as we need to run a database as large as ours.
In order to stay afloat, we rely solely on the donations of our members. Its those member donations that have kept us online for the past 8 years and hopefully for many more years to come. And even though we have just as many (if not more) video games in our database as Wikipedia, we don't quite need the $16-20 million they raise during their donation drives. But we do need roughly $1000 for a year's worth of hosting, so whether its $1 or $100, every bit helps us out. And every cent donated to us (minus PayPal's fee of course) goes to paying for our server. Our staff doesn't get a dime, despite their hundreds of hours of work, and the money will not pay for any contest prizes, that comes out of own pockets.
Now that you're surely wanting to give us some of your money, I'll sweeten the deal even more for you. Every donor will receive the super awesome Donor rank on the forum, which will give you access to a top secret forum board where you often get to read about upcoming news and features before everyone else. And thanks to the RFGeneration Collectorcast there are some extra special prizes. Everyone donating at least $5 will get their name mentioned on the Podcast, those donating $20 or more will have all of their scores mentioned in the next episode, and those donating $30 or more will get the download to the Episode 0 of the podcast. But wait, there's even more! The person who donates the most during our donation drive will receive an amazing prize pack including two items of their choice from the RFGeneration store, plus some other goodies that will be donated by staff members.
The donation drive will end on February 1st, so you have roughly one month to participate in the contest. If you just want to give and don't care about the contest, feel free to donate $5, $20, or whatever you feel your experience at RFGeneration is worth.
If you're a little burnt out on cash due to the holidays, don't worry, you'll still be able to donate all year long, and it'll be as much appreciated then as it is now. You just may have to wait a little longer to get that sweet Donor rank on the forum, as I'll only be checking for new donations once a month rather than daily.
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