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.
[img width=324 height=490]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c6/We're_Back!_Movie_Poster.jpg[/img]
Drive swap was successful. Server stats seem to be much better as well.
So, we have some word from the web host. After my investigation, I found that one of our drives had some bad sectors. After unmounting it, the site seems to be running much better. Good news is that it was our backup drive, so none of the site data should be damaged. They will be replacing the drive, but in order to do so, they will need to power down our server to swap out the drive.
We have this planned for Wednesday during the day. Most of you will probably be at work or school, so there shouldn't be many that this will affect. We will be making solid backups ahead of time, just in case. 
So, to sum it up, site is having planned downtime to resolve a hardware issue that should help our performance once it is resolved. It'll be down Wednesday during the day and hopefully back up by that night. I don't have a time as of right now, but we'll redirect somewhere.
Go ahead, kick it over to channel 4 for a little bit on Wednesday, but be sure to bring it back over to channel 3 soon!
[img width=700 height=599]http://www.lolbrary.com/content/878/have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-on-again-23878.jpg[/img]
Site's been slow for you? Yeah, us too.
We have been running over our logs and settings and are in contact with our host as well to try to sort out exactly what is going on.
Please be patient. Your calls are very important to us. Have you considered buying an extended warranty? *shakes head* Sorry, went in to call center mode for a second.
We know just how important this site is to you guys. Personally, it means the world to me to have this site up and running well for everyone to experience. We hope to have everything running better very soon.
Don't forget to keep it on channel 3! (Even if there is a little static every now and then.)
Hey guys! I'm late on this one, but we have another set of thanks to give out for August!
In August, we had 2550 submissions! 2324 of those being games and the other 226 were hardware. That's back up from our summer lull of July! This month also pushed us over 30,000 submissions on the year! Thanks to everyone who submitted!
The top submitters for August were: ApolloBoy with 1043 submissions! Nearly half! Then there was Shadow Kisuragi with 328, thegreatska with 236, Sirgin with 154, and ericeskapade with 127 to round out the other members with over 100 submissions.
The top approvers for August were: Shadow Kisuragi with 390, Tynstar with 215, Paully3433 with 198, and ApolloBoy with 118!
Great job everyone! Let's keep up the awesome work!
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!
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.
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.
[img align=right width=500]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/repository/48011LuckySeven45000-1.jpg[/img]
Quick! Look over on the right side of your screen, we have exactly 45,000 screenshots in the Database! For those of you reading this in the future when we have more than 45000 screenshots, sorry, but you missed one of the great milestones of your life, better luck next time.
Seriously though, 45,000 screenshots is a lot of screenshots, and they were all submitted by members just like you. So thanks to all of you who have submitted one or more of those 45000 screenshots, without you, we wouldn't be here.
And a special thanks to member Aeroc, for not only submitting lucky number 45,000 but for also submitting what seems like another 20,000 or so screenshots over the years. Really though, this guy has over 11,000 images credited to him in our DB.
So now that we have 45000 screenshots, its only 5000 until we get to the really incredible 50,000 mark, why not help us reach that a little sooner and start submitting some screenshots? We're not super picky, you can use an emulator (just don't ask us where to find one or the ROMs, we can't tell you that), or use a video capture device on the real hardware, you can even set up a camera and take a photo of your TV screen, as long as its a good quality, we'll be glad to add it to the DB.
I ran out of baked goods, so here's Bob Barker instead.
And don't forget about the quest to finish all these milestones by the end of the year. We're half way there, and we have 11 days to finish the other three.
70,000 games45,000 screenshots- 90,000 scans - 1410 to go
- 3000 Collectors on our site (the number of people who have something listed in their collection) - 108 to go
- 5000 hardware entries - 44 to go
5000 members (number of people actively registered on the site/forum)
[img align=right width=500]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/repository/892525000 smiles cake.jpg[/img]
I told you it was coming, and yesterday at 1:42:44 PM EST, it happened.
RFGeneration welcomed its 5000th member, -Goemon43-. Congrats to -Goemon43- for being lucky number 5000, and thank you to the other 4999 people who have registered here at RFGeneration and are currently using the site or have used it in the past.
Now, I challenge all 5000 of you to tell just one friend about RFGeneration. If each of you got just one friend to start using the site, we would be at 10,000 members in no time! Just think of all the new information we could harvest collect from that many more people, not to mention all the new trading opportunities we'd all have.
And don't forget, we've got some other milestones coming up, lets see how many we can cross off before the end of the year!
70,000 games- 45,000 screenshots - 151 to go
- 90,000 scans - 1630 to go
- 3000 Collectors on our site (the number of people who have something listed in their collection) - 141 to go
- 5000 hardware entries - 54 to go
5000 members (number of people actively registered on the site/forum)
[img align=right]http://www.rfgeneration.com/images/repository/9072870000.jpg[/img]
For those of you who don't keep a constant eye on our DB's statistics, we now have over 70,000 games in our little database. I guess it ain't so little any more. Now, if you're like me, you probably want to know what the 70,000th game added to the DB was. Well, I can't tell you. Not because I don't want you to know, but because I wasn't paying close enough attention to the DB stats and let us go 150 games passed 70,000. I'll blame it on you guys though, you're the ones who added 150+ games in the last day, before the stats on the front page could update. So you all better know that I've got my eye on you and your sneaky submitting ways, we're only 78 hardware items away from 5,000 and I'm going to watch it like a hawk, so don't even try and sneak 79 passed me.
Anywho, congratulations to RFGeneration on having 70,000 games. And thank you to every one who has helped to add those 70,000 games.
We're also really close on a few other milestones, let's see how many we can reach by the end of the year!
- 45,000 screenshots - 151 to go
- 90,000 scans - 2308 to go
- 3000 Collectors on our site (the number of people who have something listed in their collection) - 146 to go
- 5000 members (number of people actively registered on the site/forum) - 49 to go
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