Why are verifications checked manually?

[Egen]

I kind of don't believe that. Someone coded what we have now on this website. Is that person gone? Doesn't this project belong to all the same people that have been around forever? And if they have time to add new discs and a verification every now and then, they have time to code the forms, even if it's over the course of a long time and they do almost nothing else with the site. Sure the site slows down even more for a time, but the result is that it speeds up tremendously FOREVER, PERMANENTLY.

[MigaMan]

^^^^

I used to be this way too but I've mellowed out a bit. It might seem like a big deal at this time but a few months / years from now and you too will be comfortably numb. And enough time will have passed for your verifications to get approved too, so win/win? (Granted a forms update would also be win/win but that could be years down the road too, if ever.)

If my data isn't going to get processed, I'm not submitting it, it's as simple as that.

Withholding dumps to try and force them to change their process / software is not a good strategy imho. iRobot is a nice guy, no need to indirectly rage at him and make veiled threats!

I don't see any pending verification threads by you so this is all hypothetical talk any way. Try my subdump suggestion. They might be like "holy shit! green cue files! let's verify all the dumps!"

Oh, wait, I think I get it, this isn't really about your verifications getting approved in a timely manner so much as you wanting to improve the process for everyone, and you're using your discs as leverage right? In that case it's really up to iRobot and further arguing about hypotheticals with dumpers in a forum thread is just going to waste your time. That being the case I'll just be over here by the Wall not aggravating you further.



Which one's Pink?

[ssjkakaroto]

I kind of don't believe that. Someone coded what we have now on this website. Is that person gone? Doesn't this project belong to all the same people that have been around forever? And if they have time to add new discs and a verification every now and then, they have time to code the forms, even if it's over the course of a long time and they do almost nothing else with the site. Sure the site slows down even more for a time, but the result is that it speeds up tremendously FOREVER, PERMANENTLY.

Yes, someone coded this site before, but that was almost 10 years ago. The people who coded it may not be the same that add dumps to the db and could easily be gone now. This is speculation on my part, but, for sure, a lot can change in a person's life in a decade.

[Egen]

Withholding dumps to try and force them to change their process
you're using your discs as leverage

What are you talking about? I'm not submitting dumps because I simply see no reason to go through all the effort of formatting 300+ of them into posts with bold and color markups when the posts will sit there and never get processed. Why do literally days' worth of work that will never see the light of day? It's ridiculous, there's absolutely zero incentive for me to go through all that work. And you're saying that if I triple my personal workload and do a bunch of scans and crap that will give the mods even MORE busywork to process per dump, THEN they will actually want to process the dumps? Not only does that make no sense at all, I didn't know it was my job to make the mods/admins interested in their own project, but I think I'll pass.

I appreciate that you want to look good by defending the mods/admins, but you're defending complacency with a broken system. It doesn't make you look good. There's no onus on you to say "I'm okay with the broken-ass way the project is right now", it's fine if you take a step back, look at it, and go "yeah, wow, this is ridiculous, virtually nothing ever gets done around here." Some people may say you're "complaining", others realize you're just pointing out the truth. But if you think you have some high ground to take and you want to tell me to put more work in so that not only will 300 verification posts will sit for years, but hours worth of scans along with them, then go ahead and make yourself look "good", but I have to tell you, it's not working; you don't look good doing it.

I don't know why you guys are rejecting the simple fact that this can be improved. It's like no one wants to step on anyone's toes and point out that the way things are being done isn't working, but it's not working. HUNDREDS of verifications, if not thousands, sit around endlessly. Why do we think it's chic to say "yeah you'll get used to it" rather than say "hey here's a legitimate idea to fix it"? Lame.


EDIT: By the way, this isn't about anyone being a "nice guy" or otherwise. iR0b0t is a perfectly fine fellow. F1ReB4LL is a perfectly fine fellow. Shout out to all the mods I missed too. I have nothing against you as individuals who have conducted themselves in whatever fashion around others on a message board; you've been courteous enough, and that's all well and good. This just isn't about person A or B being "nice", it's about getting something gosh-darn done around here. We ALL know that this system sucks. Come on, who around here doesn't know that? Show of hands right now. I don't mean this as any kind of attack on anybody and if it's taken that way, then that's a shame and you're missing the point, which is to get this site moving into the future.

I'm not making "threats" or whatever other crap you can call it, I'm giving you a simple truth: given the way the system works right now, there is no reason for me to go through literal DAYS of work on my personal time, which is not endless, to submit a bunch of stuff that could possibly NEVER be processed. Not "processed in three months" or "processed in two years", NEVER PROCESSED. It's completely possible and we all know it. How is it then worth anyone's time to submit anything other than a new disc here? This is all I'm saying. I want submissions to be processed, and not to make myself feel good, or to make blahblah person feel good, to contribute to Redump and get this great site rolling. Hasn't it been long enough that we all complain and nothing gets done? Let's change something, man.

[ssjkakaroto]

I didn't reject your idea at all. Actually, I got pretty mad once when I saw tons of new discs being added when there were a couple of my verifications just seating there completely ignored.

What I said was: it's possible that the people who coded the site at the very beginning are not around anymore and/or may not have the time to code a new functionality.

I actually don't know who were the people in charge of coding back then, but I don't think they were the same people that updated the database.

[Egen]

Heh, sorry, I actually missed your post entirely, so none of that was directed towards you. "You guys" was poor general phrasing for anyone that is rejecting the ideas.

I see what you're saying, definitely. Even if the original people are gone though, it doesn't preclude the possibility of somebody on the current staff being able to code some new stuff for the website. Neither of us know anything regarding that, but it would surprise me a little that a website would be maintained without anyone on the staff with some coding knowledge.

[F1ReB4LL]

I kind of don't believe that. Someone coded what we have now on this website. Is that person gone?

Yes, gone. user/2/ -- no visits since 2010 and no db engine modifications from him since, dunno, 2007 or 2008. iR0b0t is only capable of doing little corrections, AFAIK. I only remember small form/field fixes from him for certain systems, adding some additional CUE fields handling and adding the total image CRC (with the V's help).

But when I wrote that last bit, I wasn't actually thinking about verifications but rather those 2 year old "new" dumps with 0 replies on the last few pages like

/viewtopic.php?t=10224 … australia/
/viewtopic.php?t=10171 … rd-france/
/viewtopic.php?t=9661 … on-v11425/
/viewtopic.php?t=9660 … -new-disc/
/viewtopic.php?t=9575 … bmissions/

Those are just a sample of the ones with 0 replies. They may be crap dumps but without an explanation who is to know? My biggest personal gripe isn't with the database software or slowness but the lack of feedback / education / training. I think that's what this old friend was getting at. I guess it doesn't matter any more now with new acct creation ended.

Wii dump was overlooked or something, dunno, it's added now. I don't know how to verify DC, GC/Wii and XBOX/360 dumps, anyway, they are in their own tricky format requiring specific drives and specific tools.

PC is a different story. Since all my ideas were totally ignored even by Dremora (while he was still an active coder), the PC section is a total and barely maintainable mess now. What should be done from the very beginning is to split the PC section to Win16, Win32, Win64, MS-DOS, OS/2, *nix, BeOS sections, etc. Only then it would be more or less possible to maintain the dumped/undumped lists and all these sections separatedly as well as properly adding all the stuff instead of putting everyting into a single bottomless bin. And then we have another problem - inability to assign more than 1 system per entry, that's a fundamental database issue, Dremora was going to code so-called "Redump 2" engine able to handle that (as well as subchannels, cover scans, bonus materials and all the other possible stuff), but abandoned the project. So, at the moment, only Jackal and Nexy are adding PC dumps from time to time picking the ones to add by their own logic. And yes, many PC titles are heavily protected with gazillions of different protections (compared to the consoles, where all the discs have the same format), so you can't just add these blindly.

[MigaMan]

Thanks for the responses, Fireball. I didn't realize the situation was like this.

*
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I'm not going to bother reading the other posts cause I'm done with this thread- too much scarey quotes but here's a different idea I thought up.

*

Why don't one of you geeks make a little dotnet program that has forms needed for verification and saves the data you entered into a xml database.

Then you could zip up the database with any logs / scans and post it. The mods could then use the same program to review the data you entered.

It's not as good as full redump integration but let's be realistic here. And advanced versions could eventually be better integrated by scraping redump or open a link to a mod edit page.

Not a programmer? If everyone with a zillion verifications pitched in the price of a few games you could pay someone around here to do it at a cut rate.

...Or you can keep trying to threat^H^H^H^H^H^H cajole iRobot / the mods into doing it for free and on your schedule.

[iR0b0t]

Back the other days I was working on an (in my opinion) improved database structure, while the current database structure is based on DISC information, I thought it would be more clear to make it PACKET / REVISION based. The disc information would still remain same, just assigned in an other way to a packet. Which to be honest would make it a little bit difficult in case of discs with unknown release source.

Anyways, the whole project has become dead after a powerfailure on my machine and the entire hdd, which was encrypted, has gone unreadable, and it didn't just contain the redump web project, there was my entire project source collection i ever was working on! I think you only can imagine how bad it was for me.

I still have this hdd and made a clone of it in case i can restore the decryption key one day, but there is no real much hope.

The verification form is on my todo list, i know, it should make the entire verification process a lot faster and easier, there is however a big BUT...
a) the disc matrix still has to be reviewed manually, mainly because in most cases dumpers do not separate it into cells.
b) there can be typos basically in every submission.
c) the disc source, region, languages, and several other submission categories can be either wrong or unknown.
d) logs etc. have to be provided and be in a specifical default form.

If you can work out a flawless template how it should look like and be reliable i will gladly bring it into a code format.

Cheers

[Egen]

Yes, gone. user/2/ -- no visits since 2010 and no db engine modifications from him since, dunno, 2007 or 2008.

And he was the only coder? Redump has not a single coder now? Well, then, it's no wonder we're in so much trouble here. Alright, well, I guess nevermind this then, at least until you get a new coder.


EDIT: Oh, and then iR0b0t ninja'd me

That SUCKS man. I'm sorry to hear that. But I'm so glad to know that somebody has considered the verification form! I wish I knew anything about website/net coding. I know some C++, some Java, and a hell of a lot of AHK (lol), but I wouldn't know what I'm doing around these systems and it's moot because I'm new here and rightly wouldn't be considered for the position. But thanks for your responses you guys, I just love this website and want to see it make progress.

I'll seriously mull a form template over. Probably harder to come up with one than I think, but if we got one up even for one or two consoles it would be a huge improvement. I think nobody should bother with PC, since it's a gigantic mess, but at least some of the older PlayStation consoles should be possible.