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Well, I believe jap PS1 titles should be hyphenless in general, PAL and NTSC ones seem to be with hyphens. Dunno about other systems (except PCE, where there's no logic for hyphens and spaces at all). Maybe would be a good idea to ask ir0b0t to remove all the hyphens for ps1 jap and to manually fix all the exclusions, if any.

Another similar issue is barcodes.. Is there any real point in including spaces or > ?

There is, someone was even trying to explain me all those spaces, Ts and >s belong to the certain standard, different types of barcodes fall into different standards (something like different ringcode types help to identify different mastering companies). Anyway, better to keep them as is, since it's way easier to retype these properly, compared to the rings.

I also find it a little bit funny that we go through all this trouble to write stuff like serial numbers and ring codes "exactly as they appear" but then don't do this for titles

I've always thought the whole No-Intro convention was written for preserving the titles "exactly as they appear".

NOBODY DOES TITLES EXACTLY. IF THEY DID MOST OF THEM WOULD LOOK LIKE THIS!

Yeah that's really what I'm talking about

It just doesn't make a lot of sense. "Our goal is to preserve game release pressings" so we write some things exactly as they appear and others how they actually don't appear at all by adding text that doesn't exist. Then titles are standardized.



I'm not going to leave the website over it though. The most important part still remains the same and that is hashes. You just sometimes wish that some of the other stuff made more sense.

Jackal wrote:Another similar issue is barcodes.. Is there any real point in including spaces or > ?

I don't think there is. The barcode itself is simply a string of digits/data with no spaces between any of the digits. The spaces are only there to separate human-readable country/manufacturer codes (first half) from product codes (second half), and the > is just there as an end-of-text marker which is not present in the barcode data either.

It would be interesting to show the actual barcode itself in the description, similar to what UPC Database does. Edit: This identically-named UPC Database also has the same feature.

To me it's like like a game having a ™, © or ® symbol in the title. I'm sure you wouldn't want to edit the entire database to add those, or else we would end up with things like "TEKKEN", "TEKKEN 2™", "TEKKEN 3®", "Tekken Tag Tournament™", "Tekken™ 4" and "Tekken™5". Yes, that's how they look on the spine of the PAL versions.

I've corrected around 200-300 bad barcodes in the past month.. I agree that the spaces / end marker is unneccessary and perhaps even impractical because people search barcodes on google without the spaces. iR0b0t was going to optimize the barcode field and add a validation check. Maybe a nice solution would be to show the barcode as a number initially, and moving the cursor on the barcode or clicking on it would then reveal the barcode the way it's shown on the box.

Jackal wrote:Maybe a nice solution would be to show the barcode as a number initially, and moving the cursor on the barcode or clicking on it would then reveal the barcode the way it's shown on the box.

Better to show it "like on the box", but with some hidden digit string for search engines.