Hey guys,
A while back I came here to request the creation of some Call to Power 1 & 2 download areas, which you guys kindly granted and I filled them with downloads that I see have been getting plenty of visitors to in the years since, which is good as after the fall of Poly downloads CTP needed a new home for it's patches & mods!
Anyway these days my attention has been on Civilization 2 and as some of the admins may already know I've been doing Civ2 preservation work over the last few years here at CFC building giant lists cataloging archives of lost Civ2 websites, huge lists cataloging and rescuing scenarios, which expanded to collecting lots of rare lost scenarios from other collectors and dead sites.
If you look in the Civilization 2 downloads area you can see I'm just getting started on the big process of uploading hundreds of these old collected lost scenarios here to CFC to ensure the communities have access to all the lost stuff again. I'm doing my best to ensure they have consistent and easily identifiable titles along with good descriptions and a nice picture to show off the authors work.
As part of this process I'm also going through all the old downloads in the Civ2 section to make sure I don't accidentally duplicate anything. While doing that I've noticed a number of issues and that things are in a bit of a mess in there...
One of the big problems is Test of Time is obviously the same engine but 'kind of' a different game (eg like what CTP2 was to CTP1) and because of that ToT scenarios are not compatible with MGE while visa versa MGE scenarios are not compatible with ToT either, yet they're all mixed in together in the same download section and often people were lazy with their titling and descriptions making it hard for the casual viewer to make the right download choice. I don't really know how to fix that problem though as identifying and separating all of the content into 2 separate ToT and MGE/preToT sections would be a huge job for an admin and I'm sure you guys would rather being doing a thousand other things that cleaning up a download section for a 25 year old game lol!!
However some of the other problems are silly little things that might be more solvable however I can't figure out how to fix them. I'm guessing I probably can't but thought I'd clarify with you guys in case I've missed something.
Eg on a few occasions I've accidentally uploaded a file under the wrong sub category (eg a modpack in the scenario area or visa versa, or a scifi scenario in the regular scenario area outside of the scifi area etc) and I can see others have accidentally done this too over the years. I looked for options to move my accidents to their correct sub category or to even fully delete their resource page so I could start over again in the right section but had no luck finding any options for either.
There's also quite a number of older downloads with dead external links posted by users long gone from CFC that I actually have a working file for but I can't find any options to fix or update them. Although I'm guessing that's not possible since that feature could be abused.
So if other peoples dead items can't be updated then that begs the question of is it okay to create duplicate content in there? Especially when it was the scenarios creator that make the original dead entry? I can see some other duplicate content in there (same scenario listed twice by different people) so I kinda feel like I'm adding to the problem if I do that, yet a dead download is a dead download and people can't get the scenario unless its added again or the original can be modified.
What's the standard procedure around here for problems like these? Wanna make sure I do the right thing by this site and it's rules.
.
A while back I came here to request the creation of some Call to Power 1 & 2 download areas, which you guys kindly granted and I filled them with downloads that I see have been getting plenty of visitors to in the years since, which is good as after the fall of Poly downloads CTP needed a new home for it's patches & mods!
Anyway these days my attention has been on Civilization 2 and as some of the admins may already know I've been doing Civ2 preservation work over the last few years here at CFC building giant lists cataloging archives of lost Civ2 websites, huge lists cataloging and rescuing scenarios, which expanded to collecting lots of rare lost scenarios from other collectors and dead sites.
If you look in the Civilization 2 downloads area you can see I'm just getting started on the big process of uploading hundreds of these old collected lost scenarios here to CFC to ensure the communities have access to all the lost stuff again. I'm doing my best to ensure they have consistent and easily identifiable titles along with good descriptions and a nice picture to show off the authors work.
As part of this process I'm also going through all the old downloads in the Civ2 section to make sure I don't accidentally duplicate anything. While doing that I've noticed a number of issues and that things are in a bit of a mess in there...
One of the big problems is Test of Time is obviously the same engine but 'kind of' a different game (eg like what CTP2 was to CTP1) and because of that ToT scenarios are not compatible with MGE while visa versa MGE scenarios are not compatible with ToT either, yet they're all mixed in together in the same download section and often people were lazy with their titling and descriptions making it hard for the casual viewer to make the right download choice. I don't really know how to fix that problem though as identifying and separating all of the content into 2 separate ToT and MGE/preToT sections would be a huge job for an admin and I'm sure you guys would rather being doing a thousand other things that cleaning up a download section for a 25 year old game lol!!
However some of the other problems are silly little things that might be more solvable however I can't figure out how to fix them. I'm guessing I probably can't but thought I'd clarify with you guys in case I've missed something.
Eg on a few occasions I've accidentally uploaded a file under the wrong sub category (eg a modpack in the scenario area or visa versa, or a scifi scenario in the regular scenario area outside of the scifi area etc) and I can see others have accidentally done this too over the years. I looked for options to move my accidents to their correct sub category or to even fully delete their resource page so I could start over again in the right section but had no luck finding any options for either.
There's also quite a number of older downloads with dead external links posted by users long gone from CFC that I actually have a working file for but I can't find any options to fix or update them. Although I'm guessing that's not possible since that feature could be abused.
So if other peoples dead items can't be updated then that begs the question of is it okay to create duplicate content in there? Especially when it was the scenarios creator that make the original dead entry? I can see some other duplicate content in there (same scenario listed twice by different people) so I kinda feel like I'm adding to the problem if I do that, yet a dead download is a dead download and people can't get the scenario unless its added again or the original can be modified.
What's the standard procedure around here for problems like these? Wanna make sure I do the right thing by this site and it's rules.
.