[Announcement] Re-organizing games and other content

jonne · November 18, 2018, 7:00am

Hi all!

Latest upgrades to Discourse allow me to search and organize content better. You will see the Games/Apps section improve today, as I rewrite the search scripts to use tags instead of the unreliable text searches I have been using.

Jonne

drummyfish · November 18, 2018, 8:40am

I love to see this, tags are great. Would it perhaps be possible to introduce a libre tag (or free, open, foss or something like that), like Arduboy’s de-facto-almost-official game repo has? It would also make people notice that licenses matters.

jonne · November 18, 2018, 10:46am

try to add a CC0 tag, I think it works just like that

drummyfish · November 18, 2018, 11:13am

Indeed it does, I missed the field. I think foss will be best, it covers CC0 as well as other licenses, and is respects both “free” and “open” viewpoints.

Pharap · November 18, 2018, 12:27pm

What is the release tag supposed to be for?

For licences I’m not sure which option is the best:

licence-mit, licence-apache-2 etc.
mit-licence, apache-2-licence etc.
mit, apache-2. etc.

I’ve created open-source on for now, because that’s the term people will be most familiar with.

If we now have a tagging system, do we still need the [Game] and [Demo] things in front of the topic titles?

jonne · November 18, 2018, 12:35pm

Release means downloadable .bin

We do not need the [Game] tags after this, but I’ll remove them after I have fixed all the scripts

Pharap · November 18, 2018, 12:45pm

Is there going to be a standardised tag order?
e.g. release then game or game then release

drummyfish · November 18, 2018, 12:48pm

I’ll tag my submissions with open-source as well then… is it okay to have multiple tags here?

Anyway, maybe we should disable adding new tags just like that, because people will start using open-source, open_source, opensource, ‘OpenSource’, oss, and it’s gonna be a mess (the same issue as @Pharap mentioned with the licenses). What do you think, wouldn’t it be better to leave the tag creation a privilege of just moderators/admins?

Personally I’m okay with open-source, I’d just like to have one standardized tag for it.

jonne · November 18, 2018, 12:50pm

I guess that’s fully ok. The most important thing (from organizing point of view) is that usage of game , release and the game type tags are relatively controlled

Pharap · November 18, 2018, 1:33pm

It might be possible to restrict it to moderators and trust level 4 users.

The downside with that is then users have to contact someone with that power every time they want to create a valid tag that doesn’t already exist.
(Admitedly that’s only a minor issue because it’ll probably be handled within 24 hours, but it’s still inconvinient for the user.)

I think it would be easier to just leave it open to all until we’ve built up a decent pool of tags and/or until it starts becoming a problem, and then reevaluate the situation.

Hopefully most people will notice the existing tag in the search box.

Also this is less likely to be an issue for more popular tags,
because the more popular tags are presented to the user before the user even starts typing.

My issue was “what do we say is the ‘standard’ way of doing it?” rather than “people are going to be using different things”.

If we settle on some standards then we can make a thread specifying what the standard tags are,
and as more people use the standardised tags they’ll outweigh any non-standard ones.

If anyone does deviate from the standards (which will most likely only happen accidentally),
then others can just come along and correct them and cite the ‘official tags’ thread if there’s any dispute.

I’d vote open-source over foss because ‘open source’ is the term that crops up most often.
I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen (on this kind of forum) actively using the term ‘foss’.

We definitely need some degree of standardisation though.
I’d like the positions of at least game, demo, and release tags to be organised, but I doubt people would remember to follow the order, so that may be a losing battle.

At the very least, we need to agree on a pool of standardised tag names, and/or the format for certain tags.
(E.g. should genre tags be prefixed with ‘genre’ to make them easier to find? and obviously the issue with the licence naming scheme I mentioned earlier.)

@jonne is there a way to increase the number of tags allowed on a game?

The default limit is 5, which I’ve hit on ‘noughts and crosses’, so I won’t be able to tag the licence.

I think 8 or 10 would be the right amount if it’s possible.

Then you can have:

game/demo
release/wip
open-source/closed-source etc.
1-player/2-player etc.
licence
main genre
other genres
other tags?

jonne · November 18, 2018, 1:36pm

I will check

jonne · November 18, 2018, 1:43pm

@Pharap , max number of tags now 8

drummyfish · November 18, 2018, 1:51pm

Yep, standardisation is all that I want here. We can leave the creation of new tags open and just edit occasional non-standard ones manually. If it’s too much extra work, just disable it. (Or maybe just disallow non-standard versions like open_source to make people use the correct one? Is it possible?).

Also why does the order matter? Can’t they be ordered automatically?

jonne · November 18, 2018, 1:54pm

From the point of view of Discourse and how it works, order of tags has no effect

Pharap · November 18, 2018, 2:21pm

It makes it easier to look for tags when they’re in a certain order,
you know roughly where in the tag list to be looking.
It also looks nicer.

For example, at the moment if you open up the games category and look at the tagged games, some of them have ‘genre’, release, game, but then there’s some that breaks the pattern at it’s visually quite jarring.

Having release and then game in on some topics and then game then release on other topics looks a bit odd.

It could probably be done with an extension or a modification to the discourse software, but that might be more effort than it’s worth.

Again, it would probably need editing or an extension.

There is an order, but if you try to reorder the tags without adding or removing any then the system won’t register that as an edit, it will consider them the same as before.

If you remove a tag, save the edit and then re-add the tag, then it will reorder them.

I tested this by removing the 2-player tag from my noughts and crosses game and adding it back in a separate edit, so it’s now at the end.

Should I start a separate thread for discussing standardisation or should we discuss that here?

drummyfish · November 18, 2018, 2:28pm

If it’s just a visual thing, users shouldn’t be bothered with entering it in a specific order, it should be automatic. Can be just a few line client-side JavaScript that calls sort on the tag elements.

Yes please

Pharap · November 18, 2018, 2:34pm

I have no idea what level of customisation is available for the pages themselves, so I have no idea if this is possible.

If it is possible to just add scripts to the editor without needing a full extension then yes, this would be possible, but there would need to be a list of tags with weights that determine their order.

E.g. { "game": 0, "demo": 1, "tool": 2, "release": 3 }

If that’s possible then it might also be reasonable to implement a system to make certain tags mutually exclusive (e.g. game, demo and tool should be mutually exclusive).

Person A: “Should we do option A or option B”
Person B: “Yes”

:P

I’m assuming you meant “yes, start a new thread” and not “yes, discuss it here”?

drummyfish · November 18, 2018, 2:37pm

Yes, sorry that was unintentional

Pharap · November 18, 2018, 2:54pm

Hanski · November 19, 2018, 11:39am

Btw. Have to say that there are now so many cool games for Pokitto The games list with gif-animations looks really attractive.