how do you think the lack of /newstuff chronicles and a functioning review section has affected the community?

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

Reading those wad reviews is worse than injecting a whole Youtube comments section - a bunch of people repeating the same jokes that were never funny to begin with. I think it makes the overall community look a lot dumber than it is in reality. I'm fine with the place just being a forum.

[prfunky]

15 hours ago, LadyMistDragon said:

... there's an audience out there who'll occasionally hit the Random link on /idgames and circle through until they get some single-player map or another.

 

14 hours ago, Maribo said:

... The Cacowards simply cannot cover everything, the output is too high.

 

13 hours ago, DNSKILL5 said:

... combat the forum software’s tendency to shit the bed in ways that seem to be hard to clean up. 

 

13 hours ago, Li'l devil said:

... why did they still not fix that desync, after over 5 years? ...

 

12 hours ago, roadworx said:

... the increased volume of new wads would make it difficult and there would likely have to be changes to its structure.

 

12 hours ago, Li'l devil said:

Oh yes please, I miss that era.

everything sucks ARSE! lel 0/-5

Fucking doesn't work without the Dehacked SHIT. 0/0

MY SHIT in the toilet looked better than this garbage. 0/-5

 

11 hours ago, bofu said:

... Some of the people writing reviews for wads on idgames shouldn't be trusted with dental floss, never mind the ability to impact a wad's score.

 

10 hours ago, Arsinikk said:

I think the main thing that comes to mind recently that does a pretty good job of showcasing WADs each week is the Doom WADs YouTube channel:

 

6 hours ago, Somniac said:

... you have to rely on your project thread, which is no guarantee if your wad is competing for screen time with more popular things...

... The community is also seemingly bigger than its ever been, which while being a positive, obviously increases the amount of voices clamouring for a limited well of attention. Nobody can cover every single thing, obviously ...

 

5 hours ago, bioshockfan90 said:

I think it's been both a curse and a blessing, curse because you get the same feed of review trains on the old /idgames stuff and nothing new, but blessing because you have all these new alternative outlets like say, Backloggd or Tumblr blogs

 

5 hours ago, Firedust said:

... not everyone uploads to the archives and you don't always have time to play through all the cool stuff that's been getting released - so, eventually, you remember a couple maps that you wanted to play but can no longer find them, because you don't remember the authors or the names. Or maybe you want to have a nice roundup sesh to catch up on releases you may have potentially missed out on, but they got buried among other threads.

 

4 hours ago, yakfak said:

getting instant feedback in project threads kinda pseudo replaces reviews...

 

An embarrassment of riches; there's so much content being produced. I'm an awful Doom player. So, I actually look

for new mappers' stuff in the W&D thread. I figure, most of the time I'm not going to have my hat handed to me

immediately trying a new map. Too, if I post a response to that mapper, I try to make it constructive or even helpful

criticism.

 

As for the lack of a review function in the iD archives, I hadn't noticed it went away. I still see reviews with stars there

but when I go to the archives, I'm usually doing a search for a specific file or a specific author. I did notice that some

functions of the Doomworld website have degraded or disappeared though. I'm seeing these alternate suggestions

in my quotations above; Tumblr, Backloggd, YouTube and I'm wondering how many are going to put their stock in

those and what it's going to do to "the community" in general. I guess all I can say is embrace entropy.

[Individualised]

3 minutes ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Reading those wad reviews is worse than injecting a whole Youtube comments section - a bunch of people repeating the same jokes that were never funny to begin with. I think it makes the overall community look a lot dumber than it is in reality. I'm fine with the place just being a forum.

Are you talking about the idgames review section or the /newstuff Chronicles? Because I don't see anything like that in either. Maybe this was the case for idgames a while ago but recent reviews seem completely fine to me. It would just be extending the reviews to cover post-2018 .WADs.

[BunnyBun]

9 hours ago, roadworx said:

if it were as simple as "bring back the reviews" then they would've done it a long time ago. creating and maintaining a website is harder than just turning things on and off.

I know that, but its been years now. Shouldnt there be progress?

[Horus]

16 minutes ago, BunnyBun said:

I know that, but its been years now. Shouldnt there be progress?

 

This probably has something to do with it, someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the situation has changed materially since then.

 

 

[magicsofa]

As someone who used to religiously read every /newstuff when they were being written by forum staff, and who wrote several reviews when they tried the crowd-source thing, I really miss it. For those who don't know, it was specifically reviews of everything that got uploaded to /idgames in the last month. And I mean everything. This meant that your upload would get at least one "front-page" feature, even if it was just deathz0r calling it crap, it was still a link to your wad with some words and some screenshots, at the top of the news section, and that was cool.

 

Nowadays people tend to just make threads about their wad, which end up buried, and there's less of a clear boundary in terms of what was "released" this month, and there's less emphasis on uploading to /idgames since you can just share it in an attachment. I don't actually know if the number of uploads has really gone down, but I'm just guessing that since I see lots of threads about people's mods but only the "serious" ones usually end up on /idgames.

 

Anyway, they did try a somewhat automated, volunteer-based system where anyone could claim up to 3 wads in the queue. It seemed to work pretty well, although I think it was already heavily backlogged when it was first implemented, and another problem was Bloodshedder still had to manually check each review for legitimacy and (I think) parse it out into a news post, so basically that stopped and everything grinded to a halt.

 

Essentially we just need a way to replicate the review center page, that is fully community-run, meaning people volunteer to write the reviews as well as make the news post. If that could happen then at least forum members could pitch in whenever they want and, at least starting now, could have a consistent review system.

[BunnyBun]

5 minutes ago, Horus said:

 

This probably has something to do with it, someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the situation has changed materially since then.

 

 

Ah fudge, well that makes sense. SO there is nothing we can do to get back wad reviews then?

[No-Man Baugh]

25 minutes ago, Horus said:

 

This probably has something to do with it, someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think the situation has changed materially since then.

 

 

Jesus Christ...

[Li'l devil]

Yeah. We're complaining about no reviews section, but it can get a lot worse than that. What if DW dies tomorrow? Where will we all go? Interesting question actually.

Edited January 24 by Li'l devil

[Endless]

52 minutes ago, Li'l devil said:

Yeah. We're complaining about no reviews section, but it can get a lot worse than that. What if DW dies tomorrow? Where will we all go? Interesting question actually.

I asked something similar and these were the responses I got from back then if you are interested.

 

TL;DR: We don't know. Most of the admins are inactive and have been for years, re emerging every once in a while for a quick update or something. Right now, Doomworld has been bugged for a month already (status and posts are not updated since December 23 more or less) and it seems to just fly under the radar. I get it. The admins are all grown ups and probably don't really care that much about Doom anymore with their busy lives, but it still kinda discouraging to see the forum slowly lose its oil.

 

The demise of /newstuff was a big hit back then. I used to be a big reader and I absolutely loved it. I also asked more about why it stopped working back then in case you also want to learn more, or anyone else.

 

TL;DR: /newstuff couldn't work due to a combination of several factors, included: a lack of new reviewers, the forum software update of 2017 (I think it was) which removed the frontpage, making the /newstuff less noticeable, and the way /newstuff itself worked, forcing reviewers to play ALL the WADs that were being uploaded, slowly building up a massive backlog, meaning that if you wanted to review something ''new'', you had to first review something ''old'' so that the slot would be open.

 

As for the locking of reviews, now that is something I'm still salty about. Wish I was an web engineer or had the skills to properly created something new for WAD downloads, but the truth is, if you are a Doom fan, your only way to finding WADs is either Doomworld or the Doom Wiki. Ever since the demise of reviews, as well as the closing of WAD Archive, the Doom Wiki became my main source to search for new WADs to play. If you are just a regular user and don't really use the forums or navigate deep enough, most WADs will remain hidden and only the usual Cacowards or Top 100 tend to be the ones that shine. That is ultimately just the nature of this community. So many new stuff coming out, but we don't have a proper system to filter it and catalogue it.

 

I do believe that the growth of the playerbase is limited by the lack of a proper WAD repository. Search ''Doom WADs'' on google, and the first 3 results are the Internet Archive, Doomworld Top 100 WADs, and the Doom Wiki Notable WADs article.

[Mordeth]

11 minutes ago, Endless said:

TL;DR: We don't know.

 

We do know. And if this was easy to fix, it would have been. There is some activity on this front but best not to divulge at this point.

[bioshockfan90]

2 hours ago, prfunky said:

I'm seeing these alternate suggestions

in my quotations above; Tumblr, Backloggd, YouTube and I'm wondering how many are going to put their stock in

those and what it's going to do to "the community" in general. I guess all I can say is embrace entropy.

The thing about Backloggd is it's more of a videogame backlog tracking site, I just mentioned it because there are a fair few Doom PWADs listed in their database (which is sourced from the IGDB and I have contributed some PWADs for listing on there) so probably more useful to someone who just sees Doom as another game than us hardcore fans that actively seek out new content. 

 

Great for logging pretty much any game out there that's in their database otherwise though, the closest comparison I can make is Letterboxd (movie tracking website) but for videogames.

[mrthejoshmon]

I miss Newstuff reviews, however they mainly consisted of a few brave and respectable volunteers (I once threw my hat in the ring and did a few myself and damn man, it was hard work actually and I didn't think I could hold a candle to the absolute heroes that were getting the quality reviews out there, I remember folks like gaspe being hella dedicated to it) and the recent review sidebar was mainly filled with the most popular/controversial at the time so it wasn't very good for finding anything.

 

But they were nice, miss em once they're gone.

 

3 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Reading those wad reviews is worse than injecting a whole Youtube comments section - a bunch of people repeating the same jokes that were never funny to begin with. I think it makes the overall community look a lot dumber than it is in reality. I'm fine with the place just being a forum.

L take, those reviews are just modern Everything Else threads (I am one of those to blame).

[esselfortium]

Hi all.

 

There are recent official efforts underway to get Doomworld into a more stable and maintainable shape. I can't give a a timeline yet on when everything will be ready, as I don't want to overpromise, but I hope the knowledge that the issues are being seriously looked at will help ease some minds. The top priority is getting the forum software and database moved to a more reliable setup (I imagine many of you have noticed the recent site outages), as that's the foundation underlying the whole thing, and these individual issues will be able to be dealt with once that new foundation is in place. Apologies for the delay on this, we're aware it's long overdue.

 

Regarding the doomworld.com domain situation that was described in that post from Linguica, the worst-case "sky is falling" scenario there would be relocating to another domain name, not the loss of the site data itself. That would of course still be far from ideal, so we're doing what we can to get things straightened out to avoid that scenario as well.

[prfunky]

24 minutes ago, esselfortium said:

...There are recent official efforts underway to get Doomworld into a more stable and maintainable shape. I can't give a a timeline yet on when everything will be ready, as I don't want to overpromise, but I hope the knowledge that the issues are being seriously looked at will help ease some minds. The top priority is getting the forum software and database moved to a more reliable setup (I imagine many of you have noticed the recent site outages), as that's the foundation underlying the whole thing, and these individual issues will be able to be dealt with once that new foundation is in place. Apologies for the delay on this, we're aware it's long overdue.

 

Regarding the doomworld.com domain situation that was described in that post from Linguica, the worst-case "sky is falling" scenario there would be relocating to another domain name, not the loss of the site data itself. That would of course still be far from ideal, so we're doing what we can to get things straightened out to avoid that scenario as well.

 

Your response here is so appreciated. I just got finished reading some of these linked-to older posts here. I had

no idea that DW had been in such a precarious position! I'm so glad I finished one of my bigger projects back at

the end of 2021 or I probably would've never got into reading as much of the history of/on the DW website since.

For the record, my attempt to find a backup domain name wearelegion.com is already taken. Owner isn't doing

jack with it tho... filthy squatter.

 

[Doomkid]

6 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

Reading those wad reviews is worse than injecting a whole Youtube comments section - a bunch of people repeating the same jokes that were never funny to begin with. I think it makes the overall community look a lot dumber than it is in reality. I'm fine with the place just being a forum.

Damn. This is the first outright bad take I've ever seen from you, MMM. Other than meme wads (or similar), I pretty much never saw this. It was just people leaving a brief (but honest) sentence about the wad like 90% of the time, assuming it had any reviews at all. The review section for WOW.wad is the exception not the norm lol

[DuckReconMajor]

11 hours ago, Stupid Bunny said:

/newstuff was fun. I enjoyed doing some writeups of my own and enjoyed reading the weekly reviews as they came out.

💖

 

Yeah you used to just throw your stuff on /idgames right away. Making a new thread felt almost pompous, as if the whole world needed to know you made this or that thing.

I think the community is too large for /newstuff now. As noted, back then the backlog was almost comically long, despite how hard people worked on those. I almost signed up to do some writeups but i was terrified i'd procrastinate and not get it done in time. But of course now I wish I had.

I wish the Downloads/Files/new Idgames frontend, whatever you call it, was working. I think it's really cool, it displays files and reviews neatly, etc. 

That said, as has been pointed out in the past, Doomworld's /idgames frontend is just a frontend. Have there been other ones made? afaik anyone can make a frontend that could support reviews or any kind of feature.

 

Side note: I get the appeal of just dropping your new level into a doomworld post but I have never found it to be a good idea. Attachment space is for demos!! 

[esselfortium]

My favorite review I've ever gotten was "3 maps, 3 stars" on SpaceDM9.

 

Later on, once idgames started showing individual reviews' ratings, I found out it was actually a 0-star review.

[Individualised]

I think my favourite idgames review I saw was someone complaining a mapset was incompatible with Project Brutality, which led to a mod editing it to note that it was not a valid reason for a negative review. But yeah, other than that I've never really seen any badly written reviews.

[roadworx]

51 minutes ago, Individualised said:

But yeah, other than that I've never really seen any badly written reviews.

lol. you need to go digging through the frontend more then - there's some hilariously bad reviews, especially ones from its earlier days.

[LadyMistDragon]

Yeah....I'll admit that the reviews aren't all that bad despite that a fair few will have at least one review that's like 'shit' or 'god awful' - but the format does not encourage people to explain their reasoning which might play into why it was retired - but i'm sure it's just as likely to be tied other things too.

1 hour ago, DuckReconMajor said:

💖

 

Ye

I wish the Downloads/Files/new Idgames frontend, whatever you call it, was working. I think it's really cool, it displays files and reviews neatly, etc. 

That said, as has been pointed out in the past, Doomworld's /idgames frontend is just a frontend. Have there been other ones made? afaik anyone can make a frontend that could support reviews or any kind of feature.

 

Side note: I get the appeal of just dropping your new level into a doomworld post but I have never found it to be a good idea. Attachment space is for demos!! 

 

 

Yes, anything mostly complete on Doomworld, any set of 3 maps and things even on moddb and zdoom also ought to be fair game. That's the ideal though and again, it goes back to how much of a backlog that just builds up.

Edited January 25 by LadyMistDragon

[roadworx]

40 minutes ago, LadyMistDragon said:

Yeah....I'll admit that the reviews aren't all that bad despite that a fair few will have at least one review that's like 'shit' or 'god awful' - but the format does not encourage people to explain their reasoning which might play into why it was retired - but i'm sure it's just as likely to be tied other things too.

unless you mean /newstuff chronicles, which almost always had fairly decent writing, the reviews under files were never "retired". the issue is that there's a database desync between /idgames/ and the dw frontend, so newer wad listings were essentially useless and it was shut off until it was fixed (which it never was).

 

also, part of the reason that so many reviews suck is in part due to the fact that 1.) there was a fairly tight character limit on the old frontend, so you could never write all that much in there, and 2.) guests used to be able to write reviews, so you could say anything you wanted anonymously

Edited January 25 by roadworx

[Biodegradable]

5 hours ago, esselfortium said:

I can't give a a timeline yet on when everything will be ready, as I don't want to overpromise, but I hope the knowledge that the issues are being seriously looked at will help ease some minds. The top priority is getting the forum software and database moved to a more reliable setup (I imagine many of you have noticed the recent site outages), as that's the foundation underlying the whole thing, and these individual issues will be able to be dealt with once that new foundation is in place. Apologies for the delay on this, we're aware it's long overdue.

 

Just keeping us in the know with what's happening at this stage is all we really need, Essel. I figured you guys are doing all you can and don't want to really announce anything until it's worth announcing, but small posts like this so we're not totally left in the dark is cromulent and will prevent people from thinking the staff are too busy, too lazy or too disinterested to do anything about the situation. Thanks for the update!

Edited January 25 by Biodegradable

[LadyMistDragon]

49 minutes ago, roadworx said:

unless you mean /newstuff chronicles, which almost always had fairly decent writing, the reviews under files were never "retired". the issue is that there's a database desync between /idgames/ and the dw frontend, so newer wad listings were essentially useless and it was shut off until it was fixed (which it never was).

 

 

That's what I thought but couldn't remember it being said outright anywhere in reference to the reviews. Thanks!

[magicsofa]

20 hours ago, DuckReconMajor said:

I think the community is too large for /newstuff now. As noted, back then the backlog was almost comically long, despite how hard people worked on those. I almost signed up to do some writeups but i was terrified i'd procrastinate and not get it done in time. But of course now I wish I had.

 

 

 

I don't know, as I remember it the staff-written reviews phased out and then, some time later, the community review center was implemented. Meaning it already had a large backlog from the beginning. That said, it did get longer and longer, I remember just before it got shut down completely it was like 3 years out. My strategy would be to just start from today and consider the backlog a loss, maybe people who got missed and would still like a review could make a special request, but so many submissions from the past 5 years are just not that critical to review especially if the author is not active anymore or if the mod got even a small amount of recognition already. The point of /newstuff was to review what was just released and keep up with it, not to catalogue years of WADs. I think if we were able to start with a clean slate then it would be plausible to keep up with submissions, especially if it is restricted to /idgames uploads just like before. If indeed those have slowed down by way of WIP/casual project threads becoming more common, the workload shouldn't be too insane.

 

[roadworx]

agreed; i think that it'd be a good idea to have special guidelines in place in order to determine what's on the docket for reviewing instead of just "here's a giant-ass list of wads that haven't been reviewed! have fun!". the two most obvious ones are that it has to have been released within the past 30 days and it can't be something that's already garnered lots of attention. i'm not exactly sure how you'd go about determining that second one tho

Edited January 25 by roadworx

[Decay]

[LadyMistDragon]

21 hours ago, roadworx said:

agreed; i think that it'd be a good idea to have special guidelines in place in order to determine what's on the docket for reviewing instead of just "here's a giant-ass list of wads that haven't been reviewed! have fun!". the two most obvious ones are that it has to have been released within the past 30 days and it can't be something that's already garnered lots of attention. i'm not exactly sure how you'd go about determining that second one tho

Not like it would matter too much anyway (because I'm not sure who exactly would want to go back so far) but I have quite a few little short reviews going back around a year and a half.

[TheCorinthian]

On 1/23/2024 at 7:41 PM, Li'l devil said:

Oh yeah, the lack of option to write reviews for new wads is really bad. And why did they still not fix that desync, after over 5 years? Pure negligence. I suggest protesting and rioting.

*Shaking my fist in angry rioting motion*