As much as I dislike the current Internet fad for using this word, its use is to the point here.

I've already spilled my bile regarding Wikipedia's policies. Heck, who likes seeing their edits reverted en masse?

Yet that's a website that tries to sound serious. Surely game-related sites are less strict?

Recently I was looking for Doom95 info at the Doom Wiki, so I casually added links to us in respective articles. The response: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/User_talk:RolaPL#Moby_Games_Links

Feel free to add websites, which shoot our links at sight without question.

Well, I don't think it's really necessary either on such specific wikis, really.

Not necessary for them, maybe, but it doesn't do any harm and for us it is important to get known. I only found MobyGames because I was browsing Home of the Underdogs back in 2001 and saw those links there.

MG still rarely shows up on Google search results (more so for newer games). :p
So much for public relations.

Well, the site does need a massive overhaul for anyone in the internet to start taking it with more seriousness. The fact that we handle half the stuff through game groups (at least in the way game groups are handled at the moment) is ridiculous, not to mention many of the other things that are aching for a redesign. In fact, the Soviet Union had it better under Brezhnev than we have it at the moment :P.

Ouch. Perestroika is long over due.

If this was true, you'd mysteriously disappear for saying such stuff...

If we want to grow, we need more people. People find websites not only through Google search, but also via links, hence me spamming websites with them. Are we doing all this stuff for a closed club of people? Or do we want more exposure for our hard research work? Perhaps I care more because I contributed more...

This reminds me of trouble Flipkin had...

Yep. I have a nice perspective on how the public sees MG, now being a non-approver.

I did notice people disappearing from here.

I don't know about newer games, but usually I find Moby reasonably often showing up in my results when entering a game + a platform.

If you want to see irony, google "games database" (with or without the quotation marks). The results are sad. So sad.

Not sure if I see the irony. My results are probably a little different from yours, since they are location dependent, but still, Moby is on the first page..well, there are also chess databases.

games database = result 5
game database = result 4

Strange. No results for me.

games database = 14 game database = 4

I get moby as #2 on both searches.

I assume this variation is a result of googles targeted search results for different users/locations.

Regardless, I find the #1 result in my search results to be slightly annoying. Giant Bum.

In my Google search, this one is not present within the first 120 results. There is only one result with the site's API.

Guys, are you by chance logged in to Google?

For me: games database = #7, but #1 when logged in.

When I log out, MobyGames rises one rank on both search strings.

That was logged in. Logged out, rises by 1 to #13 on games database, still #4 on game database.

#9 here on Google Hong-Kong, logged in or not.

#4 in both searches while logged in.

Yes, MG has an awesome database, but the interface to access it kinda sucks. Check out the 'advanced search' page of boardgamegeek.com:

http://boardgamegeek.com/advsearch/boardgame

:droolingalloverhisself:

Dang it. Only includes board games. Still looking for a gaming database with a comprehensive search engine.

Their video game counterpart is only one click away:

videogamegeek.com

I only envy year range in their search. Well, their genres overlap with some our groups...

Please note that our outdated website knows more wars than those wargamers... no Korea or Napoleonic wars...

Thanks Rola. I'll now be disappearing for a few weeks. *searches database furiously*

Wow, missed the video game part of the site!

The fact that you can check multiple boxes for category intersections is what appeals so much to me.

http://www.uvlist.net/search and click "more options and filters"

UVL seems to have similar visibility problems to MobyGames, it's surprising how few people know about it.

I also don't understand why MobyGames tends to get such bad placements in Google results. See also this recent blog post: Does Google hate MobyGames? Considering how many Wikipedia articles on games link to the corresponding MobyGames entry, and how highly Wikipedia is ranked in Google, it doesn't really seem right.

You seem to have missed all my whining for the past nine years. :p
Yeah, nine years. I've lived through five Endonesian presidents in that amount of time.

[edit] Nope, 12 years. Holy fak. I've been here for 12 years? o_O
Screw the updates. -_-

Yeah, stuff passes me by! It's a problem.
I even missed what part of my post this was in response to? Hehe

Just a heads-up, most of the community has moved to doomwiki.org instead. Try adding MG links there?

Indeed. You're being told by some "first edits from 2011" on that wiki, like they seem like control-monging obsessive Wikipedia editors taking the helm rather than the Doom community I used to know (which would welcome the mobygames links).

Oh, so you had clashes with them too?
Few days ago I replied to one's email, she list so many languages she speaks and other relevant fields of interest, that I politely asked her to expand my article. Turned out she contacted me only to point out I... changed the order of categories.

I'm still upset that wikipedia insists that a former 'colony' of Endonesia now independent country, isn't not legally recognized by wikipedia. The country's name is now Timor Leste, however according to wikipedia, that name isn't popular enough for white guys that don't read so they're stuck with East Timor; the provincial name of Timor Leste when it was still a part of Endonesia.

It really doesn't get more moronic of epic proportions than that.
There's a reason why 'public policy' is a specific field in social politics. -_-

Yes, but translated from Portuguese it means just that - East Timor...

Translated to Endonesian, it means the same thing too -- Timor Timur. We don't call it Timor Timur anymore, just Timor Leste as it's the official name of their choosing.

You don't see Germany listed as Deutschland or Finland as Suomi either, for example.

Their official English name is Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste not Democratic Republic of East Timor.

How's a Portuguese term official English name?

That's a question you need to ask the Timor-Leste government.

If that's what they want to call themselves, then that's what they should be called. Privilege of being a sovereign nation. They could call themselves Island of Dodo's for all we care, it's their prerogative.

Check any source from the United Nations, CIA world factbook, embassies, and practically every official source known to man. All use Timor-Leste. East Timor is and should only be used before or during the process of them becoming independent.

Very few peoples or nations have gone into history books under the name they gave themselves. It's only common to go into history under a name given by your 'peers'.

I live in Nederland, which English name is The Netherlands, and whose inhabitants are Nederlanders, yet English people insist I am "Dutch" a term which went out of fashion here over 250 years ago. They also insist I live in Holland. Even though the Kingdom of Holland (Royaume de Hollande / Koninkrijk Holland) was a Napoleonic puppet state that only lasted 4 years until it was annexed to France. Other than that the only time that Holland was a separate state was between 1101 and 1572, but constituted only a small part of what is now the Netherlands.

In your defense, I usually kick the intellectual capacity of any Endonesian that calls your country Holland. Only because I was enlightened by a 'Dutch' friend (though I vaguely remember him saying that Holland only refers to 3-4 provinces there?) Did I mishear it or something?

In return, I asked him to disseminate information regarding Endonesian food:
-->It's called sate not satay. Makes you sound like a tourist.
-->It's called kecap. Not kecap manis. Kecap is by default manis (sweet).
Among others.

Plus he taught me that the Burgerlijke Wetboek consists of 16? chapters. The Endonesian version still only has 4 chapters. :p

Dutch isn't used in the Netherlands? That's news to me. Will adapt accordingly.

The Netherlands has 2 provinces North and South Holland, which together roughly correspond with the County of Holland during the Holy Roman Empire. While its true that some of the most populous cities of the Netherlands are in the Holland Provinces, we have 10 more provinces.

You don't want to know how we pronounce sate, nor what types of food we use it for in the Netherlands :D

Why did my thread got hijacked by an Indonesian pirate? And with a dangerous subject like this?

Names, just like history, are written by victors. Don't even get me started on this subject. My country was already wiped out from the maps (literally) in XIX century, a time of rapid growth of encyclopedias. Even decades later, well into XXc. and after major geopolitical changes brought by the Great War, things like Encyclopaedia Britannica would keep on using names and views copied from ...ahem... certain empires that conquered us. Maybe they lacked unbiased Wikipedia bureaucrats?

It's common for major geographical features / cities to have own spellings in different languages. But the connotations... When Poles spell "Nowy Jork" or "Londyn", neither Yanks nor Brits would care, as New York was never our colony and London wasn't under Polish occupation. Same as French don't mind hearing "Palika", which means Paris in Hawaiian. However, when some country has such plans regarding your capital (that goes beyond forcibly changing street names) which later get worse, you get a nervous hiccup whenever you hear names of your cities in that language. This can be applied to any other wars that resulted in one country occupying/annexing another.

Generally, I go with the notion that the right to pick how to refer to something belongs to whoever is doing the referring at that particular moment. It's a matter of perception, after all.

Not really better on game boxes (displayed in the first post) :-) : http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=858151#post858151

I've seen worse offenders.

Internet did change a lot. Lazy people suddenly have decent reference material, available in original source language via Wikipedia, translated by Google. As recently as less than 20 years ago Discovery Channel in their documentaries about WW2 was using today's map of Europe to display Wehrmacht advances and presenting nazi newsreel commentaries as facts.

I don't demand detailed knowledge of Polish history from the common Western folk, but if you don't know much, at least stop repeating tsarist, kaiser's, nazi or commie propaganda about us. What if our media would keep on refusing to acknowledge that Ireland is independent (and paint the whole island UK colour)? Ouch. Touchy, eh? If you say that such errors are long gone, I'll remind that US media still love to spit out "Polish death camps" from time to time.

Bear in mind that I don't try to portray Poles as flawless. When it comes to names only, I'm sure the French would point out that our "Lotaryngia" sounds suspiciously like Lothringen and not much like Lorraine. As for the other issues, Lithuanians would eagerly explain which nation was the culturally/politically dominant in the Commonwealth, assimilating their nobility... and Ukrainians would ask why didn't it become the Commonwealth of Three Nations...

You make it sound like that's something a pirate wouldn't do. o_O

lol

Well, I suppose if one can't be proud of anything else, might as well be proud of intimate FPS knowledge. Such delicate brittle flowers they are. :p

lol indeed.

My favourite ever "MobyGames hater" was the single comment to this entry

Below is my favourite bit

The last thing that did is I wrote a nice, long, geeky review of particular game that is one of most well known computer games of the pre-CD-ROM era, but not of the computer game version itself. Well, what I got was an asshole, who illegally claims to be an attorney . . . (What in the flying frak does that have to do with anything, and most state bars forbid attorneys from going around and flaunting it, as it demonstrates poor character?) . . . and doesn't care for my review. So, I sent a nasty, but 100% factually honest, response to this small-time Adolf Hitler, using words to nasty a sailor would blush. I even informed him that if he was an actual attorney, he wouldn't be allowed to flaunt the status as such, for that's deemed a threat, and in the state I live in, it is considered a felony. I demanded another reviewer to review it, but decided to just walk away from the website altogether.

Wonder about who he is talking

Oooh, I remember this thread.

Oh, that dude was referring to me. I believe he created a review that 100% had nothing to do with gameplay, but was a technical review from the programming side. I don't remember the game, but for an example it would be like playing King's Quest I and only talking about the AGI in the review. I humbly WIP-ed it back to him for further input and he kinda went berserk after that, so let the other approvers deal with him. Amusing really.

That attorney/lawyer thingy came up because he was questioning my competence in writing, I explained to him my profession (e.g. lawyer), which requires a strenuous amount of writing involved. Then he mentioned that a lawyer doesn't call oneself a lawyer, but an attorney (a title mostly used the US mind you, not so much in other countries). Hell, took me awhile to understand that some people in other countries call themselves solicitors.

He seemed to think everyone on the internet is an American it seems. :p

yeap, I've noticed when ever Hitler is mentioned on a forum it's a American. Normally followed by "if it wasn't for us you'd all be speaking German"

The implication being, the worst thing about Nazi Germany was that people were speaking German?

Interesting point. To be fair, it is a tough language to learn for Americans...although English is a tough language to learn for Americans too. :p

Good thing the Finns never were expansionists then... And let's not mention the Basques.

Oh, how I dread the Scandinavians. Their overuse of consonants would have brought this world down to its knees.

Think that's bad? try Czech.

Oh crap. On the upside though, txt speak is far less likely to degrade that, as it can't exactly apply.

Sounds like something you'd say if someone was strangling you. o_O

Reminds me of politically incorrect joke: president G. "Dubya" Bush receives a report that a town in former Yugoslavia got bombed (and here goes a name like: Vrbnik or Vrsac). He replies "Oh gosh... umm... and what was its full name before the bombing?".

My ISP seems to be occasionally blocking mobygames and several other sites for no apparent reason. Perhaps I should restrict my p o r n o graphic vocabulary. Dang fundamentalists and their uncontrollable erections. :p

How's this for fundamentalists. Local Christian school I help out every now and then BLOCKS Wikipedia because it features kiddy porn.

It also blocks Moby for obvious reasons

I don't have a problem when they do it to their own kind/group. I have problem when someone does it to other people not belonging to their own social network.

If it'd be appropriate (for lack of a better term) to have no problem with it, then the block wouldn't be needed, because nobody in said group would ever go there. Since it exists, it means some disagree that they shouldn't go there, which likely implies that some may not be part of that group entirely of their own free will, so it is definitely a problem.

Despite around 300 links to MobyGames at Wookieepedia, mine got removed ...?

I must be really bored, 'cause reading this thread made my day.