1. Source is expensive. If we hosted the constituent parts of all our art, the hosting costs would be exponentially more costly, and upload times, page load times and downloads times would also balloon exponentially. You may have noticed that the patreon campaign on the home page is not covering costs as it stands. Bart literally pays for this site out of his own pocket, and you're asking him to personaly shell out huge sums of money to support your ideological position. If you want OGA to be hosting hundreds of terrabytes of data, you better also be suggesting a way to pay for it.
2. Finalised art is the prefered format for most purposes. This site is specifically to support game development, by helping developers who can't create their own artwork. If a dev can't create an artwork due to lack of time or skill or money, the odds are pretty good that they aren't going to be willing or able to edit the constituent files themselves. Most game devs we see want files that are as close to finished as possible. This is often problem since many of our files aren't completely "game ready", and devs aren't prepared to make them game ready. There have been many ideas to get artists to collaborate to get their works closer to game ready state, but for the most part artists prefer to work on their own new work, than someone else's unfinished work. Given this relative lack of people actually using or requesting constituent "source" files, it is pretty clear what the "prefered format" is for most of the community, and it is the game ready files, not the source files. If you're uploading a texture, most game devs are wondering if it has usable dimensions with matching specular, glow and bump mapping, not if it still has the photoshop layers.
OGA acts as a repository which facilitates exchange between devs and artists on terms which are ultimately dictated by the artists. The artists are donating their time, skill and effort for the benefit of people they will never meet and games they will never play. I can't speak for OGA as a whole, but personally I wouldn't want to do anything to discourage artists from that. When an artist says a file is GPL, then that says to me that they consider the final file to be the source they are distributing. Unlike binary code blobs, these final art formats can still be edited and remixed to some degree, you may not have the layers, brushes or libraries, but you can still rearrange those pixels to your hearts desire. If that is insufficiently sourcey for your purposes then ask for a different format, or find a different artist, because the license is ultimately between the dev and the artist, not between the dev and OGA.
So I had a quick look into it, there are a few ways around this, but none are ideal. The best solution would be for us to use a views path rewrite module like this
However that would require approval from Bart and extensive regression testing.
I could also set up searches for each of the art types at those specific URLs. That wouldn't require any new modules, however it would be a functional downgrade as you'd no longer be able to switch between content types with the checkbox.
That is great offer. In the short term I'd suggest reporting spam, helping other users with their enquiries and commenting on things to increase their visibility is probably the best things to do. Long term engagment is pretty much how you become an admin.
I have had a look into it. The approval queue was experiencing a strange bug.
The problem was the option which let you switch between approved and non-approved users, it was causing an SQL error and returning 0 results. I have disabled the switch and set it to only display unapproved users, and it is now functioning as intended.
I will post in the admin forum with more details about my findings. In the mean time, if you feel you should have been approved a long time ago, please let us know
The nefarious purposes are more about the specific technical implementation, it would require exposing Drupal's bulk operations interface, and that functionality is what I am concerned about. It is a powerful tool and is usually reserved for admins, I can certainly see some edge cases that might not end too well. That tool can have a pretty significant performance impact, since you're writing to a lot of tables at once, and exposing it to end users might allow them to easily automate the process to crash the site.
Just to reassure everyone, we have 13 admins and another 3 editors in addition to about 12 people with other degrees of elevated access. Of those, 4 admins have not been online in the past year.
I think that is actually a fairly sized "staff", though in practice it is at the whim of who has free time at any given moment. We do have an admin forum, but it is not used as extensively as it could be and I agree we could always organise and co-ordinate ourselves better.
I will try to monitor the feedback and admin forums more closely, but i am wary about making a public list of staff with direct contact capability. I am also not sure that a ticketing system is appropriate, we probably just need to be more timely in our responses to the existing systems, rather than creating more lists for us to check.
I just want to reiterate two points:
1. Source is expensive. If we hosted the constituent parts of all our art, the hosting costs would be exponentially more costly, and upload times, page load times and downloads times would also balloon exponentially. You may have noticed that the patreon campaign on the home page is not covering costs as it stands. Bart literally pays for this site out of his own pocket, and you're asking him to personaly shell out huge sums of money to support your ideological position. If you want OGA to be hosting hundreds of terrabytes of data, you better also be suggesting a way to pay for it.
2. Finalised art is the prefered format for most purposes. This site is specifically to support game development, by helping developers who can't create their own artwork. If a dev can't create an artwork due to lack of time or skill or money, the odds are pretty good that they aren't going to be willing or able to edit the constituent files themselves. Most game devs we see want files that are as close to finished as possible. This is often problem since many of our files aren't completely "game ready", and devs aren't prepared to make them game ready. There have been many ideas to get artists to collaborate to get their works closer to game ready state, but for the most part artists prefer to work on their own new work, than someone else's unfinished work. Given this relative lack of people actually using or requesting constituent "source" files, it is pretty clear what the "prefered format" is for most of the community, and it is the game ready files, not the source files. If you're uploading a texture, most game devs are wondering if it has usable dimensions with matching specular, glow and bump mapping, not if it still has the photoshop layers.
OGA acts as a repository which facilitates exchange between devs and artists on terms which are ultimately dictated by the artists. The artists are donating their time, skill and effort for the benefit of people they will never meet and games they will never play. I can't speak for OGA as a whole, but personally I wouldn't want to do anything to discourage artists from that. When an artist says a file is GPL, then that says to me that they consider the final file to be the source they are distributing. Unlike binary code blobs, these final art formats can still be edited and remixed to some degree, you may not have the layers, brushes or libraries, but you can still rearrange those pixels to your hearts desire. If that is insufficiently sourcey for your purposes then ask for a different format, or find a different artist, because the license is ultimately between the dev and the artist, not between the dev and OGA.
@kagerato That is a good point, I have added a blog post to the home page so others can see the issue.
@DezrasDragons, I just fixed that for you, may have to log out and back in again for it to take effect.
So I had a quick look into it, there are a few ways around this, but none are ideal. The best solution would be for us to use a views path rewrite module like this
https://www.drupal.org/project/views_url_path_arguments
However that would require approval from Bart and extensive regression testing.
I could also set up searches for each of the art types at those specific URLs. That wouldn't require any new modules, however it would be a functional downgrade as you'd no longer be able to switch between content types with the checkbox.
That is great offer. In the short term I'd suggest reporting spam, helping other users with their enquiries and commenting on things to increase their visibility is probably the best things to do. Long term engagment is pretty much how you become an admin.
Aren't you meant to be able to see the edge of the last drawing so you can make something that fits?
I have had a look into it. The approval queue was experiencing a strange bug.
The problem was the option which let you switch between approved and non-approved users, it was causing an SQL error and returning 0 results. I have disabled the switch and set it to only display unapproved users, and it is now functioning as intended.
I will post in the admin forum with more details about my findings. In the mean time, if you feel you should have been approved a long time ago, please let us know
The nefarious purposes are more about the specific technical implementation, it would require exposing Drupal's bulk operations interface, and that functionality is what I am concerned about. It is a powerful tool and is usually reserved for admins, I can certainly see some edge cases that might not end too well. That tool can have a pretty significant performance impact, since you're writing to a lot of tables at once, and exposing it to end users might allow them to easily automate the process to crash the site.
351 Total which are exclusively GPL or LGPL.
There are also an additional 1160 which include GPL or LGPL but are not exclusive, for a total of 1511 which use either GPL or LGPL in some way.
Just to reassure everyone, we have 13 admins and another 3 editors in addition to about 12 people with other degrees of elevated access. Of those, 4 admins have not been online in the past year.
I think that is actually a fairly sized "staff", though in practice it is at the whim of who has free time at any given moment. We do have an admin forum, but it is not used as extensively as it could be and I agree we could always organise and co-ordinate ourselves better.
I will try to monitor the feedback and admin forums more closely, but i am wary about making a public list of staff with direct contact capability. I am also not sure that a ticketing system is appropriate, we probably just need to be more timely in our responses to the existing systems, rather than creating more lists for us to check.
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