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posted in suggestions  threads list There are numerous OSS teams that don't pick out a collective name for themselves, which linger about either as "published by ?" or the editors use artistic license and add "gamename team" into that field (which is per-game thing and as such serves absolutely no purpose as such). Ergo, we should pick one special name and use that for any instances with "numerous authors" but no common name for them all.
Luckily older such games have only one maintainer (and hundreds of contributors, but they're not of the core team) whose name can be used in those cases, but there are plenty of projects which don't bother to call themselves anything other than what you see in the credits/team members pages, and those can't be really used here. Anyway, the company name probably should contain special characters to make it stand out as something not so valid. Like {open source}, >various>, (unnamed), or maybe even something that completely lacks text: >>>>. This is primarily to distinguish games that the publisher/developer isn't known for and those that just don't have a name. --- Alternatively, keep ? for "unknown" and add * (or other symbol) for "various/unnamed group". This is perhaps better route. ! --- Developer name should be added to required fields, too. Empty publisher/developer fields shouldn't be allowed in any case, and any older game entries should be auto-converted to unknown. We can't currently search for empty fields, so this would remove that problem. I was recently thinking to automatically fill the developer field with the publisher, when left empty.
This only when editing games. Using the * would be good too. Side note. In the near future (technically related to the events i'm working on), publisher/developer fields will be filled only selecting the companies available on the database, forcing editors to eventually add the new company if needed. *snip* forcing editors to eventually add the new company if needed.
More reason to have some shared generic "company" for all these game specific teams. Hopefully people understand to use it, though. I was recently thinking to automatically fill the developer field with the publisher, when left empty.
I believe this is a bad idea. This will automatically place false information in to many of the game entries. Credit for the developing company has only recently gain popularity. For many games, especially pre-NES, an outside developer was used and did not receive credit, on purpose. In the beginning of videogames (and to some extent, computer games) many companies went to great effort and expense to hide the developers name and assumed credit for themselves. While this was all technically and bureaucratically legal, the result was public fraud. In cases where such fraud was perpetrated, and UVL automatically listed the publisher instead of the rightful party, UVL would then become the perpetrator of the fraud. | |||
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