pouët.net

CONS and Gargaj were having this discussion on discord about artcity & bitfellas needing a rewrite and how hard it is to find sceners willing to step up to webmaster role. Always feels like it's the same couple of people picking up the slack on that department, even the most important things like scene.org main page have been waiting for a dedicated rewrite for years.

So i suggested it might be time to poll people for a crowdfunding and just pay a dedicated professional to handle the rewrite instead of waiting for a volunteer. Feels like most demoscene websites are made / maintained by a handful of the same usual suspects.

Gargaj was arguing that that sounds like admitting defeat on some level.

Which i completely disagree with, we should pick our battles, i can totally understand why demosceners rather do something else then "yet another website". Still, am curious to hear other people's opinions.

Would you rather wait a few more years for the "made by real scener" remake of the scene website you haven't really been using for the last few years because it's so damn outdated and not mobile friendly, or would you rather contribute a few euros and see it revamped by a paid professional?

On topic, i'm looking for webadmin help for the shader summary project, lot of people thumbed it up and reposted on social media when i announced it a couple weeks ago but a total of 0 people stepped up to help us make it look less like the total ass that it currently looks like :)

Does that really help though? You'd still need someone to actually maintain that code, and depending on who you contracted it to, it might be extremely shitty code to maintain. You probably don't want to pay someone for ongoing maintenance.

I think it is the same as with diskmags. If you want to have one, make it yourself. If you wait for others, you will wait for good.

If this actually comes to fruition, there better not be any modernizations to website design. I love how clunky some of these sites look on PC.

What Saga Musix said.

I made some changes to make the site mobile friendly :)
Check the result: https://psenough.github.io/shader_summary/

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Ironically, I actually offered to improve the Artcity code at one point, starting with the admin UI. It was a hard no on that back then :)

Anyway, I don't think the sites are unused because they're old or clunky, but rather because most of them provide roughly the same functions as currently popular sites, and/or aren't updated -- which is what really takes time and effort in the long run, especially on E.G. Artcity.

Sure, Artcity could be updated to allow people with SceneID to upload and tag pictures, but then if you want to see more info on releases/artists you still have to go to Demozoo. I think consolidating the efforts around the currently popular sites would be a better investment of time, effort and resources. Especially considering that every release has to be created, uploaded, tagged, categorized etc. on each and every site separately, which is tedious and naturally leads to one or two sites being the "official" places for "releasing" things.

Centralization just puts pressure on the same people.

I'm afraid that sites for which you can't find webmasters nor programmers aren't that interesting either. In the course of time and since we are all getting older, we no longer look so often on several pages to see what news there might be. At least that's how it is with me Maybe it would be easier to create ONE meetingplace that represents EVERYTHING instead of many sites for which you don't seem to find anyone to update it.

My personal favorite for this is Demozoo. I think it's a very successful site. :)

As opposed to the same people being even more thinly spread across an even larger number of sites that all require maintenance, moderation and content?

E.G. instead of rewriting Artcity, why not implement similar functionality on Demozoo? Then _all_ users can upload and tag pictures and link them to parties, demos, sceners and groups. It'll be one less site that's going to need hosting, moderation, security updates etc and Demozoo already presumably has a lot of the boilerplate stuff in place.

I'm not sure I follow the rationale here but maybe I'm missing something.

This is the issue here. If you centralize, it's the same people by design. If you decentralize, you should spread the workload, and the sites can independently diverge in featuresets without having to constantly align to the existing site.

Even a freshly coded, crowdfunded Artcity or similar isn't going to moderate itself and fill itself with content. If there are other people around willing to step up and run a similar site, why couldn't they care for certain parts or functions of a centralized site instead? E.G. having platform-specific moderators, adding to a pool of people with sysadmin skills who can share the workload, etc.

But that assumes that one size fits all when it comes to site functionality. For example, Artcity has a voting mechanic, Demozoo doesn't, so that's already a decision someone must make whether that's something to either drop (which is a loss of functionality), or to expand Demozoo with (which may not be Demozoo's intent)

But I don't wanna speak for Demozoo, instead here's my reasoning why I wouldn't want to merge Artcity for Pouet:
- Picture-based sites should have a different layout to be efficient, and e.g. the current Artcity layout simply works better for a site like that.
- Pouet is already "too" popular so that we get enough fat we need to trim off by people adding the wrong things or trying to spam etc. Image if we'd expand to include images.
- Obviously then we'd need to include music (since then that'd be the only thing missing) which would then probably triple the already considerable workload.

It's just the wrong kind of fit, but also as I said before, separate sites can grow independent of each other; one can have compos, the other can run annual awards, one can care about parties, the other can decide to ignore them, and so on.


Pouet sometimes has problems with that, with people who are less well-versed over certain platforms or situations make wrong decision - it hasn't been a huge problem so far but it happens - but that's also not what I'm arguing about.

What I'm arguing about is that centralization is always a result of user-driven laziness, and causes a lot of problems with monolithic decisionmaking.

I get your point, I just don't think the scene is sufficiently big and engaged to make it happen. I can only speak for myself of course, but I'd rather see one or two sites doing most of the things good enough, than ten different niche sites that'll never grow big enough or attract the size of audience they deserve.

Take the voting function or Artcity, for example. It could easily be implemented on a site such as Demozoo which already supports image entries - but the question is if it's worth it? Even when Artcity was regularly updated and visited, a picture rarely got more than five or six votes and it was maybe 10-20 people who did almost all the voting and commenting.

Sounds like I'm hating on Artcity now, which I'm not. It does what it's supposed to do and I have the utmost respect for the work CONS has put into administrating it. And that goes for pouët admins too, of course. :)

We have a simple website www.nahkolor.org
We just link to our pouet/demozoo/kestra etc website urls..
Indeed scene has come to an age to less time for scene than in earlier and very earlier days imho

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Kiddz Chip is Starting it websites hosting / sign up / sign in / sid / mod / created websites

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Okay?
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