Zandronum

What is Zanstuff?

Zanstuff is a continuation of Skullstuff from Skulltag, which in itself was based on the "Newstuff chronicles" from Doomworld, which is a review service reviewing new wads posted to the idgames database.

This is a sub-forum that contains reviews of wads for Zandronum.

Can I post a review?

Yes! Unlike skullstuff, ANYONE can post a review by simply posting it to this sub forum. HOWEVER, your post will be invisible to the public until it is approved by a member of the Zanstuff group. Your review will ONLY be approved if you meet the criteria of what we consider to be an acceptable review, which we will outline below.

What can I review?

Anything posted/advertised on the Zandronum forums, or anything on the idgames database that was designed for (at least partly) or is played on Zandronum. If it is not posted on either of these places you must have permission from the author. Stuff that was posted on the skulltag forums is also acceptable if you have proof.

YOU MUST ADHERE TO THE FOLLOWING STANDARDS IN ORDER TO HAVE YOUR REVIEW APPROVED

Format
The thread title should include the title of the project, the name of the reviewer and if the project is still a work in progress include the version number of the wad (e.g. "DerpDoom v4.6: Review by Hypnotoad").

At the top of the review, please display its title and version (ideally with a hyperlink to the download), the author's name, any additional information such as whether it is COOP, CTF etc..., and at least one picture that is thumb-nailed or spoilered.

A score out of ten at the bottom of the review is also desirable, but not completely necessary.

Rules
Your review must contain explanations for your opinions. No ad hominems without any substance; rather than simply saying "this wad is trash" or "this map is garbage", you should instead explain the flaws in the maps/design/gameplay and how they detract from experience. The same goes for talking about how "awesome" or "epic" a wad is without any explanation as to why.

You must not personally insult or make non sequiturs about the author, keep your comments to the project they made.

If the project is a work in progress/still in beta, you MUST MAKE THIS CLEAR. Do not overly bash a specific release of a project for bugs that will almost certainly be patched in the next release. Ideally you should mention improvements that could or should be made for the next release.

Please use correct grammar and spelling, bad use of such will ensure your review is not approved.

Obviously, no troll reviews. If we suspect you are not posting your genuine opinions but instead are simply posting something controversial for flamebait, we will ban you from submitting any more reviews.

You cannot review a project you made yourself.

This ruleset is close to flawless, I might reconcider making a review on something, though I'm sure that any review I make would have some bias on it and wouldn't be too good either overall.
Good luck with this.

Hey, how you feel about game play footage?

very wonderfull, I'm looking forward to some good reads :>

mifu wrote: Hey, how you feel about game play footage?

Second. Are video reviews accepted, if at least if it's in a post-edited spoken review over gameplay footage instead of a live "let's play" format?

This is assuming that the reviewer would transcript the video into a written review below the video.

Video reviews are fine, no need for a transcript. Same rules apply to the video.

What if we do a review involving more than one reviewers? (video, as it wouldn't make much sense for written) This can come in handy for mods that are strictly multiplayer only

As long as the review works, that's fine.

Don't know how to say this but, could the author of a map/project reply to a review on the authors map?

e.g: could I reply about the review on my project?

Yes.

Yeah I always thought it was kinda dumb that reviewers get their own usergroup when the only one who's been (at least semi-) consistently reviewing is Catastrophe, and that users have to somehow earn a purple name. I think it should just be a section where anyone who feels like posting a review can just do it, with no delay and no approval necessary.


SkullStuff is dead.

[QUOTE=Decay]Great job on providing multiple reviews yourself to set an example for everybody else.[/quote]
This is very valid shortcoming in this Sub-forum. I had no idea until now that there wasn't a template or sample anywhere to be found. Certainly there are plenty of people who would review things if they had an idea of what was expected of them. Additionally, there would not be a need for an approval process if there was clearly defined review structure.

I understand that they want to check the review for the sake of quality, letting everyone post unhindered could prove to become a mess and it could become the start of an era of half-assed reviews.
They chose the system they did, the big problem I see here is that there isn't much management or real promoting going on, which causes the activity to wither away slowly but surely. There need to be reviews posted to keep people reading them, and there need to be people reading them for people to get interested in writing their own reviews.
For this to happen there is a requirement that the purplenamers should post regular reviews, I don't mean that every person should post a review every week, but if the teams crew posted frequent reviews then the subforum would be active enough to keep the community interested.

Also, I Hypnotoad, you wrot eto me once that you would ask for some changes to be made to the way the subforum worked, did anyone ever meet those requests? It would be a great initiative from the forum staffs side to ease the job of the ZanStuff team.
If anyone wonders what I am talking about
I made a review at some point with some grammatical mistakes beyond the acceptable level. The problem was that I couldn't do anything about it after I posted because I couldn't edit the post, and Hypnotoad had to edit my review for me. Very inconvinient for both reviewer and manager.

EDIT:
The template point is very valid, it helps anyone new to the business. Building up a general understanding from concrete examples can be very difficult when it comes to matters like these that are very abstract and can be handeled with different nuances.

Decay wrote: Jroc you did an unbelievably shitty job with this subforum group.

There are many aspects of this subforum I dislike that unfortunately I have no control over. I've spoken to infurnus about this before and there are apparently many idiosyncrasies to this forum software which prevents basic things (like being able to see in "view new posts" or pm'd if a review is waiting to be approved) from happening.

There seems to be a lot of hoop jumping for this stuff and it probably could've been better executed. Making a group dedicated to it was also probably not a bright idea, even if anyone can review now. Why does a review have to be approved?

Let me just explain, Zanstuff is a continuation of Skullstuff, but compared to Skullstuff - Zanstuff offers a lot more flexibility. To make a review for Skullstuff, you had to be an approved member of Skullstuff review team. The idea behind Skullstuff was that strict requirements to become a reviewer were necessary to prevent the forum from being spammed with either spammy, malicious or flawed/nonconstructive reviews. However, this closed group of reviewers brought about its own controversies as you're probably aware.

Zanstuff is a continuation of Skullstuff, so in the spirit of Skullstuff I sought to ensure that at least some minimum level of standards were met for reviews. However, unlike Skullstuff (and more like Doomworld's newstuff), I wanted anyone in the community the ability to participate and submit reviews, rather than it be limited to a select clique of reviewers.

So I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to curate reviews submitted to ensure they're not spammy, malicious or badly written. I added many people in the group initially with the ability to approve reviews - unfortunately many of those (such as wirtualnosc, one_two, ijon tichy) have subsequently gone inactive. Because of this and because my interest in Zandronum has been waning I have actually suggested multiple times in irc that this subforum should probably be closed or transferred, but nobody seems interested.

Still, the idea behind Zanstuff is not some general purpose feedback forum. Modders can already easily get feedback from the Projects, Maps & Mods forum or the Editing Help & Discussion forum. If it's too much 'jumping through hoops' or too burdensome for the community to have their reviews checked for a very basic level of standards as explained in the OP, then so be it - Zanstuff will be no more.

I cannot fathom why you required people to put forward their work for review.

I'm not sure what you're getting at, if you're talking about this thread, there is actually no requirement at all for reviewers to review wads only posted in that thread. The purpose of that forum was merely only to bring to the attention of reviewers mods they may have missed.

early stages or not.

To be clear, unlike in Skullstuff and Newstuff which requires people only review projects that were posted in the releases sub forum, or at idgames, respectively, I've explicitly allowed people to review beta WIP projects, so long as they clearly indicate the version of the wad they're reviewing in the title.

---

Ru5tK1ng wrote:

Decay wrote:Great job on providing multiple reviews yourself to set an example for everybody else.

This is very valid shortcoming in this Sub-forum. I had no idea until now that there wasn't a template or sample anywhere to be found. Certainly there are plenty of people who would review things if they had an idea of what was expected of them. Additionally, there would not be a need for an approval process if there was clearly defined review structure.

I mean I thought the OP in this forum spelled out fairly clearly the format we expect to see in reviews, those are the only requirements. If anything is unclear about them feel free to let us know. The requirements don't include a specific review structure true, I didn't want to dictate a specific structure or length as I thought that'd be too restrictive and too difficult to enforce. If people are unsure about how they should structure their reviews they can look at previously posted reviews to assist them.

Of course, a template would be very helpful, I can maybe look into making a template in the future (although as I've said I have very little interest in Zandronum these days), or alternatively if anyone else wants to post a template feel free. I'm not the dictator of this place, I stress community involvement so anyone is free to help each other and set examples/templates.

---

Lollipop wrote: the big problem I see here is that there isn't much management or real promoting going on

This is true. I think this is because most of the people originally involved have lost interest either in Zanstuff or Zandronum in general (including myself). I welcome anyone who wants to contribute and help out.

The problem was that I couldn't do anything about it after I posted because I couldn't edit the post, and Hypnotoad had to edit my review for me. Very inconvinient for both reviewer and manager.

Indeed, as far as I know there is no easy way to fix this. You'd have to speak to Infurnus but I haven't seen him around lately.

Wait, you are low on staff? I for one had no idea, not that I in any way can speak for the whole community though.
Also, there is nowhere I can find any mention on how to apply to become a member of the team or which requirements have to be met.
I am also curious as to why there is nothing really going on in the zanstuff section, are people just too busy?

I am a busy guy myself, but I would like to help out ZanStuff, as I am still very invested in Zandronum myself.
I also study communication at A level, so I might be able to make a few revisions here and there and maybe make something that can promote ZanStuff when I am not as busy anymore. The most important aspect is sparking some activity right now though.

I think the greatest problem going on here, and also in the tutorials subforum, is a self reenforcing problem, where lack of activity causes lack of interest, which causes lack of activity in an endless cycle. The only solution is injecting enough activity into the system over a period of time to make it self sustaining for a while and keep is sustained.
In therms of ZanStuff, this requires a lot of modding content though, which means that the modders over time will have to make more and more things worth reviewing, which can prove to become a problem.

Let's see where we can take this, maybe it will work, maybe not, but we can try. We can do our best and if all that fails, we will at least have tried.

Lollipop wrote: Wait, you are low on staff? I for one had no idea, not that I in any way can speak for the whole community though.
Also, there is nowhere I can find any mention on how to apply to become a member of the team or which requirements have to be met.
I am also curious as to why there is nothing really going on in the zanstuff section, are people just too busy?

I am a busy guy myself, but I would like to help out ZanStuff, as I am still very invested in Zandronum myself.
I also study communication at A level, so I might be able to make a few revisions here and there and maybe make something that can promote ZanStuff when I am not as busy anymore. The most important aspect is sparking some activity right now though.

I think the greatest problem going on here, and also in the tutorials subforum, is a self reenforcing problem, where lack of activity causes lack of interest, which causes lack of activity in an endless cycle. The only solution is injecting enough activity into the system over a period of time to make it self sustaining for a while and keep is sustained.
In therms of ZanStuff, this requires a lot of modding content though, which means that the modders over time will have to make more and more things worth reviewing, which can prove to become a problem.

Let's see where we can take this, maybe it will work, maybe not, but we can try. We can do our best and if all that fails, we will at least have tried.

Since I don't really know you or your capabilities, if you're really interested in reviving Zanstuff, then at this stage it's probably best for you to submit some more reviews yourself to try and bring about more activity. Then we can discuss you joining the group in the future.

I understand, which brings back one of my earlier points:
What exactly are the required qualifications to join the team?
This is important to know before even concidering applying for something, it is only because I do not doubt that I will be an asset to the team that I concidered it despite not knowing what would be expected of me.

I will see what I can find time for as I am busy as already mentioned, but it will be difficult to revive this on my own, and the only help I expect to find is for Catastrophe to make a review once in a while.
I will try my best, let's see what I can make of it.

[quote=HypnoToad]I mean I thought the OP in this forum spelled out fairly clearly the format we expect to see in reviews, those are the only requirements. If anything is unclear about them feel free to let us know. The requirements don't include a specific review structure true, I didn't want to dictate a specific structure or length as I thought that'd be too restrictive and too difficult to enforce. If people are unsure about how they should structure their reviews they can look at previously posted reviews to assist them.[/quote]
Not necessarily. When it comes to writing, you are going to get variations and interpretations even with the most seemingly crystal clear guidelines. Just as in the past when you had to write a paper, people read the same guidelines and either wrote a good paper or a shitty one. With at least an example or defined structure of what a great review is, you will get more A and B quality reviews and less F's or reviews that end up with suspensions. Of course this has to be coupled with a more open submission model (rather than one that reeks of semi-exclusivity) where anyone can submit reviews such as /newstuff.

[quote=HypnoToad]I'm not the dictator of this place, I stress community involvement so anyone is free to help each other and set examples/templates.[/quote]
You are still seen as a leader or the goto man of ZanStuff whether you like to admit it or not, albeit a questionable one it seems.

Lollipop wrote: I understand, which brings back one of my earlier points:
What exactly are the required qualifications to join the team?
This is important to know before even concidering applying for something, it is only because I do not doubt that I will be an asset to the team that I concidered it despite not knowing what would be expected of me.

I will see what I can find time for as I am busy as already mentioned, but it will be difficult to revive this on my own, and the only help I expect to find is for Catastrophe to make a review once in a while.
I will try my best, let's see what I can make of it.

It's probably better if we take this convo to PM, I will PM you shortly.

For anyone else, if you're interested in joining the staff or perhaps taking charge of this subforum and regenerating activity then please feel free to PM me.

---

Ru5tK1ng wrote: Of course this has to be coupled with a more open submission model (rather than one that reeks of semi-exclusivity) where anyone can submit reviews such as /newstuff.

Anyone can submit reviews here, do you mean where anyone can submit reviews and they don't need to be approved/are automatically shown? I mean an 'anything goes' reviews subforum is entirely missing the point of Zanstuff.

Still, if everyone thinks that would be a better system, then I am open to making this change - or better yet ask the forum admins since I would not be able to do this myself.

Yes, without an approval process. Just because you forgo an approval process doesn't mean anything goes is now the law. Content still would need to be watched and moderated and it's stupid to think otherwise.


Apparently your current model is so successful that's why only one person is doing anything worth while. I'm just offering a suggestion and not claiming it's going to revive ZanStuff in glorious fashion. The current system isn't cutting it anymore.