Survey posted 2004-03-05 08:48 by Morgan.

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With the number of quadratic solvers in the archives, and the trouble it takes to find the good programs in the BASIC section, it's sad that 2 people voted that everything's fine as it is.

They probably haven't been around for very long, or tried to find something useful in the basic archives.

Or their programs are in jeopardy!

That too. :-)

NOOOOOOOOOO! NOT MY HELLO WORLD PROGRAM!!! I SPEND _SECONDS_ WORKING ON IT!!!

Wait a minute, I think it was rejected a long time ago.

It is kinda stupid what people put in these archives. I think that we should really avoid stuff that is our "first programs" or whatever and stuff that is already built into the calculator unless the program can do it either extremely fast or just something that can actually benifit someone.

Yes!!! Exactly!!!! Beginning programmers need to write "hello world" programs and other simple ones for practice, BUT THEY SHOULDN'T UPLOAD THEM!!!

I think the problem is with the PEOPLE who upload quadratic solvers and things. Something about duplicate programs should be added to the upload guidelines.

Wait...<idea> Maybe there could be a field on the upload form for explaining why your program is better than the others like it, or why it's useful in the first place!!! If the reasons are good, the program gets uploaded!!! If they aren't, the program doesn't get uploaded!!!

It's not necessarily what the program does, but how it does it. For example, people learning how to figure out the quirks of grayscale need to know how a program that runs is made, and that grayscale program might very well display "Hello World", and it might be a picture of the wing flapping of a hypothetical pig, but that is irrelevant. What the should do, though, is make a "Tutorial Programs" subfolder in "Informational Texts" so that people who don't need 87E9 "Hello World" programs don't need to sift through them. But they still should be uploaded.

If you're looking for something in particular, the current folder system isn't very good.
First of all, if I'm looking for a periodic table, do I really care if it was written in assembly or BASIC?
Also, the science, math and programs folders really are too general. If I want an Ohm's law program, I don't want to be bothered with a pH calculator.
As for games -- there are many good BASIC games that are overlooked because everyone goes to the asm directory anyways -- maybe the two categories could be merged and a sorting by rating could separate the wheat from the chaff?

I think that pretty much, the BASIC vs ASM is a good separation, and, for the most part, DOES "separate the wheat from the chaff." I agree that their are some BASIC programs out there that are pretty good, but you also have to agree that there will never be a BASIC Phoenix or anything like that...

You've never seen my Shooter 82, have you? :D

I agree. Although there are some good basic programs that demonstrate advanced techniques, there aren't very many. If people want to find asm, they should be able to. Also, when I look through the games folder for source to help me with problems, basic would just clutter it all up.

What if there were only basic games worthy of being with assembly, like if they had amazing ratings (assuming that ratings are instituted)

I'm willing to bet this has already been said but since I have neither the time nor the patience to sift through all those messages, I think a rating system would be good IF done properly. For one, if just anybody, ticalc.org member or not, can vote on a program then it'd get out of hand. Maybe have a set review form where you have to fill in actual, legitimate values and give explainations as to why you gave it that. Of course, for the amount of files that are already out there, this would be a major pain in the butt unless they simply said "screw it!" and removed all the files and started fresh...pissing off pretty much everyone that has uploaded SOMETHING...

i think that the real benefit to a rating system is it being easy to use. The fact that all you have to do is press a button is what will make it work by getting a lot of ratings done. If people wanted to explain their reasons, they'd write a review.

but, like i said, any idiot can give a particular review or rating to a file. Heck, if I wanted, I could use all the old e-mail addresses I have, make ticalc.org memberships out of them, then give fantastic ratings to my own programs. Heck, I could do the same with reviews. The difference is that with reviews you'd have to actually GIVE a reason to why you gave it that rating. In any case, at this point of development it's going to take a long time to get whatever they have in mind implemented from the sheer volume of files here...and if they do it by ratings then everything is going to start out with the same rating (0, presumably) and nothing will have really changed...

yeah, ok i agree that that may happen. But its not a problem for a few reasons:

1. It isnt worth the effort for _most_ people to do that

2. If the "honest", or at least reasonably fair, people were to see a program that had been given a ton of good reviews, even though they know it is terrible, then they would go ahead and give it some bad ratings, maybe even bad reviews, to help offset all of the good ratings.

Not many programs would suffer from the rating problem, so it wouldnt be hard to fix. I know that if i saw some awful "game" that doesnt do anything and it had 30 ratings of 5 stars, then id give it a 0 and then write an accompanying review to let people know not to trust the ratings it has.

I said reject meaningless files, but here's my idea!!
Create a rating system, and all programs below a certain rating are rejected.
Also, perhaps, to comb through the old ones and reject stupid memory-wasters (my favorite being the "calc clean-out" programs), TI-Calc could make a feature where the users (that's us) rate the program. After about five (or more... shrug) ratings, if the average is below the standard, bye bye!
How does that sound?

but how long would this 'clean out' period be? I mean, after how long would it be before the system cleaned out the low rated ones? And how would that stop it from wiping out the really good ones but people never voted for 'em and now they're gone for good...