Survey posted 2006-01-29 06:52 by Jon.

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Survey idea by Sebastian Schmied <s.schmied@gmail.com>

For those of you who don't know what's going on, please refer to the link under my name.

I submitted some files with "very high compression rate", thus following rule 55.

I haven't felt the need to submit any of my games to ticalc.
The chances of them being downloaded from the 83 basic section is so small that I probably never will.
That's why I'll eventually just put them on my site.

EXACTLY. There's so much junk in the BASIC section(as seen from the article this survey was based off) that no one will even bother to download it. And so, I move on to ASM. :D

but, if the staff looked at the last poll's comments, they would implement some task to clean out or sort the clogged BASIC archives.

My pessimistic will express itself now. Unfortunately, I doubt the "cleaning of the archives" or as I like to call it, "purifying of the archives," will ever occur. I mean, the ticalc.org staff have lives too, (this is a rumor), and it would take a long time, considering how many 83+ basic programs are out there, claiming to be "timers" and "watches," but vary on the speed of the calculator. I am done expressing my pessimistic side now. The End

If it were to happen, it would probably be some sort of user system where people vote if a file should stay or be removed, and there would be a threshold where it would go away. Granted, this gets into a whole new argument about whether ticalc.org accepts all files or if it discriminates. Maybe there could be a "popular" file section and an all file section, although this is similar to just sorting the results by ranking.

Would that mean that the all the members of ticalc.org have to vote to get each program out of the archives? That would be a fair system, although it would take a very long time...

I thought of a (2^6+1)th one:

Always zip your files with the built-in zip utility in Mac OS X: just because you can't see the resource forks, that means they're not there!

I've violated that one uncountable times. Just ask spencerdubya.

ditto....although actually any zip program screws up resource forks on a Mac :-(

of course .tgz's are much better :-p

Eww... Mac file extensions... (please don't flame me). I say Linux and open source are the way of the future.

Agreed, but .tgz *is* a Linux thing.

I don't think I violated any of the rules, my file has never been rejected.

just because you never got a rejected file doesnt mean you didnt break the rules.

just look at how many violations are in the archives

*cough* Archivers shirking their duties... *cough* :D

I know...I know...as much as I'd love to clean up the entire archives, I don't have a year of my life to spare. :-)

I think you would probably need more than one year...

Well, just thought of a really stupid idea that would solve that problem. Since most people don't have a year of their life to spare, the task could be split up among the entire ticalc.org staff, not just the file archives. Now for idea #2, which is even worse, have the active members, who I'll say, there are about 150 of us, clean up the archives. That way the enormous task will be spread out among the many. Stupid idea. And lastly, a third idea, which I came up with while typing this, is to have a more rigorous (spelling?) requirements for file submissions, so that only the good programs get accepted. Although this might discourage some new basic programmers.

The entire have-the-community-fix-it isn't a bad idea, but obviously we need a way to make sure the fixing is done both appropriately and also correctly.

And I believe submitting programs with bad spelling is on the list of 2^6 ways to get your file accepted. ;-)

I've seen group efforts foiled by things such as petty competition. This could pose as a problem becasue someone might want to change who gets credit for writing a program, especially since I believe in the 2^6 ways to get files accepted is that at the end of your life, your accomplishments are judged based on how many programs you've submitted to ticalc.org.

to many idiots floding the arcives whith useless programs. this is sortof off topic but it would be cool if their was a place where good programs could get voted so everyone would know that they were good.

There is: the ratings system.

But the problem is that not many, (including me), use the rating system, even if they've downloaded that program.

yes, but I don't think I have anyways. a rejection letter would confirm rule breaking