pouët.net

I've been mulling about this for a while: What exactly are we supposed to do with prods that were either permanently lost (or are presumed to be permanently lost), but moreso about prods that for all intents and purposes never existed?

Here are a couple of examples to the latter:
- http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=26754 - "Never released demo. No working link."
- http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=24608 - "This prod had been presented on a VHS video tape. I don't have the material to put it in divx."
- http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=13766 - afaik this never saw a file, still not sure how it was played at ASM
- http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=48241 - from csdb: "party version not available, only the 100% released later"

So I'm at two minds of this, and it essentially hinges on what Pouët should be treated as: is it meant to be a comprehensive archive, or is it meant to be a showcase / commenting site? I'm leaning towards the latter because the former is much better suited for sites like CSDB and Demozoo and I like the niche Pouët represents right now - however that means that prods that cannot be watched properly (i.e. there is no reference to a video conversion) should in essence be removed. Naturally there should be a level of tolerance towards prods that currently have a broken link but potentially may exist somewhere around the world, but in case of prods that really never had a working link, it feels like deception to encourage sceners to comment on something that may or may not be what the prod really is / was.

Thoughts?

At least regarding Lobotomia by Dekadence, as the compoversion wasn't released, it can in my opinion be deleted from Pouet (there's a reason I never added it here).

This awful shit can also be deleted (link goes to 127.0.0.1); I'm willing to put it on demozoo with a "lost" tag though.

What if you remove something and then, suddenly, reappears?

You can always read the previous comments and see the screenshots. I agree that pouet it's not a comprehensive archive but sometimes a few comments about some lost prods are better than nothing.

Exactly. I wouldn't delete "lost" files, because one never know when/if they resurface. However, perhaps non-available new prods shouldn't be added anymore.

Is there any number of how much prods here at pouet might be (really) lost/have never existed?

yep, those that are not released have no place here, IMHO.

Well... Isn't sounds like an oxymoron? You don't have a "prod" until you release it.
But I would not remove anything that was released and presumably lost. Just in case someone find it.

Adding a flag that the entry is "lost" (on purpose or otherwise) and then prevent new uploads for that file until cleared by a gloperator?

IMHO if a prod existed (was shown at least once) it should stay. After all it's about the history.

How many prods (vs "existing" ones) are we talking about anyway?

you can still show it (like that zx spectrum youtube capture), but not release it.
so, it doesn't belong here.

dfox: "new uploads"?

i'm of the opinion that if it was released it should be in the database, regardless if the binaries were ever distributed or not or lost meanwhile. they might still be retrieved in most cases. even if they are not retrieved the release is still a part of demoscene history and i'm against pretending releases never happened.

Did you read what I said though?

This was referring to this: "What if you remove something and then, suddenly, reappears?"

As in: an entry is supposed to be not available (e.g. party versions) but somebody uploads and links them anyway.

somehow it is a two sided blade (as always). deleting lost prods makes it a it harder to dig for and maybe finding them. if you don't know that they ever existed where would you start? but if something was not supposed to be released at all or is added without any working link ... who needs that anyway? i can only speak about ms-dos intros but i came across many in the past that were tagged as "lost" at demozoo and were still in the wild. on scene.org alone might lie so much data that isn't even in the database here (and there). i'm glad that i don't have to decide on the direction of pouet :D

on one hand, I'd say keep it all, because it seems more complete that way.

But on the other hand... we have demozoo. The question only remains; does demozoo have all these "lost" entries already? otherwise they might truely become lost to the ages.

I think of pouet more as a showcase site. Non-existing demos have no place here. So to make sure they don't get reuploaded you need a placeholder. With comments enabled but maybe without a rating system.

What functional role is the Pouet website supposed to serve in the so-called demoscene? Whatever it's supposed to do, it anyway seems to provide functionalities like: (1) "view prod" page/URL queries, (2) search for prod, (3) add prod, (4) add comment to prod, ... Etc. Etc.

What is this "prod" thingy, how would you explain its functional role? "Prod" = working download link? Or "prod" = historical record of something?

I always thought Pouet is supposed to catalog artifacts produced in the demoscene. Not contain the artifacts themselves. For some reason the scope of things to list was limited to executable thingies only. (What is an "executable" then? Maybe something that can be fed as input to a Turing-complete machine?)

If you search for something, what is it supposed to mean, if the search doesn't find anything?

How about sceners after they've died? Remove the user pages? A person hasn't answered phone calls and emails for years, so remove records of that person and remove the prod credit links, as if the people had never existed?

What knoeki said (imho). If the content (screenshot, links, credz) is on demozoo, I'm comfortable with removing it here.

this

I don't think it really matters what we do with these particular productions. It's not like someone is uploading a new prod just to get glöps without any reason for it to be.

It could be nice, as stated above, if there was an easy way to reify the prods if more proof of their existence was obtained (the original prod files, etc.). However I understand someone might decide to go looking for this prod and not find it, so could be worth it to set up further tie in with Demozoo to search there if no hits were found here and indicate "X hits were found on Demozoo" (possibly with caching)? I'd only do it if there's exactly zero hits here, but non-zero results could be enhanced with a bit saying "Not finding what you're looking for? Try <a href="https://demozoo.org/search/?q=user'spouetqueryhere">Demozoo</a>."

Pardon my ignorance, but what sort of bad things happen as a result of Pouet showing an entry for a demo that was entered in a compo, shown, it happened, people saw it, voted on it, and commented on it on Pouet, but nobody can find a downloadable file for? Someone will be blamed, because Pouet's customer promise is not being fulfilled? I think being able to link to and comment on entries shown at parties is very useful for the scene, regardless of what some Design Rule from a long time ago might say. The reasoning behind such design rules could be worth re-evaluating.

It's actually the reverse of what your saying - we're re-evaluating the idea that we should be able to comment on something that we have no way of verifying.

I think people's comments are valuable historical records, even if you cannot "verify" stuff at will. Myself, I have sometimes used the commenting facility as a way to tell how I felt about entries at the party place, when the prods were shown, and how it felt to experience them as part of the audience, etc. There's no way to "verify" the party experience, because every party is a unique time-dependent situation that happens only once.

Maybe add a warning sign? WARNING: THIS PROD CANNOT BE VERIFIED. ;)

I think it's a much bigger problem that people don't generally even watch prods anymore, only Youtube videos.

Sure, but then it wasn't long ago when the Still demo from Evoke was posted without having a working download link - that's the most extreme version of this particular scenario.