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Old Oct 28, 2017, 05:22 AM
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Secret Squirrel Secret Squirrel is offline
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Location: Cleveland, OH
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For, historical perspective, this is the album that started it all, not so much here, but in the community years before VGMdb was around:

http://vgmdb.net/album/1917

And I might as well add my original design intent from 2005

Quote:
5. Content Tags
Really, this is just another field in the database to denote what the album is (see below), though I think that color coding search results based on the content tag might be worthwhile, and that it deserves it’s own toggles on the search panel.

I envision these tags:

Official – An album that was actually commercially sold.

Enclosure – An album that was included in a Game or Magazine, but not sold separately. Note that enclosure CDs sometimes have their own catalogue number.

Dojin – Unofficial album by a fan arrangement group (One-UP Studios counts as this, since it’s unofficial). The key should be that it was commercially released, so Overclocked Remixes do not count. The GMR community has taken a strong stand against Dojins appearing in the database, but in my opinion, they need to be catalogued too.

Works – An original album by a VG Composer that doesn’t come from a game. This includes solo works like Gikyokuonsou as well as omnibus albums like Ten Plants.

Game Animation – Invariably, some game-related anime albums will end up in the database, so this is here to accommodate that. GMR has quite a few anime albums listed, and there are examples of game-related anime soundtracks that are part of purely game catalogue number runs, so I think the category is necessary for completeness.

Demo Scene – This one is questionable, but there are some albums that qualify. Use it for albums of chip tunes or demo scene music, such as GMO Christmas Songs

I wouldn’t advise the inclusion of Game rips or recordings. There might be a case made for Redbook Audio, but I’d put that off until well in the future.

There’s probably a hierarchy that would be enforced here. For example, if an album contained 8 original works by a composer, and 2 from a game, I would probably tag it as an Official, simply because in my mind, Official is more important than any of the other categories.
The only major changes were part of the Visual Arts rebranding.

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Addressing some more specific things, yes I am also concerned that we are covering too much here.

Also, there was a specific complaint that I went back on my statement that we weren't going to cover Sentai music here. I still stand by that statement, however this whole business reveals a flaw in our moderation system, in that trusted editors and staff can do almost whatever they want completely under our radar. Specifically, it looks like Depa added most of those albums in August when most of us in the United States were busy watching the solar eclipse. And then dealing with the normal deluge of crappy anime vocal albums in the regular-member moderation queue, it isn't hard for this stuff to slip through.

My first reaction would be go get rid of the Sentai vocal albums, because the requirements for a vocal album to be eligible as "works" are much higher, and few of those satisfy it. However, they are well submitted and accurate, and that always poses a dilemma because it is hard to find good accurate English language information on some of these. There is also the notion that staff and trusted editors are all leaders here, and many in this very thread have pushed the envelope here (e.g., Effendija with Western Animation).

Some specific ideas
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1. Portals
We've discussed this for a while, even back when anime was first added and proved disruptive. However, no clear design for this feature ever emerged. It is unclear how to make it work well.

2. Restrict non-anime/game submission
I've been considering restricting the ability to submit out-of-scope albums to trusted editors, or maybe just staff. This is an interface challenge though; I don't want someone to do a lot of work completing an album entry, and then push submit only to find out they can't proceed, so it needs a way to prevent it early. Also, this doesn't solve the problem of trusted editors and staff submitting them, like with the Sentai albums. At the very least, submitters should be required to defend their out-of-scope album.

3. Cull (or mass cull) the database.
I don't really want to do this, but it does get the message out there. But, what to delete. Nobody is currently shepherding all that happy hardcore music, which initially had some overlap with doujin music, so do we get rid of that? And the final arbiter should be: "are we better without this album?"

4. Community (or panel) voting on each out-of-scope album
Maybe, but could turn into a mess.

That is where my thoughts are currently, so don't have any solutions yet. I've rejected 3 out-of-scope albums in this weeks moderation cycle. And whatever else happens, please don't start submitting all the DC or Marvel universe soundtracks.
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