Libregamewiki:Community portal

Here is a place to discuss ideas and coordinate improvments to the LibreGameWiki itself.

Please use a number of :-characters at the beginning of your paragraph to indent it. You can sign your edits by using the second but last button in the toolbar.

Feel free to ask questions on this page. By the way, do you know the FAQ and Article policy‎?

How do we make it easier for potential contributors to help?

How can we make it easier for potential contributors to help? Since the beginning of October account creation works without red tape again. This is a great step forward. Is there anything we can do to further improve the articles explaining how to contribute?

Well, for once, we might want to fix the following explanation, which I see whenever I try to create a new page, hours after creating my account: "If you just created a new account, please wait a couple of minutes". :)

[Edit: now I can create the page fine. Thank you.]

It would be great if you could give a rank to users that contribute to wiki, which would save them from long pending periods. Saying that as an amazingly impatient person. --Yutyo (talk)

Its been 2 hours for me and i still cant create a page, can someone change that message? -- Impulse

I remember that there is a restriction related to the User page. You need to have one approved edit before you can create it. Maybe this also applies to all pages in general. Since you now have an approved edit, is it now possible for you to create the page you wanted to create? --Kribbel (talk) 23:00, 31 October 2023 (CET)

Main Page

I think it may be a good idea to have a little paragraph at the top of the main page which explains what LibreGameWiki is.

The front page links to Libregamewiki which is currently outdated, the main page could have a summary with more detail on that page. Kymara (talk) 12:31, 6 October 2012 (CEST)

Shall we have a small "How to contribute?" or "Help wanted" section on the main page which links to the relevant articles? What would it look like?

Yes. It should link to an updated Libregamewiki:Article_policy and List of games Kymara (talk) 12:31, 6 October 2012 (CEST)

There could also be a portal for this in the side bar. Kymara (talk) 12:47, 6 October 2012 (CEST)

Which article should be featured next?

There is quite a number of very good articles. I think we should change the featured article on the main page more frequently to draw attention to them.

Yes, I already asked a recent productive user, GNUbie for his thoughts for the next one. Generally, we should ask the wider community to help choose somehow. Kymara (talk) 12:32, 6 October 2012 (CEST)

In my opinion we should pick a reasonably good article to feature next, and give it a little special attention. The information in the current feature is already years out of date. I'd suggest the Special:LongPages list as a good place to start looking. FreedroidRPG and Globulation 2 are examples which could be easily made into a good feature. Input would be needed from someone who has rights to pick a featured article. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 14:24, 27 December 2021 (CET)

Engines for non-free games with no free games using them

Hi. Should free remakes of engines for non-free games be accepted as free engines, if they have never been (and not necessarily intended to be) used for a playable free game yet? Examples: OpenMW, Enemy Territory: Legacy. --AVRS (talk) 12:35, 28 November 2012 (CET)

My two pence: I'd class those as free engines. Their use case is irrelevant, and it could be considered as a matter of timing, for example: a free engine which was created and then later used for a non-free game doesn't make the engine non-free.Kymara (talk) 12:46, 28 November 2012 (CET)

There is already OpenMoHAA, so I guess other non-free game engine recreations are allowed as well. Matthias (talk) 10:56, 26 January 2021 (CET)

I'll let you guys figure out what "should" be done, but I can make the distinction more blurry! :). There *is* a open source game that uses OpenMW as it's engine. The game is openmw-template described in here in the faq. However, the game isn't actually *fun* to a point that some people might say it's not actually a game. (However, I don't think the game has to be fun to be listed here) 2023-01-30

Game articles redirecting to genre list

I'm seeing odd behavior. If I try to go to the following articles:

• https://libregamewiki.org/Freedroid_RPG
• https://libregamewiki.org/PARPG

I get redirected to the RPG genre page:

https://libregamewiki.org/Role-playing_games

If I use non-rewrite links, however, they seem to work.

• https://libregamewiki.org/index.php?title=Freedroid_RPG
• https://libregamewiki.org/index.php?title=PARPG

Could there perhaps be an error in the URL rewriting rules?

--Cov (talk) 22:33, 31 August 2013 (CEST)

Thank you for the report. I fixed it. --Hendrik Brummermann (talk) 17:04, 8 September 2013 (CEST)

License Choice

The CC-BY is a non-copyleft license, and unless I'm mistaken, the GFDL is a copyleft license, which is why CC-BY-SA was chosen for Wikipedia when it dual-licensed to make it compatible with other CC sites. If I'm correct, this wiki is currently under two licenses which contradict each other on the question of copyleft, which is confusing. Why wasn't the CC-BY-SA license chosen for LGW? This would allow relevant to content to be imported from and exported to Wikipedia and other CC-BY-SA sites (with appropriate attribution of course). --Strypey (talk) 08:04, 11 January 2014 (CET)

The CC-BY was chosen to make it easy for third parties to use content from LibreGameWiki. The GFDL was considered non-free by Debian and Debian is quite an authority as the Open Source Definition is based on Debian guidelines. It was kept as alternative to make it easy to copy content from LibreGameWiki to Wikipedia. Wikipedia and the FSF later pulled a stunt of releasing a new version of the GFDL with the Lex Wikipedia clause, allowing Wikipedia to move to a completely different license. LGW content, however, was licensed as GFDL 1.2 without the backdoor "or later". And personally, after this stunt, I don't think "or later" is a good idea at all. --Gamfan (talk) 08:16, 11 January 2014 (CET)

For the record, the change to the GFDL was made to allow Wikipedia (and other multi-collaborator works) to dual-license with CC-BY-SA, which is identical to the GFDL where it counts (eg attribution, copyleft), although it happens to lacks the "invariant sections" and "transparency" terms that made Debian declare the GFDL non-free. Both CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are free culture licenses: http://creativecommons.org/freeworks Practically speaking, the purpose of having a wiki under a license is to inform the user about what they can and can't do with its contents. The GFDL tells the user they must put derivative works under the same license (copyleft), while the CC-BY says they don't. This is confusing. Can I use sections of LGW within an ARR (All-Rights-Reserved) work or not? Is this wiki copyleft, or it isn't? If it is copyleft, shouldn't the CC-BY-SA needs to be used to let the user know that? If it isn't copyleft, shouldn't the GFDL be dropped to make this clear? --Strypey (talk) 05:49, 12 January 2014 (CET)

It is very simple: If you you contribute to LibreGameWiki, you must license your work as CC-BY und GFDL. If you want to use content from LGW, you can pick the license you want to comply with. Please keep in mind that copyleft is only one of the difference between the licenses (please read the full text of both licenses to learn about other demands required by each of the licenses). --Gamfan (talk) 13:21, 12 January 2014 (CET)

I intended to answer, but I got an edit conflict earlier. Anyway, some points:

• Being CC-BY licensed, this wiki's text can be contributed to Wikipedia if properly attributed: see CC FAQ and Wikipedia copyright FAQ.
• Wikipedia is not entirely dual-licensed: all of it is available under CC-BY-SA (except the fairly used stuff). On the other hand, the GFDL does not necessarily apply to text added after the project voted to use the CC license - you have to check this yourself if you'd like to use a Wikipedia article under the GFDL.

I'm pretty sure this is incorrect. When I edit Wikipedia it says "By clicking the "Save page" button, you agree to the Terms of Use and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the CC BY-SA 3.0 License *and* the GFDL..." (emphasis mine) --Strypey (talk) 10:50, 6 November 2015 (CET)

• As I recall, Debian only considers the GFDL non-free if there are invariant sections involved, see this vote. What is the problematic "transparency" term?
• The lack of a "or later" clause precludes our stuff from being used in the Free Software Directory. This may be a pity, because their goal is rather similar to ours. -- StevenDH (talk) 19:40, 12 January 2014 (CET)

Is the copyright in LGW content owned by the original author(s) or the project? If there was a consensus among all LGW copyright holders, the content could be relicensed under any license they choose. This would not revoke previous licenses on the same content, but would apply to all existing content, and only the new license would apply to new content. As I said initially, I can't see the benefit of using CC-BY for a collaborative reference wiki, and I think CC-BY-SA would be a better choice, as it means any improvements made in derivative works are available to be backported into LGW. --Strypey (talk) 10:50, 6 November 2015 (CET)

Libregamewiki uses an invalid security certificate

Hi, I do not know if the Community portal is the right place to report this type of problem. But I have not been able to find any better place.

When connecting to libregamewiki, some web-browsers (Mozilla based: firefox, iceweasel, icecat, seamonkey etc.) displays a warning page stating "This Connection is Untrusted". I have tested this on several computers with several browsers with both GNU/Linux and Windows OS, so it seems to be a problem that applies to everyone that uses these browsers.

The following details are given:

-libregamewiki.org uses an invalid security certificate.

-The certificate is not trusted because no issuer chain was provided.

-(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

--Hurdman (talk) 15:34, 8 February 2015 (CET)

As of March 21, 2015 this problem no longer occurs. I am guessing that the security certificate has been updated. --Hurdman (talk) 14:06, 21 March 2015 (CET)

A few things: Thanks for fighting spam

Hopefully the Argentinian/Brazilian wiki spammers have no places left...

I am inquiring about the Public Domain version of Rogue, and the BSD version of Rogue.

I posess a copy of the Public Domain version of Rogue, and have screen shots of the screens, which wikisneeripedia seems not able to read 'Public Domain."

If need be, I can contact either Michael Toy or Glenn Wichman ( who published the sources to the PC Version/Commercial version) about verifying the public domain version is indeed the public domain version.

Article looks like ... data corruption?!

The article SDL_games is messed up. Even the old version that was ok some months ago is ... corrupted? --Gegxt (talk) 16:52, 27 July 2015 (CEST)

Could you specify what looks corrupted? To me the article looks fine. LibreGamer (talk) 17:46, 31 July 2015 (CEST)

Now I see it. It was only visible if one views the article after logging in. When not logged in the article looks fine. LibreGamer (talk) 17:46, 31 July 2015 (CEST)

I fixed the template, thanks for the hint. --Hendrik Brummermann (talk) 19:18, 31 July 2015 (CEST)

I can confirm the fix. Thanks for fixing. (section can be deleted / archived) --Gegxt (talk) 14:38, 8 August 2015 (CEST)

Copying from Wikipedia

I note the warning at the bottom of edit pages not to copy from Wikipedia. I'm assuming this is out of date, as Wikipedia is now dual-licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0? If so, it would be good to remove that warning, as there is a lot of useful material about libre games that could be imported to this wiki.

This is particularly important in view of the massive pruning of Wikipedia that appears to be going on, with many articles being deleted on the basis that their subject is not "notable" enough to have a page in an Encyclopedia. This problem has disturbed Wikipedians enough that one (or a group?) has set up the SpeedyDeletion wiki to rescue pages before they are removed, in case their contents are still of interest to other wikis like this one. --Strypey (talk) 06:17, 6 October 2015 (CEST)

Hi there. I'm afraid the warning has to remain as this wiki is cc-by or gfdl and wikipedia is cc-by-sa. (If you combine those cc license, the end result is the stricter of those, i.e. the one used by wikipedia) GNUbie (talk) 13:59, 12 October 2015 (CEST)

Oops! I didn't notice the lack of the "SA" part of the LGW license when I made this post, and I totally forgot I already started a discussion about license choice further up. As I said there, all Wikipedia content is licensed under both CC-BY-SA *and* GPFDL. If content was imported from Wikipedia, it would have to be marked as such, to indicate that it can't not be used under CC-BY. --Strypey (talk) 10:40, 6 November 2015 (CET)

Posting images

Hi!

  I try to help someone to edit his game's page. Yesterday, his IP was block cause abuse (probably tried to much html lines to make edit as he wanted). I looked all around your site to understand how to post an image through your site, and choose categories for his game, but found nothing about it. Is there somewhere an option to make it directly?
  -How upload an image on your site (I think it will be ok to post it on the edit of the game's page, but would be appreciated to have the exact html line to be sure)
  -How to add categories for a game.

P.S.: maybe there is an error on the chat... you let us know that we can connect as guest, but all times I tried, this don't work, cause I don't have a nickname.

Thanks a lot in advance for your help!

Answers could be send to tricotvanille2003@hotmail.com, or directly to the member Electro l.i.b

Spam & blocking users/IP

On the "Recent changes" page, I see there's a lot of spam-fighting going on. It's good that LGW is being valiantly defended against the incessant spam bots, but I think the Abuse filter is sometimes a little quick to block well meaning users. The anonymous user recently working on the Liberated Pixel Cup page, and two weeks ago even the registered user Lanadapter got on the block list, presumably because they made a series of small edits in a short time. Would it be possible to differentiate a bit better between real editors and spammer, so that we don't turn down actual contributors (while keeping the spam out, of course)? -- StevenDH (talk) 15:24, 14 February 2017 (CET)

Lists and categories

Wouldn't be better to direct the reader to categories of games, instead of lists of games by genre, like Roguelike games? The list can get easily outdated.

Board games page broken

When I'm logged in, I can see an up-to-date version of Board games, but when I'm not logged in, I can only see a very old version from 2013. Could the reason be that this page was protected in 2012? If yes, could you remove the protection or ensure otherwise that the autogeneration by the bot works again and the generated page is visible to all users? Thanks --Blokusguy (talk) 07:42, 29 July 2017 (CEST)

How to add a game?

1. Please create an account with mail adress and confirm that you own the mail adress. The create account link is also available in the upper right corner. There may be traps against spammer. Read the pages after sending a request for login creation or changing a page!
2. Read the Article policy and other articles from Get involved
3. Make sure you are logged in and in the "Autoconfirmed users" group. Details can be found on your Preferences page.
4. Enter the title of the new page in the search box in the upper right corner and search for it. Before the search results, if there are some, there is a bold line with "Create the page "Example game name" on this wiki!" (I searched for "Example game name"). The "Example game name" is a link for creating a new page. If this line doesn't appear, make sure you clicked the confirmation link in the confirmation mail.
5. When creating a new page, there are links to templates for games, humans and redirects above the big text box. Click on a template before entering text.
6. If the link to the game home page isn't shown in the text add a == External Links == section with the URL

Unable to auto confirm account

I can't create pages add I'm a member of group Users but not Auto confirmed Users. I didn't receive a confirmation message. I tried changing my email address but still no. Can you resend a confirmation message or confirm my account? Thanks! Eagle

I'm now an Auto Confirmed Users group, not sure how that happened exactly. --Eagle (talk) 18:56, 27 January 2018 (CET)

The same happened to me. -- Nudin (talk) 20:37, 19 January 2019 (CET)

I have the same problem. I can't autoconfirm. Could you send me a confirmation email? thanks,

qbancoffee

I can't autoconfirm as well. Can you send a confirmation email or confirm my account? Thanks! -- Bitsplit

Same here. dettus

The autoconfirmed status is not related to email confirmation, but to the number of approved edits in the mail article namespace. --Hendrik Brummermann (talk) 21:39, 5 May 2022 (CEST)

This section requires a cleanup to clarify the steps a user needs to take in order to be assigned to the Auto-confirmed users group.

How to add games to genre listings?

How to add a game to the genre listings page, Educational games and GPL games? Or does that happen on its own after the game has been added to the appropriate category? Thank you! :) --Eagle (talk) 18:55, 27 January 2018 (CET)

Yes, those pages are periodically generated based on the categories. --Hendrik Brummermann (talk) 00:01, 27 February 2018 (CET)

Vandalism

Hi!

I think contributions by 95.70.132.254 should be mass reverted (and maybe this IP blocked). —2A01:CB11:421:F500:6E5E:2123:F965:8FC4 02:02, 26 November 2018 (CET)

That IP was banned and all vandalism reverted --Hendrik Brummermann (talk) 22:14, 27 November 2018 (CET)

It's being vadalized every day from a different IP. They completely mess up the game tables. Can we do something about it? Better filters/bots? Disallow anonymous edits? Drummyfish (talk) 21:56, 23 December 2018 (CET)

Looking at the Recent Changes, it appears the wave of one-letter vandals has been stopped, right? Cheers to that! --StevenDH (talk) 23:09, 14 March 2019 (CET)

Version updates from Wikidata?

New versions come all the time and it's tedious to update manually. Wikidata might have many of the items here and could get updated more often than LGW. Their data is in the public domain. Can somebody figure out how to incorporate it automagically? That would help keeping up to date also the recent releases box on the front page of LGW. --GNUbie (talk) 11:51, 22 January 2019 (CET)

Wikidata:Notability requires that a page exists in one of its sister projects and Wikipedia:Notability (video games) is much stricter than what can be included in Libregamewiki. I doubt that using Wikidata would help much with keeping the list of new releases up-to-date. --Blokusguy (talk) 13:18, 10 February 2019 (CET)

Wiki page existence is not the only criterion for notability. F/OSS games fall under at least the second one ("clearly identifiable conceptual or material entity" which "can be described using serious and publicly available references"), and in many cases the third one ("it is needed to make statements made in other items more useful"), when it can be linked to the author. --AMDmi3 (talk) 21:05, 28 October 2019 (CET)

Additionally, LGW is in most cases a 'serious and publically-available reference'. Arlo James Barnes (talk) 09:26, 23 January 2020 (CET)

It could help with popular projects like OpenTTD which also have a Wikipedia page and update frequently. Matthias (talk) 15:04, 7 February 2021 (CET)

Duplicated reference names break genre pages

Problem: I.e. Category:Pages with reference errors (yes red link but still go ahead and click!). Open one of those list articles and scroll down to the bottom of the page where the references are to see the errors with the similarly named references between the included articles.

Solutions?: Perhaps the references could be somehow removed from the genre list articles? Of course the silly solution would be to manually edit the articles to change ref names... but that's a lot of work and not exactly future proof. --GNUbie (talk) 14:19, 25 January 2019 (CET)

Machine readable dump of wikidata entries metadata

For the Repology project, I need a complete list of all games with their versions, homepages and preferably other metadata. Among other this this would allow to discover more outdated version information in LGW and also to link (example) Wikidata entries to LGW.

Currently, Repology parses New_games_and_releases page, however it does not seem to contain all entries. For instance, BZFlag, Colobot, Freeciv are missing despide they fulfill the requirements listed at the buttom of New games page.

It would be great if all conforming games would be listed on that page, even better if there's an extra special page which lists all entries with latest release defined, probably in more parsing friendly format (e.g., a table, or even better an XML/JSON file).

--AMDmi3 (talk) 21:24, 28 October 2019 (CET)

You can query the database with {{#databasequery:gamelist|Wikitable|Game list header|Game list row|%}}. This will render a table with all games (% is a wildcard) with the Template:Game list header as table header and Template:Game list row as table row. In the second template all variables defined in the Gameinfo box can be used. Both templates are used on List of games, but you can create your own template. Colobot was on the list. BZFlag and Freeciv showed up after I edited the article and saved it without changes. I am not sure why that happened. --Hendrik Brummermann (talk) 22:28, 18 November 2019 (CET)

Pending review

What is the policy on "pending review" edits? I mean, after how many edits is a user free to edit without supervision. Checking your work while you commit it (especially if it is multistaged, as in "add image + add new article") is very useful. Ffa (talk) 09:57, 17 December 2019 (CET)

I also don't understand why you still think I am a spam bot. Saving an article and not seeing any result is a terrible user experience. Another problem: this creates broken links because the articles get aggregated on the front page, but both image and article are unavailable. Matthias (talk) 09:43, 16 February 2022 (CET)

I have been granted rights to edit without review after a significant number of edits. My personal opinion is that LGW would receive better content by following the recommended best practice, which is to have edits automatically accepted as soon as there is enough evidence to see that a user is a real person (or at least a real person making helpful edits). If the user then misbehaves, consequences can be applied. The way it is currently takes a heavy toll on the patience of new users who might give up even before creating an account. This skews the ratio of spammers to users over time, where I have to invoke the law of unintended consequences: It could well be making moderation harder in the long term by making helpful edits a smaller percentage of the total. I don't make the rules; I am merely a guest here. I hope that our gracious host would find the suggestion helpful and consider it. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 15:48, 17 February 2022 (CET)

Wouldn't it be a good idea to summarize what was written here, here and here in the past days and write this down for interested contributers to find, maybe in the classroom/Help/FAQ? Kribbel (talk) 19:22, 22 October 2022 (CEST)

Excellent point. You've just noticed that our most common question is not addressed in the classroom. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 18:39, 23 October 2022 (CEST)

And see how eager everyone is to write something :-P No rush, I just did. Corrections and clarifications are welcome. Kribbel (talk) 17:12, 18 November 2022 (CET)

Not easy to contribute to the wiki

I opened a thread on freegamedev forum, I will link to it here too so to hopefully get more replies. thread. Ffa (talk) 16:39, 20 March 2020 (CET)

Hey Ffa! I completely understand your frustration. However there has been a problem with spammers so LGW was forced to adopt some kind of a solution to deal with them. I think this is a reasonable compromise. Certainly not perfect but I think the Powers That Be are open for improvement suggestions. Thank you for the contributions and this feedback. --GNUbie (talk) 15:40, 19 March 2020 (CET)

Excellent! My suggestion would be: when a user "collects" N edits and has been a member for T time, upgrade their status to "no review required". This might be automatic or (even better) on request of the user themselves. I admit I have zero wiki experience, so I don't know if this is viable. Ffa (talk) 16:39, 20 March 2020 (CET)

But it doesn't work properly. Trying to upload an image I get "Please click the save button again. This helps us fight spam", so I click again and get the same message again. Honestly, I'm trying to help and contribute but you make it really, REALLY hard. There *must* be a better way than the complete faff you've made it at the moment.

I don't know how it works exactly but I think it uses cookies, allowing those? Please sign your comments with ~~~~. --GNUbie (talk) 14:00, 22 July 2020 (CEST)

File uploading does not work very well. I had the same problem and it started working randomly after a few days. And the same thing happened to other users. Some even had to ask me to upload the images. Rampoina (talk) 14:13, 22 July 2020 (CEST)

Free engines with no existing free games

Hi, I'd like to ask about this. I see the OpenMW article was deleted on the basis that it requires the original game files. However my understanding from the article policy is that engines are allowed on Libre Game Wiki even if there are no games for them--and so the question is probably obvious. It is possible to run a total conversion mod on OpenMW with no use of the proprietary data. There are as I understand it some example games in development but nothing concrete. The newer versions of the construction kit can, as I understand it, also create these games standalone without any use of the proprietary Bethesda software. Would it not be appropriate to create an article on the engine? FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 18:54, 8 December 2020 (CET)

I should add just in case: Yes, there is discussion on OpenMW higher up on the page but it mostly doesn't apply here because that was before the page was deleted and OpenMW has changed considerably. Improvements to the Costruction Set are particularly relevant. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 17:49, 10 December 2020 (CET)

Moderation policy

Anyone care to explain the moderation policy? Normal recommended practice for mediawiki is to not send every edit from users known to be real people for moderation. I can understand if that is necessary on LGW due to high spam levels. If edits that I made just sit there and don't appear, while edits from other users continue to show up approved day by day, I have no way of knowing if something is wrong. There's no log, no queue visible to me, no rejection notice, nothing. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 16:32, 27 December 2020 (CET)

Looks like somebody flagged you as spammer. I have now removed this flag. Your old contributions cannot be automatically accepted anymore. --GNUbie (talk) 07:32, 3 February 2021 (CET)

Thank you, that helped. It may have been due to my recording a large number of very similar small edits adding repository info to pages, perhaps it was even automatic (due to the same edit summary). This thing with the old contributions is a little bit of a mess since now when I edit a page it remembers my version which isn't up to date (e.g. when making this edit I have to manually add your and another comment back in). But it is workable. I hope I don't accidentally delete someone's edit at some point in future by forgetting/negligence. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 16:56, 4 February 2021 (CET)

I have exactly the same problem. Regards Matthias (talk) 09:59, 6 February 2021 (CET)

I also have this issue. I haven't really done many things so far, but in regards to what I have submitted I feel like I've waited long enough for some sign of acknowledgement, whether that be of rejection or approval. Don't take this as some sort of rage-filled hitting out at the mods. It's just that my patience has become somewhat tested and I've been a bit confused about this for the past couple days. LibreJacket (talk) 21:37, 2 October 2022 (CEST)

Distro logos

Hi, I thought it good that we should add FreeBSD to the list of platforms. The FreeBSD logo is, however, a bit of a grey area w.r.t. the media policy on LGW. (To an extent so are the other distro logos because they are trademarks.) On Wikipedia, for example we see here that the copyright and trademark issues restrict it to fair usage based on the necessity of using the trademark as a trademark. What's the attitude over here? Do we upload an SVG of the logo and mark it as not under the same licence as the rest of LGW? Do we just leave it blank? Let it default to some kind of "media not allowed" image? FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 16:45, 6 February 2021 (CET)

Can't upload images

I recently created an article for my game but I couldn't upload images. In the upload popup I have selected the image to upload, filled the name and description, but when I click Save, there's an error telling to click again (message about fighting bots), but when I click again the same thing happens, no matter how many times I click... How can I upload some images for my game's article? Victords (talk) 11:01, 17 February 2021 (CET)

Hi! Thanks for your game and the article! I don't know what is wrong, perhaps it's related to cookies? Please sign your messages with ~~~~. --GNUbie (talk) 09:25, 17 February 2021 (CET)

Thanks! I was able to upload it in another browser (it now showed a message about going to moderation). Will I be notified somehow when the image is approved? Sorry about not signing, this is my first time using a wiki. Victords (talk) 11:01, 17 February 2021 (CET)

I don't know if you will get notified but I just approved your uploads. No worries and welcome to the wiki world! --GNUbie (talk) 14:01, 17 February 2021 (CET)

I get "Internal error: Server failed to store temporary file." so I think it is a technical problem. Matthias (talk) 12:54, 7 March 2021 (CET)

Game only shows up in category page when logged in

Hi, I created a page for my game Super Bombinhas about a month ago and it is marked as Platform game. When I visit the "Platform Games" page anonymously, my game doesn't show up. However, when I access it logged in , the game does show up. The game page itself appears normally for anonyous users. Can someone help? Thanks. Victords (talk) 23:29, 14 March 2021 (CET)

Fixed by following https://libregamewiki.org/Platform_games?action=purge --AVRS (talk) 14:18, 15 March 2021 (CET)

Games without fixed releases

I've been wondering how to deal with games such as Space Nerds in Space, which deserves an entry but has no official release numbers anywhere that I can find. In other words it's just a repository and basically works by rolling release. Any ideas? FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 18:18, 30 May 2021 (CEST)

Not really an answer to your question, but still...
There's a new page for The night wolves attacked the mountain village of Venzone, where no "latest release" is filled into the Gameinfo template. That seems to work, but it renders the release date inside a <pre> in the overview of recent releases. -- 16:58, 17 August 2021 (CEST)

Game info template

Does anyone understand why Template:Gameinfo will properly display the homepage link for some games but not others? "|link homepage(some spaces)=" works in e.g. Naev but does not work for most of the new games we add. I've noticed that the template is sensitive to plural vs. singular (e.g. "|platform =" must be one and "|platforms =" for multiple) and we have a lot of pages to clean up in that respect. Homepage, on the other hand, I don't understand. The template code looks normal though I'm not that good at mediawiki—just can't get it working. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 17:50, 10 January 2022 (CET)

I took this up here Kribbel (talk) 22:50, 8 November 2022 (CET)

[Suggestion] Use Repology-powered badges

Being Repology a packaging monitor par excellence, it can be useful as an info about which Linux distros (and, more generally, package repositories) contain a certain game.

Article about game on wikipedia

Hello, I created an article about the game Rabbit Escape on wikipedia [1] but it will be the draft article to end. It is better than article about this game on this site. If it interests you, you can copy it

Adopt F-Droid's system of tagging anti-features

I am proposing to adopt F-Droid's system of tagging anti-features https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features

Through the years I have witnessed a disturbing trend of developer-developer, developer-user and user-user communication in libre games leaving libre services for proprietary ones. These services are mostly GitHub and Discord.

Examples of tags would be

• "promotes non-free network services" when the game includes links to Github/Discord on their homepage and/or in the game itself.
• "promotes non-free addons" when the game integrates with Discord/Steam.

-- ThinkSome 8 February 2022‎

SourceForge is also non-free, same as BitBucket. Launchpad isn't and itch.io the server also isn't Open Source. Of course, Twitter is non-free. You might as well tag every game on here because they link something that is not a libre web service. I think "promotes" is also a weak argument. If the feature is optional or can even be completely turned off by not compiling against libdiscord-rpc how is that an anti-feature? It doesn't restrict anybody. It is a feature for players, but definitely not an anti-feature like ads or microtransactions. Matthias (talk) 12:23, 20 February 2022 (CET)

To use an example from that linked FDroid page, "Tracking - tracks and/or reports your activity to somewhere, even when it can be turned off" -- so being optional or not is less the point than that the user may end up restricting their freedom without intending to. That said, I am in favour of such labelling but only if presented in an informational, non-hostile manner. I agree that purity politics beyond the basic Four Freedoms is beside the point of the wiki, but I also think it's something (potential) players would be interested in knowing. For instance, ThinkSome mentioned Discord; perhaps there could be a standard 'social' article section or infobox to articles listing places to chat, LFG, or otherwise hang out with other players/devs (right now this sort of info is under the Development section of template:gameinfo), and nonfree venues are marked with a warning sign that has an explanation on hover/click. This way it doesn't seem like a contextless statement. Arlo James Barnes (talk) 08:42, 24 March 2022 (CET)

I agree, also, that will tag libregamewiki as recommending freegamedev which contains google analytics. Id really like them to remove google analytics for me to use them.. 94.187.228.231 16:08, 4 April 2022 (CEST)

Double Damnation

Unfortunately this game uses non-free assets and is therefore not acceptable, unless there is a stripped version available. --Hendrik Brummermann (talk) 08:09, 2 September 2022 (CEST)

License of images / screenshots

According to Classroom and Article policy I have to put images I upload under a free license. Are these (suggested) pretty hidden rules added by Driss 21:29, 26 January 2008 valid? Do the licenses of elements in the screenshot influence what license I'm allowed to choose? How do I decide about the license of an image or screenshot I made of a game? Kribbel (talk) 13:22, 19 November 2022 (CET)

To a first approximation, yes. Screenshot guidelines for LGW already specify that we should show only the game itself and not include window borders, which takes care of the skin problem for games I can think of. There should rarely (never?) be any reason for the screenshot to include anything which isn't displayed as part of the game per se, which means everything would have to be free since game assets have to be free per LGW policy.

An image of artwork is a derivative work of said artwork. Hence any screenshot or video of a game is at least to an extent a derivative work of the game assets displayed. Note that even text games would qualify—assuming the text is long enough to be copyrightable. There's a little bit of leeway where you might have to claim fair use. E.g. if a game contains two textures of which one is CC-BY-SA 3.0 and the other GPLv2, both are free but not compatible. The screenshot containing both is a hornets' nest, since it is a derivative of two works under incompatible licenses. Here I'd blame nobody claiming an exception under fair use (US law, no impact on value and for education and review purposes) but perhaps our host might disagree.

In my uploads I simply state that the assets displayed have their licences as indicated in the game repository and don't claim rights for the screenshot. The composition normally also confers copyright, but then the licence I chose would have to be compatible with the asset licence(s) so Public Domain removes a headache. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 16:50, 23 November 2022 (CET)

Oh, and one more thing: There's the can of worms that I would be opening by noting that fonts are art. Ouch. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 16:54, 23 November 2022 (CET)

What's the oldest game on this wiki?

What's the oldest game on this wiki? Asking for a sloooow YouTube project... 181.64.202.209 17:11, 29 November 2022 (CET)

When is a game “the oldest game”? The first game article created or the game whose programming started first or the game whose public release happened first or...? Kribbel (talk) 18:06, 30 November 2022 (CET)

Oldest game released publicly was what I was interested in. Thank you.181.64.202.209 19:08, 30 November 2022 (CET)

I somehow doubt that this question can be answered with the information on this wiki. Alone for the reason that not necessarily all releases of a game are or were written down. For some games there are pages with release history, for some the release history is in the game article, and for some (probably the most) there simply isn't one, because only the last release has been deemed interesting. And even if there would be, the information would have to be somehow gathered and compared. But maybe someone is able to surprise both of us with an answer. Kribbel (talk) 21:37, 30 November 2022 (CET)

Probably Adventure. It's one of the very first computer games (sometimes falsely called first) but in those days they were often copied around without any licence, which generally disqualifies games for LGW. Eric Raymond managed to get a licence for the 1995 version which makes it a very early game on here—if we consider the early versions which date even from the mid-70's. The version which was already being marketed as the "original" by 1981 was being copied around since 1976. FacelessLinuxUser (talk) 20:40, 8 December 2022 (CET)

Automatic &action=purge for important lists

IMHO the section Recently released games on the main page (info probably connected to New_games_and_releases) and the Genre menu at the top of most pages are probably the main ways people explore Libregamewiki and use to access articles. Sadly from my observations those lists don't update automatically. One has to purge the lists manually. And additionally the lists to purge are different for logged in users and not logged in users (Different storage areas / caches?). This means when one purges the list when logged in, it only updates for logged in users. For those not logged in it stays not updated. This is especially problematic because most visitors of LibreGameWiki will certainly access the lists not logged in because they even don't own an account. For example the list Board games which I probably purged after making changes to OpenKropki on 2022-11-11 by adding categories.

• Differences when logged in and not on 2022-12-06
• 

  Everything looks fine at the bottom of the list Board games when logged in.

• 

  All the old errors caused by references not using unique names are still visible when not logged in.

• 

  Pentobi has the release date 2022-01-21 and OpenKropki 2020-11-19 when logged in.

• 

  Pentobi has the release date 2021-12-05 and OpenKropki isn't even there when not logged in.

I therefore think that LibreGameWiki would benefit from a little program that regularly purges those lists automatically for logged in and not logged in users. The section Recently released games or respectively the list New games and releases should be purged at least daily while for the (other) lists in Genre menu a longer period would be sufficient, a week, a fortnight or maybe even a month. Kribbel (talk) 17:18, 8 December 2022 (CET)

The server side HTML cache for Main Page, New games and releases, List of games is deleted every night at 1:12 server time. In addition to that, pages are cached in your browser. --Hendrik Brummermann (talk) 00:19, 9 December 2022 (CET)

Leaving the lists aside for now because Hendrik Brummermann didn't mention them and List of games also, because I didn't check it. The Main Page and New games and releases seem to work pretty fine for logged in users. But when not logged in/visiting as a guest they don't seem to.

The last change displayed for them seems to be the edit to FreedroidRPG by StevenDH on 2023-01-23. The next relevant change is the new page Tanks of Freedom II by Kribbel on 2023-01-25. This one and all those done after it are now shown for not logged in users/guests. This time I can rule out my browser cache or my perception as possible reason for this. So I think something is not working properly. But maybe I'm the only one affected by this. Could anybody please confirm or reject seeing those differences I see! Thanks! --Kribbel (talk) 11:53, 4 February 2023 (CET)

New release LBreakoutHD

https://sourceforge.net/p/lgames/news/2023/12/lbreakouthd-115-released/

You are very much invited to update such information directly in the games' articles. --Kribbel (talk) 10:00, 9 December 2023 (CET)

Can I create translation pages for existing articles on this wiki?

Can I create translation pages for existing articles on this wiki，like I did on ArchWiki? If I could, how would I create？

Note:I am not a native English speaker, my expression may be wrong, please understand.Thank you.

LibreGameWiki administration

Is there a page describing how this wiki is hosted and backed up? --Fiver (talk) 21:29, 16 September 2024 (CEST)