Recca wrote:
Romhacking.net without a doubt contains a very good collection of patches from across the web. Unfortunately, that's where my praise of the website ends... It's full of random jerk liberals who prefer to curse and argue rather than thanking us for our hard work and the free translations that we provide. You can tell it's bad when the whole general discussion board was removed from RHDN. The staff there is also very biased and unfair. They ignore all the insults of liberals while targeting conservatives like myself for posting their opinions. Or rather, I should say that they're against facts and truth in general.
filler wrote:
I'd appreciate it if political labels were reserved for discussions of politics and political issues, not people who do or do not agree with you on a romhacking board. I highly doubt you're referring to those who disagree with you about societal/govt policies, and if you were, I'd question why you were bringing that up on RHDN.
That said, I'd caution casting too harsh a judgement on folks whose shoes you haven't walked in. I think the staff at RHDN are in a difficult position of having to try to cater to an broad audience of translation hackers, and creative/improvement hackers from around the globe, and an audience that seems less than positive most of the time. I'm fairly impressed it's still going and functioning as well as it is.
Personally I've observed some troubling things about the site and the staff there however. For instance, I was given false, misleading information about policies from someone who seemingly had not been on the site that long, yet was a moderator a number of years ago. I also heard from MrRichard999 that they were banned from the message board, despite the fact that they have been one of the most prolific translation hackers in recent years. I have NO idea what the specifics around that decision/situation were, so I won't make assumptions about the appropriateness of the decision, but suffice to say it FEELS extreme to me. I've noticed some other seemingly heavy handed behavior, and even confronted some staff about it, but as I'm not privy to the details, there's no way to really weigh in on the decisions made.
I'm reluctant to be too hard on RHDN. It's still a great resource, and even still a decent place to network with folks doing this hobby. As nice as individual group sites are, the lack of a centralized community site would be a tremendous blow to the hobby and community. Personally I don't think Nightcrawler's heart is really in it at this point, but it's hard to argue that he and the moderators there haven't maintained a functioning community resource there for over a decade, one that's even grown with the times, and accepted community feedback, despite some probably deserved criticisms. In the same way we're free to write our scripts the way we want to, they're free to run their site the way they want to. The door needs to swing both ways.
Don't get the wrong idea, I never once went off topic there with politics. It was a topic about Donald Trump which existed in the now gone general discussion board. And no, I wasn't the one who began the thread. I believe it was a user named Disch, but that's irrelevant to the story. The point was that some liberal members there were cursing left and right as well as dropping the occasional death threat towards conservative ones. When I pointed this out, I'm the one that got a wag of the finger by a very biased moderator that obviously wasn't doing their job properly. RHDN is a great site with a vast collection of patches, but the staff there is far from the best. Especially in terms of moderation. For example, they banned byuu for no reason at all. Sure, I didn't always agree with his opinions, but I wouldn't ban him over it. I'm certainly that you can't possibly agree with such a decision either. And there have been many other similar cases as well.
Recca wrote:
I was going to submit the Star Ocean: Blue Sphere French translation, but decided not to anymore after seeing the long list that needs to be completed for submissions. And strangely enough, you can only add the credits via editing after the original submission gets approved.
filler wrote:
You're fully entitled to your opinion and to act in whatever way you see fit, but I've never had trouble submitting a patch, nor waiting to add credits until after the patch is accepted. Is it convenient? Not really. Is it usable? Of course. I don't understand folks willing to part the seas to make a hack/translation, who then can't be bothered to follow some guidelines for a submission form.
I have no trouble submitting patches from D-D to RHDN, but I can't do it with from other sites. The reason? Simple, if you right click on a patch here at D-D, it will have a .zip extension. Meanwhile, other sites do not, which RHDN's bot does not accept for some reason, even though the link works perfectly fine. You're welcome to try and submit the French patch of Star Ocean: Blue Sphere yourself at RHDN if you like:
https://traf.romhack.org/?p=patchs&pid=110I feel like I completely wasted my time there as I had completed the entire submission form, yet it didn't except the download link (since it didn't end in a .zip extension). Here's what I mean:
https://traf.romhack.org/get.php?dt=2&ob=110The link works fine to directly download the patch, yet RHDN refuses to accept it. I've given up trying to submit patches there from anywhere but D-D since this site seems to be the only one that actually displays the .zip extension. Good thing too, as I was at least able to submit my three current Romanian patches there. That's good enough for me at least, but it still needs to improve...