Please can we separate the fictional skins in the user downloads

[Rudel_chw]

5 minutes ago, Tippis said:

They do if you require them to and subject them to even the slightest bit of curating.

 

Really? .. someone spends hours creating a skin for FREE, and we can only think about curating their work?  If I were a skin author, this thread would for sure have me thinking about deleting all my files and forgetting with sharing them with such an ungrateful community. 

Personally, I don't use wildly fictional skins, but have no trouble at all skipping them when browsing for new skins .. it isnt hard, try it.

[SharpeXB]

There are 8,466 skins in the user files section. I’m sure somebody could volunteer to research and catalog all of them
 

Although this was actually done in another sim. They were categorized and made available as official DLC. Honestly it’s the only way to make this sort of content usable. Otherwise forget just about it.

Edited December 5, 2021 by SharpeXB

[Furiz]

1 hour ago, Rudel_chw said:

 

Really? .. someone spends hours creating a skin for FREE, and we can only think about curating their work?  If I were a skin author, this thread would for sure have me thinking about deleting all my files and forgetting with sharing them with such an ungrateful community.

 

Why?

Wouldn't you like your work to be catalogued and sorted? It is a mess there tbh

[Tippis]

1 hour ago, Rudel_chw said:

Really? .. someone spends hours creating a skin for FREE, and we can only think about curating their work?

Yes, really. Because that needs to happen no matter what. In fact, it is already happening, just through the worst means possible — popularity and downloads, which tell you nothing about the actual quality of the piece or even if it works. In fact, given the long history of the archives, how long some things have been in there to rack up those stats, and how much has changed in all that time, it is often more likely that anything with a high download count does not actually work any more.

There are tools available that will try to automate the process of figuring out how to make obsolete downloads work with the current livery mechanisms, but the fact that a tool is even needed for that is a good sign that the cleanup should happen sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more horrid the cleaning process will become.

1 hour ago, Rudel_chw said:

If I were a skin author, this thread would for sure have me thinking about deleting all my files and forgetting with sharing them with such an ungrateful community. 

…and nothing of value would be lost and no-one would care.

If you cannot take the 0.5s to tick a box, and be willing to have someone (individual or via crowd mechanics) decide whether or not that tick was accurate or not, then your work is massively likely to be a shoddy rushjob made by some diva with no capability of improvement and/or being critiqued. If you do good work, take pride in that work, and want as many as possible to find and enjoy it without having to wade through all kinds of uncontrolled and uncurated random noise, you'd be happy that those mechanics exist to help your customer base find your stuff.

Edited December 5, 2021 by Tippis

[Rudel_chw]

5 minutes ago, Tippis said:

help your customer base find your stuff.

customer base? ... they are free, what customer are you talking about?

[Tippis]

Just now, Rudel_chw said:

customer base? ... they are free, what customer are you talking about?

Even free things have customers.

[Boosterdog]

1 hour ago, Rudel_chw said:

 

Really? .. someone spends hours creating a skin for FREE, and we can only think about curating their work?  If I were a skin author, this thread would for sure have me thinking about deleting all my files and forgetting with sharing them with such an ungrateful community. 

Personally, I don't use wildly fictional skins, but have no trouble at all skipping them when browsing for new skins .. it isnt hard, try it.

Firstly, I have been a skin maker for a long time. When I was active in other sims I never made skins for adoration. I made them because I was good at it, I enjoyed sharing and I learned thngs about digital art and history. I appreciated any effort to have the skins in a ordered repository.  I know how long it takes to make something well and I know how it takes schlap some graphics onto a base template. I am greatful for the skinners. I have a lot of their work, fictional and historic.  

This thread was prompted by the time it took me to find a specific F14 skin. A skin I could have given up even looking for in the 46 pages of skins for that single module if I didnt know for sure it existed. Of those 46 pages, at least half are made up of fictional skins. I know the F14 is a special case with its lack of tactical numbering but , in modules, those skins lurking in the middle of the page set may get overlooked. 

Sometimes however, I just want a fun skin. Like the garbage truck A10 or the Crumpet Wagon Mil 8. Now I have the opposite problem - Now I hve to scroll though pages of really great historic and fictional skins to find the "fun" skin. 

Its not about what I think deserves to be posted. Im not adverse to fictional and fun skins. Its about ease of finding it. Fictional or otherwise. 

Finally - no it isnt hard - but it could be better. 

[upyr1]

2 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

Impossible to do really, since the skin creators in most all cases don’t follow or update these. 

For new skins you make the real, fictional radio button mandatory for older skins you give a warning and after some time has passed hide them.   

[upyr1]

1 hour ago, Rudel_chw said:

customer base? ... they are free, what customer are you talking about?

The people trying to look for the awesomely goofy garbage truck skin. 

Edited December 5, 2021 by upyr1

[Boosterdog]

16 minutes ago, upyr1 said:

The people trying to look for the awesomely goofy garbage truck skin. 

 

I found it BTW - after trawling though endless historic skins!  

If there was only a way of cutting those out so we could just get to the goofy gold....

[Rudel_chw]

4 minutes ago, Boosterdog said:

I found it BTW - after trawling though endless historic skins!  

I found it in 5 seconds:

 

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/search/?q=Garbage+skin&s=Search

[Boosterdog]

7 minutes ago, Rudel_chw said:

I found it in 5 seconds:

 

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/search/?q=Garbage+skin&s=Search

It was irony - get over yourself. 

[Rudel_chw]

7 minutes ago, Boosterdog said:

It was irony - get over yourself. 

sorry, english isn't my native tongue, so it’s hard for me to detect irony and sarcasm ... but don’t worry, I will take care not to cross paths again.

[Boosterdog]

5 minutes ago, Rudel_chw said:

sorry, english isn't my native tongue, so it’s hard for me to detect irony and sarcasm ... but don’t worry, I will take care not to cross paths again.

No - im sorry - And I apologise. I meant this thread only as a way of trying to ask for improvements. I understand your position but I hope Ive set mine out also. We can agree to disagree about whether or not its the right thing. 

Again - I apologise for being sharp. 

[Rudel_chw]

23 minutes ago, Boosterdog said:

Again - I apologise for being sharp. 

 

Dont worry, you had no way of knowing, thanks for the apology, which I of course appreciate .. hopefully ED will keep improving the User Files search to make it easier to find items .. for example I would like to be able to search and use the filters at the same time, currently the search always search amongst all files.

[SharpeXB]

3 hours ago, upyr1 said:

For new skins you make the real, fictional radio button mandatory for older skins you give a warning and after some time has passed hide them. 

I don’t know why this would matter. The whole idea of trying to download these individually is a colossal waste of time anyways. 

[Tippis]

10 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

I don’t know why this would matter.

Have you tried reading the thread? Or just tried understanding the issue at hand in general?

10 minutes ago, SharpeXB said:

The whole idea of trying to download these individually is a colossal waste of time anyways. 

So your idea of a solution is to just shut down the user file section entirely, then, seeing as how you've declared the way users interact with it (by necessity and by design) is a waste of time. Just because you have no interest in this particular part of the community interaction doesn't mean that others feel the same — it only means that your opinion and input is inherently pointless, worthless, and irrelevant. This is a spectacularly silly derail, even by your standards.