[Scummvm-devel] Re: Website contest results? (again)

Max Horn max at quendi.de
Tue Nov 23 12:57:05 CET 2004


Am 21.11.2004 um 13:29 schrieb James 'Ender' Brown:

> Hi Max.

Hi Ender!

>
> Sorry, I've been pretty ill this last few days. Start of Summer always
> messes me up :)

So my best wishes then, I hope you'll get well soon! You've been ill a 
lot recently, tough luck :-(

> The finalist designs are the ones at <CENSORED>.

I am removing that link from this reply, in case we don't want it to be 
spread right now. Team members can just ask for it.

>  A little poll script needs to be written for voting on the website,
>
> I'm not sure if I can do it until later in the week...

It would be nice to get this finally resolved soon, so that the web 
site designer can start with the work. However, some things:

Do we really have to / want to do a poll? I assume the results were 
pretty close between those three finalist?
Anyway, I am not sure that I would be happy with a poll. Personally, i 
have a very clear ordering for the three finalists; and I know that 
some other team members do so, too (not always matching mine, of course 
:-). For the records, I like draven's by far the most, though maybe 
with the colors toned down a little.

There might be other alternatives. One hypothetical (I don't really 
think we'll end up doing this, just want to mention it anyway), that a 
friend of mine just suggested, would be to take all three; if the 
(X)HTML and CSS is done right, it would be a matter of having three CSS 
files, possibly use configurable. Granted, that's a bit overkill, and I 
am not sure the designers would be happy with this, but it *is* a 
possibility, and would prove our (X)HTML/CSS to be clear and 
extensible. It'd also require the designers to work together, though.


If we *do* end up with a poll, it's not that trivial. The first idea, 
just runnning a poll script on our site, has a major problem: we'd have 
to choose between storing the poll results in a world writeable file; 
or storing the results in a SQL db, for which the password would have 
to be stored in a world readable file. ugh. The other alternative would 
be to run the poll on an external location (like the web server of one 
of us).
Last poll option I can think of (or rather, which Jacob Moorman 
suggested to me) is to create a scummvm-ballot mailing list to be used 
for this; then, have the poll script mail the vote to the list, in a 
special (CSV?) format. We can then just request the mbox file to be 
sent to us, and count the votes. It also has the advantage of logging 
the date when a vote was cast, which might help in fighting tampering.

And of course, we'll probably want to use cookies and some IP logging 
to prevent multiple votes...

All in all, though, if somebody really wants to, they could probably 
still tamper the poll. Which is another reason why I am not that happy 
with it.

The one thing speaking for asking our users, of course, is that they 
are the ones who are going to use that site most frequently.


Well, and if he have settled all that and decided for a new site 
layout, then we only have done half our job. The other big part is to 
think about our site structure, isn't it? Improving the accessibility 
of the download page, for example. Adding in better access to the FAQ 
and other docs. Not to forget the new manual ...



Bye,

Max





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