Busy times = late replies =(
At a few days ago, Fooliolo wrote:
If all the medals are genuinely broken, then I hope to drive momentum to maintain the medal system. Either PM the author and ask him to check out the issue, or get the broken medals removed. I don't know what the NG staff's policy is on this stuff, if such a thing even exists, but at the very least PG seems interested in acknowledging the fact that there are broken medals, and that they're undesirable. For example, Knuckstrike found the game PRO-R by tedgaming. Before he made the post, the medals were broken and didn't work. However, it was literally only a day ago that the author responded to my PM and fixed the game, even adding many more medals to the game. Whether Knuckstrike would have posted the game when he found it earlier is something for him to say. But I don't want flash devs to attempt ways to gain exposure to their works via medals, only to never find out that they really don't work for the audience.
The PRO-R story is great, and some of the time authors are really helpful (to some extent). However, lots of the medal games that recently became visible are really old games. The real problem is that some of the code got changed after the redesign. Before, medals of a game became visible after some earned a medal in that game. This wasn't the always the case, but it helped keeping games off the list that had their medals wrongly implemented. After the redesign, all of those games became visible. This is where the fun starts. Some of the authors go back to their old games because implementing medals is so much easier now. It's up to us to figure out what authors did this. Like I stated earlier, at least 50 of the ~900 games in the Games With Medals list have non-working medals. This number goes down as artists go back to their old games, but this very fact makes it so difficult for us to keep track of everything.
Broken medals are pretty rampant as it is, and the problem is only going to get worse. The way things are going currently, your suggestion of keeping a database of known broken medals would definitely be the most efficient way to keep all the medal wh0res informed. But wouldn't it also be nice to keep the clutter down by removing broken medals, or even better, broken games? I'm sure whoever is working on the medal system still has their hands full at the moment, but having broken medal games, 0 pt medal games, or no medal games clogging up the gameswithmedals list is pretty stupid, and I want to do something about it. Giving exposure to the magnitude of the issue is a start.
Removing broken medals would be the ideal situation. We both know the amount of time we've spend in the past trying to have this accomplished. PG even made a thread about this very subject, but didn't really care to read past page 1. You made a list of medal problems EVERY WEEK after H-O-S published the top list. I know the admins have more important stuff to do than help such a small part of the site, but the redesign made the problem even bigger.
As long as PG or others who have the ability to nuke non-working medals don't give us any sign of wanting to help is, I just keep my focus on playing the games with medals that DO work. In the meantime, if I can help you guys out with something I'll try my best to do so!