[Spoon]

I was typing stuff and it has been made pretty much obsolete by all the new posts. So lemme just scrap all of it, except for:

Let me just reinstate that:

Second, it has always been the policy of the SCP to provide any builds that coders are willing to compile and support.  Your position is no more tenable than if you were complaining about providing support to OSX or Linux users.

Has at no point ever been anyone's position in this thread. You really need to read these things more carefully.

Alright, let's take a step back and go from a fresh base.

1) Noone is talking about dropping the compatibility builds as long as someone is willing to compile them. We have literaly no reason to not give access to any form of content that someone is willing to provide, however marginally useful that content may be.

2) Those compatibility builds do cater to the need of a very minimal minority of players, and currently do needlessly clutter the main release thread.

As a consequence from 1 and 2, those builds can and should be relocated and the main release post should be reformatted.

Remember the release thread is a thread, and therefore can and should be composed of multiple posts. First post should be clear, concise, and comport one link to each supported platform and possibly the launcher(s). Everything else can go in later posts or separate threads, in decreasing order of importance.

This post, is what the position is.

[niffiwan]

FYI - here be the code that creates said release post, see "sub post" at the bottom of the page (afaik, chief1983 correct me if I'm wrong!)

[chief1983]

Nope, that's the latest version all right.

[jr2]

Now, as to simplifying it, if there was a 'click to see more' tag in our forum, I could easily simplify the Windows download build section as many other projects do.  But, our spoiler tag just hides things and you have to highlight them to read, with no way to turn off the spoiler tag.  If we could modify the code behind the spoiler tag in our template a bit or provide an alternative tag (maybe there's one I'm forgetting already?), I could implement it in the template, by offering one default download link, and a small, collapsed 'more builds' section below it.

[hide]<long wall of text>[/hide]

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=20652.0

Scratch that, posted too soon, will post back with appropriate one when I find it.


EDIT2:  Here, just need to change the BBCode to something besides [spoiler] and the displayed text on the collapse button, if any.

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3981

[Mongoose]

Honestly I think adding an entire mod just for this one little application seems rather superfluous.  Instead, like others have suggested, just put the more esoteric builds in their own separate post, and have a link in the opening post to it.  Problem solved with a bit of BBCode.

[karajorma]

I don't mind the idea of a see more option though. It's not just this release thread that could be greatly simplified in this way. I'd love to do the same thing to the Diaspora release thread for instance. And it would be really cool whenever I do a FRED quiz as I could have the answers in the post but hidden (rather than simply spoilered which doesn't hide things like pictures etc.)

[AdmiralRalwood]

I'm with Karajorma: collapsible spoilers would be useful for other things than just SCP release posts. Let's not throw out adding a useful new tag to the forum's repertoire just because it would be an overkill solution to a single problem.

[Goober5000]

"An entire mod" is overstating things a bit.  The code at jr2's link is really quite simple to add.  Use [hidden][/hidden] or [hidden=some title][/hidden], like so:

Hidden Text: Show

[AdmiralRalwood]

"An entire mod" is overstating things a bit.  The code at jr2's link is really quite simple to add.  Use [hidden][/hidden] or [hidden=some title][/hidden], like so:

Hidden Text: Show

Oooh, that autoplay is quite nice, too. How does it interact with hiding multiple videos?

Can you nest these tags? Wait, I can just try it...

Hidden Text: Show

Here we are.

Hidden Text: Show

Here we are again.

Apparently so.

[Mongoose]

Well I stand corrected.

[Cobra]

Well played, Goober. Well played.

[T-Man]

"An entire mod" is overstating things a bit.  The code at jr2's link is really quite simple to add.  Use

Hidden Text: Show

or

Hidden Text: some title • Show

, like so:

I remember the board at least used to be able to do that and have wanted to know how to do it for ages, thanks. Do feel it would be handy especially for posts with massive amounts of text.

PS: Damn you .

[chief1983]

I can't hide a list.  Not the end of the world but if I wanted to collapse the list of known issues with this, I can't currently.

[chief1983]

Also, I have simplified the release post quite a bit I think with this new tag.  Definitely makes the post more concise and 90+% of users probably won't need to expand anything to find what they want.

[jg18]

Pretty good but I think we can do even better.

http://pastebin.com/nXcLBesN


Notes:

- When did we start using 7Z format for Windows? That requires people to get 7-Zip, a substantial barrier for the average player who just wants to play. Consider using .zip. Then again, since many mods use .7z. maybe it's justifiable, since the average player might need 7-Zip anyway *shrug*.

- Even a computer-savvy player is not going to know how to use OpenAL Soft if just directed  to the OpenAL Soft site. We could have a download link to the latest .dll pre-renamed to OpenAL32.dll, with instructions on how to get it directly for those who want that. Unless issues with Creative's OpenAL are common, all of the OpenAL Soft stuff can go in hidden text IMO.

- The average player doesn't understand or care what compiler was used. You can put that in technical notes at the bottom if you think it's worth mentioning.

- Mentioning which versions of an OS are supported is very worthwhile. No need to mention that OS X  releases Intel, 10.6 dropped PowerPC support.

- Removing Linux from the main text of the post is a bit anti-Linux and to the casual reader will look like we don't support it. I'm okay with FreeBSD being left in the hidden  text though given that it's not one of the three primary platforms (sorry *BSD users). I wonder how many Linux users actually use the Linux build when most need to build from source anyway.

- Put known issues at the bottom. The average player is not going to read through Mantis to see if a bug applies to them.

- The hidden text's title text is a bit too subtle. I think we can leave it as is but maybe put a title over hidden text blocks in imporrtant cases, like I did with TrackIR.

[chief1983]

The 2001 thing for SSE2 is a bit off.  Yes Intel introduced it in Pentium 4s in 2001, but there were many new PCs being sold after that time which did not have it yet.  No 32bit AMD CPU has it, since it was introduced in the Athlon64/Opteron lines in 2003.  Also many Pentium 3 core-based machines might have been sold after that as well.  Celeron and  the like specifically had a long shelf life.  Still more than ten years ago, but just pointing out that putting a date of '2001' in the post might not be the most accurate way to represent the use case for various builds.  I think we can assume that anyone who _does_ click the 'more builds' area is hopefully savvy enough to figure out which build they actually need with the information we already provide.

[mjn.mixael]

- When did we start using 7Z format for Windows? That requires people to get 7-Zip, a substantial barrier for the average player who just wants to play. Consider using .zip. Then again, since many mods use .7z. maybe it's justifiable, since the average player might need 7-Zip anyway *shrug*.

This is surprisingly true. I have 3 examples of people off the top of my head (wife's younger brother-18yr, my nephew-14yr, friend from college-27yr), all gave up installing FS and Mods until they talked to me because they didn't know what a .7z file was or didn't understand why they needed an extra program to "install the installer". My nephew was unable to do anything because he didn't have the computer permissions  on his Windows account to install 7z. If the other mod creators are like me.. they just use 7z because that's what it seems all of HLP uses. I know it has better compression... meh I was never really sure the gain was worth the effort.

[chief1983]

I was doing release builds specifically in zip for this reason though, in fact I'm not sure when I switched release builds over to 7z...might have been during one of my cutovers to the automated script or something.  Or when the installer itself was able to extract 7zip files.  Really, people who don't have 7zip probably shouldn't be downloading builds manually but using the installer, so I guess this wasn't ever something I was too worried about.  Also why I probably never took too much concern for the overall layout of the release post itself.  It wasn't really ever intended for the casual first time user in the post-installer universe.

[jg18]

The 2001 thing for SSE2 is a bit off.  Yes Intel introduced it in Pentium 4s in 2001, but there were many new PCs being sold after that time which did not have it yet.  No 32bit AMD CPU has it, since it was introduced in the Athlon64/Opteron lines in 2003.  Also many Pentium 3 core-based machines might have been sold after that as well.  Celeron and  the like specifically had a long shelf life.  Still more than ten years ago, but just pointing out that putting a date of '2001' in the post might not be the most accurate way to represent the use case for various builds.  I think we can assume that anyone who _does_ click the 'more builds' area is hopefully savvy enough to figure out which build they actually need with the information we already provide.

2001 was a half-educated guess. If there's some concise jargon-free way to characterize the pre-SSE2 builds, use that. By "information we already provide" do you mean the information in the hidden text? "More builds" is pretty vague. People won't know whether to click on it.

[niffiwan]

- Removing Linux from the main text of the post is a bit anti-Linux and to the casual reader will look like we don't support it. I'm okay with FreeBSD being left in the hidden  text though given that it's not one of the three primary platforms (sorry *BSD users). I wonder how many Linux users actually use the Linux build when most need to build from source anyway.

I also vote for having Linux releases non-hidden.  There have been a number of people drop by HLP to request help with using the provided Linux builds, that's why I've got the "32-bit libs for 64bit Ubuntu" link in my sig - that's only needed for people with a 64bit OS using the release (or nightly) thread provided 32bit builds.