Some questions about the site intentions

[Sean697]

Hi, I am new here although I've poked in and out over the years to grab a mag or two for research. I kind of have some questions that seem to bug me a bit. As I'd like to maybe contribute some. Is the sites intent purely to make sure these magazines are preservered? The reason I ask as over the years I seem to see the same holes missing in the magazines for download. I know there is some history that I know nothing about with people taking magazines down, and some possible losses with the mega upload shutdown and needing to re index stuff for the sites new database. I guess my first question, if I ever take the time to scan some of these issues, what exactly is the policy about distributing to other sites? I would have no problem at all adding the retro mags credits page etc, but would it also be ok to make the mag available say on archive.org etc? (I have no interest in credit or so called ownership of scan.) I guess I would kind of like to know what the sites policy's are. Also in regards pointing out scans elseware that can be indexed here. I notice sometimes other scans that fit within the sites defined date guidelines are available elseware. Is there a strict policy of not linking or indexing scans that are not made specifically for this site without other sites permission?

Also I peruse the message boards and see offers to make available for example complete set of early EGMs etc, multiple, yet I always see the same holes in the EGM database. Do all these people flake out when it comes time to donate, or is the scanning backlog really that long? Or looking at the Magazine contest, I notice that some of the prizes are magazines that have not been preserved on the site? For instance the EGMs being given away are issues 8,9,11,14 that are long time holes in the database. And Sega Challenge issue 7 I've never seen available anywhere to download on the Internet that I could find. I mean those are cool prizes, but wouldn't the priority be to get those added to the download database instead of giving them away? (I know if I won them I would opt to just have it scanned in.) Also I've mostly seen the older download guide , and inferences that there might be some new guidance for formatting for submissions. If I decide to scan some stuff on my own should I just use that guide or will there be a prominently posted set of standards upcoming in the future for submission? I just donated like over 40 is signs to be scanned (Thanks Eday, and John Smith) but would like to try doing some on my own. But want to make sure that I do it right and that and I understand the sights mission statement fully before doing so.

[twiztor]

firstly, this site IS all about the preservation of the magazines and making sure they're available.

as far as "ownership" of scans or whatever, and someone can correct me if i'm wrong, but i believe that anything that you scan you are free and clear to upload wherever you want and do with as you please. if you wanted to post it here and at archive.org, there'd be no problem with that. some people prefer to only have scans (or whatever) on sites that they support and request that it stays certain places (which is why you may find a scan online for a magazine but it's not available here). But if it's a scan that you yourself are scanning/uploading, you can do whatever you want with it.

[E-Day]

This site exists purely to make sure these magazines are preserved. The holes missing from the magazines for download that you mention is caused simply by no one having that issue that can scan it. Phillyman has hundreds of magazines, and most likely has several of the missing ones. But with his taking care of the back end of the site and general life events, he doesn't have a lot of time to scan. He has said he plans on getting back to scanning once all the database stuff is taken care of, so hopefully some of those holes will be filled. Also, a lot of the people willing to donate the magazines for scanning in the US, and for a long time I was the only one scanning. Shipping to Canada is costly, so not everyone is willing to foot the bill for that, nor am I always able to help foot it either.

As far as distributing your scans, you scanned them, so you have put them up wherever you want. Some of our more recent stuff contributed by JohnSmith is already hosted at archive.org, and Phillyman told me a week or two ago that they are interested in hosting our stuff

We only ask that you put our Thank you page in the scans so that someone who may come across one of them in the wild will know where to go for more scans, and hopefully contribute to the site. If they downloaded an issue, chances are they would be interested in downloading more. You are not obligated to include it, and it is not a means of the site claiming ownership over the content or the scan.

We tend to only link to scans contributed by members past and present and generally don't want people uploading scans they found elsewhere to the site. This is simply to avoid any problems with whoever created that scan or the site who put it out. I think the same applies to pointing at those scans with download links. However, if whoever created the scan (an individual or a site), says it's okay for us to host it, then as far as I know that is probably fine. It's a good way to fill in a hole until someone from the site can create a new scan. Phillyman would be able to elaborate on that point more thoroughly.

As for Phillyman's magazine giveaway contest, I have to assume that he is giving away doubles that he has for the ones not scanned yet. At least they had better be doubles!

I haven't updated the old scanning guide, but the basics are still the same. Scan at 300dpi at full size, and save to a TIF if possible (JPG if necessary). If your scanning software has a descreening option, turn it on. If it has options for saturation and color adjustments, play with them until you get something that looks good. Adjusting that stuff in the scanning software is better than doing it later in Photoshop since it will save you time.

The biggest change since I made that guide is the size to save the edited scans as. I used to do everything by width; 1600 pixels wide. A few months ago KiwiArcader pointed out that when you look at the scans as a two-page spread instead of a single page, it looks odd because each page might have a different height. Since then I have adjusted everything by height. So instead of resizing to 1600 pixels wide, I resize to about 2190 pixels high. This ensures that things will look normal for those displaying two pages at the same time.

I also added some steps to my Photoshop action for saving. Along with saving a sized-down version of the edited page, I also save one that is about the full size of the page (3239 pixels tall). The reason for this is that when this site started, scans were 1280 pixels wide. By today's standard, that is small. Down the road, 2190 pixels tall might be small. So in a bit of futureproofing and saving work, I save a full sized version of the scans I do now for down the road when having even larger scans makes sense.

If it helps you, I can send you the Actions I set up in Photoshop, and you can adjust them as needed. If you use a Canon Lide 210 scanner, the Actions for colour correction and all that will already be set.

The one caveat that you need to be aware of when scanning is that if a content owner or publisher requests that their content be removed, we will remove it, no questions asked. It has only occurred twice before, but it has happened. This may mean some or all of your scans disappear from our site. That is why we sort of encourage contributors to put their scans elsewhere as well.

If you have any more questions, just let me and/or Phillyman know!

[Sean697]

Thanks eday. Wonderful response. The only thing I have to say about archive is the wonderful feature they have to preview and view the pages without downloading. But their database is woefully inadequate and unorganized and hard to search.

https://archive.org/details/GamePro_Issue_094_Volume_08_Number_07_1996-07_IDG_Publishing_US

[KiwiArcader]

The other thing about archive is that they have no considerations whatsoever for content quality. People upload files to Archive.org from sites like this one and mine without a second thought (or even acknowledging where they came from) and those ones are generally fine but they also upload any old crap found on torrent sites that may have been scanned years ago in poor quality and then make them even worse but down-sampling them to create epub files and so on. Quality control is not their first consideration, nor second, nor any as far as I can tell.

Additionally, they aren't entirely clean when it comes to copyright either. Recently they have made complete collections of arcade ROMs for M.A.M.E available without any consent being received from the ROM creators/owners from what I have read.