I guess I wish that our naming system was just a little more fluid so it's easy for people to find and add games, making our site just a little more accessible. I had a friend who was trying to add Tomb Raider Legend, and she got really frustrated because she couldn't find the game until she found under Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend.
I'm sorry for your friend, i'm probably behind the frustration of your friend, last year (if i remember correctly) i took the job of adding a lot of those "Lara Croft" after adding a few duplicate in the database since i couldn't find a lot of those games under theirs exact titles (when a name is written on the front cover, back cover and even the spine i consider it to be the title, especially if it's on the spine since it is how i organize my collection). I too was very frustrated when my "duplicates" got all chopped of theirs "Lara Croft" title (without even putting the exact name in the alt. name tab
), reported as duplicates and of course merged with the others Tomb Raider games (even though some of the titles were different, in French i mean, even the covers and the barcodes were different too...
).
But i absolutely agree, it wouldn't hurt if the rules were a little more flexible, we already have a few exceptions in the database (like the Kingdom Hearts games without the Disney/Squaresoft in theirs titles) and if we start to use the cover title as the database title for all games it will really become a mess (i take as an exemple one of those Singstar games too,
this one shouldn't be called ABBA: Singstar instead ?
), but please if you ever decide to edit a name like those Tomb Raider games being chopped of theirs "Lara Croft" title, put the exact name in the alt. name tab, for me a colon doesn't really matter since no matter if you search for "Singstar ABBA" or "Singstar: ABBA" you end up with the same results (not in the same order but all the Singstar ABBA are on the top) but when a part of the name is missing in both the actual title and the alt. name research in the database are very frustrating since you have to directly browse the category of the platform and search manually for the game and that, i assure you, is a lot of time wasted.
I still stand by my idea to have up to 5 fields for title and the common title used as the primary one on the entry, not "cover title" which is used now.
Having more field to put the names is a really good idea, a common title for the database, a cover title, a spine title, an alternative title (for games titles in different language), yep i really like that idea.
And one more thing since we are talking about title here, i wanted to ask why don't we use a system like backloggery where it directly doesn't consider articles like "The" or "A" at the beginning of the name instead of putting those articles at the end of the title (like those Zelda, instead of being "Legend of Zelda, The" will be written as "The Legend of Zelda" but the database would still put them with the other "L" titles ), that is just a simple question not a request or anything, i know some people who tried to start theirs collection here but were having trouble because of that (i too had some trouble at the beginning, i made a lot of duplicate because of that
).
