As per Glitch's post, I would agree that ideally you should be able to filter items by
-class usable
-remort restrict
-quest
-align restrict
-which equipment slot
-location/area where it pops
-level restricts

As for the review process, I would assume that most entries by most people would be accurate - I don't really see anybody wasting their time to sabotage the efforts by posting wrong information. But Brazil's suggestions regards to requiring login and/or peer review process is a good one. Ideally, there would be an immortal type person that could review the process to clean it up (perhaps people could mudmail the imm or post issues on the forum for any conflicting information).

The biggest concern is not usually people posting inaccurate information, it's the spammers throwing in garbage, links to porn or casino sites.

Item's change from time to time, so I figured the peer review part would be helpful for that, and simple user error.

Brazil.

True, regarding the spammers.

But in terms of data input, if you were to use mainly drop down menus and/or radio buttons, the only potential field that the spammers could use would be on the "item name" field. One would then select the area from a list of choices, enter a number in front of a drop down of affects, and check the usable classes, and enter the min level for the item.

Of course, that may be a bit too complicated to program.

But the good news is that there have not been new people joining the forum in a while; the newest member is still Degen, and I think he registered many months ago.

Just to muddy the waters a bit... I would think that there would have to be a unique id for each item, and the item name/descr wouldn't work for obvious reasons. I'm no code slinger, but I assume there's an id number already avail, just not visible to non-builder types. Any ideas as to address this?

Ok, so you guys asked for it... I have a basic working db running now.. it needs polishing, and the searching finished, font and colors applied, etc, but take a look and make sure I'm on the right track for what will be useful for you guys before I get much farther... I want to know what fields should be added (or if I put something that should be removed)... and anything else that would make it work well...


http://dev.addictmud.org/muddb/

Enter whatever test data you want, no worries, I'll purge the table if it gets too big for me to develop with

Brazil.

The database looks great.

I would change the following:
-Add a drop down menu where you can choose which location the area popped from. This will be important because people might not remember to add the zone in the "notes field", and there may be multiple items with the same name that pops in different zones
- Add a field where people can list the mob that it loads from
- For weapons and insettables, weight plays an important role, so it would be nice for "treasures" and "weapons" to have a field to enter the weight of the item.
-Have the "name field" to the very first (very left) field
-Make it a lot more difficult for people to edit
- Allow a submenu for people to fill in insettable slots. For example, have a radio button with the default as "uninsettable." If the person click on insettable, there is another radio button that one can click on the #of inset slots (perhaps it can be grayed out unless the insettable button is clicked).

I will provide more feedback after I play around with it a little.

-There should also be a field to put in the min level of use.
-! sell should be an added field

Wow, a lot more than I expected

I'll get some of the simple stuff added, and work on the search / filtering, then see what you guys thinks.

Brazil.

I support the idea of a MudDB (yes, hello folks).

One of the things I used for Templari back when the Squids split occurred (Grrrr.) was create a searchable database that everyone could just dump items into. Turned into quite the database (which others outside the guild used), which was sadly lost during a few server migrations.

Bz's dev template is basically the right idea - the main changes I made to ours was to have the Zone Name (which was a hyperlink to a description of the zone etc).

Another thing I was almost ready to release before the code was lost was a dynamic zone portal, which had a map, details, direction etc (which was the bit linked above). Those IMMs who saw a release of my zones and got "the PDF" would know what I'm talking about - it was just a more dynamic, extended version of that PDF.