Some comments, complaints, and my departure...

I don't think we accept "remove the entry" requests, especially, if the dump itself is correct, just hoarded.

Adding a non-existant hyphen is "accurate" for you? And you were so disappointed in removing the hyphens you've decided to leave? Sounds funny

"Asia" is for Hong-Kong, etc. releases, remember those PAL-60 Sega MD consoles for Asian non-Japanese market? These are "Asia". As for the games, you should probably check the barcode, not the serial (and who said ULJM means Asia? UCAS is for Asia, iirc).

My last reply:
The whole reason this became an issue for me was that there WAS an ASIA flag on the dump, but it was removed. I pointed this out, and was told that this is not how the rules work any more, and that ALL double-flagged ASIA/JP or ASIA/US etc. dumps were getting their ASIA flags removed (even though this reflects their actual release info and history of what was actually dumped). Loss of important metadata due to edits like these makes any attempts at actually even trying to complete an asian set all the harder.

This, along with renaming games to match their releases on other platforms, even though this is contradictory to the "new rules" that naming should be identical to what's on the disc, regardless of typos, regardless of current or past interpretation of the "new rules", now every dump will have to be inspected IF the goal would be to reverse any of the changes that had been done.

Let's throw out any arguments for or against the hyphens, the clear issue is that edits to the database were performed by one or more individuals to conform to a rule change that may or may not have been intended to have been interpreted that way. regardless, if these edits are considered correct, they love the database less accurate than it started. And that's not what I signed up for, a project that prided itself in capturing a ton of data for every release and making sure it was right at submission time, not changing it all the time so that it "looked better" or was more in key with what "SCENE" was doing. I thought Redump didn't follow scene rules, and was a project that prided itself in having original content.

Signing out.

Well, it's ok if you change those radiobuttons to checkboxes, so each release could be checked for the db. But it's pointless to list all the countries in the filename (which is limited to 255 symbols, including the path), otherwise, it would be a mess in the PC section, where 1 game can be released in dozens of countries. Generally, Asia = Japan, even if the same disc was released with different serials and barcodes for different Asian countries - the internal serial is still Japanese. If the discs themselves were different - of course, these would be (Japan) for one and (Asia) for another.

Serial number hyphens but no mention of adding phantom "IFPI" text to NTSC-J mould codes? Actually I don't know, can't read the original post to see if you mentioned it, but serial number hyphens are at least an attempt to show what is written on the actual product. This entry says "IFPI 45U1" for the mould SID code and it's just a flagrant lie because that literally is not written on the disc, it's only "45U1". It's not even arguably correct that we add "IFPI" there, it is simply and factually incorrect and there's no argument for it. And then we don't even add NULL data for fields that should contain it, we just omit it and make it look like the submitter himself omitted it as well. Then how do we know that the submitter didn't just miss it? Well, we don't.

My point to saying all this: sure, we could improve some things still, and I always hope that Redump will choose to improve them. But at the end of the day we are submitting to the only database that allows people to check your hashes for images. All serial number, ring code, and any other second-priority crap aside, this database is the only one that does what it does and it's pretty cool and special to be able to submit to it. Even if some things are wrong, the important stuff is right. As a fellow dumper I would hope that you could just see past the imperfections to be able to contribute to a database that's doing an awesome thing, but if little things like serial number hyphens (which aren't even really that inaccurate...) bother you that much, I guess it's sadly your choice.

Grabbing a beer j/k I dont drink alcohol

Good point about the IFPI adding.. I've caught F1ReB4LL doing this several times.. as for the hyphen in Sony serials, I've always added them before because this is what logic tells us (this is how serials are structured, and also how Sony uses them on websites and inside PS3 files etc). It wasn't until Pablo came along that F1ReB4LL got infected with OCD about this

Another similar issue is barcodes.. Is there any real point in including spaces or > ?

Maybe a good compromise would be to display this information in two ways: The way it's written exactly on the disc, and conventionalized. The conventionalized codes will be cleaner and better for reference / googling and have the same information value (perhaps more, since e.g. barcodes without spaces are easier to find on google).

edit: So F1ReB4LL replied earlier with maybe the same thoughts: Scans would be a better way of recording non-standardized information (with a format that tends to vary with each disc or each manufacturer) such as logo's, incomplete mastering codes, barcodes with spaces, serials with missing hyphen, etc. than the current OCD approach.

edit2: Anyway, the point that I was trying to make is that information is data that is structured, and in this case, structuring mastering codes, serial numbers and barcodes means transforming them into a conventionalized format for easy reference. This is what a database should be about.

I also find it a little bit funny that we go through all this trouble to write stuff like serial numbers and ring codes "exactly as they appear" but then don't do this for titles

NOBODY DOES TITLES EXACTLY. IF THEY DID MOST OF THEM WOULD LOOK LIKE THIS!

I don't think there is. The barcode itself is simply a string of digits/data with no spaces between any of the digits. The spaces are only there to separate human-readable country/manufacturer codes (first half) from product codes (second half), and the > is just there as an end-of-text marker which is not present in the barcode data either.

It would be interesting to show the actual barcode itself in the description, similar to what UPC Database does. Edit: This identically-named UPC Database also has the same feature.

To me it's like like a game having a ™, © or ® symbol in the title. I'm sure you wouldn't want to edit the entire database to add those, or else we would end up with things like "TEKKEN", "TEKKEN 2™", "TEKKEN 3®", "Tekken Tag Tournament™", "Tekken™ 4" and "Tekken™5". Yes, that's how they look on the spine of the PAL versions.