Hey, I've bought a few things recently and its getting rather anoying, Packages that start with ! or - before the item name for the folder to get them to the top of the list. There was a long discussion about this before, long sense lost in the forum, about people being highly upset over it. I have to tend to agree with them. I make Private folders with the ! or - signs for stuff I work on, or unique items that I want quick access to. With merchants doing this it becomes more of a hassle working with the folders to keep our own 'Private' stuff seprated from the merchants stuff. Though the majority in the past felt that folder names with these characters should be avoided and merchants and brokers alike have taken to disregard this, I sticking out a formal plea to ask you guys to Please Stop. Half the time you buy something you can't rename the folders anymore without editing every file, So take some time, Think about how your originizing your products and make it easier on the customers. If you want to keep your folder items Unique Do like DAZ USE TO and Dark Whisper does do, Stick your Name/Innitials before the Group name to make it a unique folder like Dark Whisper does a "DW - Whatever it is" rather then the anoying ! or - infront of everything like a recent purchase i just made. Thankyou, A.N.

I fully support you on this, caleb68. I wanted to bring this up before but felt it might be futile. I also want to make note that Dark Whisper seems to make a good effort and organizing their products in a way that makes sense (to me anyway). I think Digiport does this too. I use the ! symbol and others as you do caleb68, to prioritize folders for my own saves, etc. It's irritating as hell.

correct! i've bought some packages (like sword maidens) where they put a ! before each file. not only that, but they - it was two of them working together - never answered my mail concerning some items that didn't work. solution is the simple one - never by again from them!

or what Stormrage and I do for all our stuff, both market and free, put it into a TSC folder in geometries, libraries and textures. ( occasionally it has been ThunderstormCreations, but due to Mac incompatibilities with that folder it's being converted to TSC ) sems to me that if you like the item, it doesn't matter where it is in the list, you will scroll as much as you need to to get it.if you don't, odds are you will remove it anyway, so it's placement isn't important in the hierarchy.

I always unzip to a special folder and change the subdirectories that I don't like. And if the name is too long I shorten that too. Once I buy it I don't need to have a discriptive subdir telling me that it is for Mike's clothing done over by Sam Snead. lol I agree with you on this one. While we are at it please go through your list on your readme and make sure everything in the list is actually with the product, as well as stuff not listed. And make sure the names match in the CR2's. Marque

a good point - must agree ...

I think you can change the foldernames and remove the ! or whatever. I suppose they do that to put their folders on top of each library, but not to annoy the customers but make it easy to find the new items. When you have a lot of stuff in your librarie and use the automatic install for your files you sometimes end up searching for your new items. This way you find them at once and then you can change the foldername and put it elsewhere. If you do not use the automatic install (I never use it - even the DAZ exe files go to a temp folder first) you can rename the folders before you move them to the libraries.

This is not true with all poser stuff. The majority of stuff which i've bought you can not just rename the file without re-editing the files to make sure everything is pointing to the right location. I've spent well over 8k on models/textures for poser and the larger majority of stuff can not be moved without editing each file because of the way it was packaged. There should be stricter guidelines for merchants far as packaging and obj's being placed into the geo folder but this would have to be a 'community' thing across sites with so many new poser comunities popping up.

I've spent about the same as you caleb and I know what you mean about having to edit. And there does need to be a guideline that is used, if not across the board than at least in the marketplace here. I've seen some odd things get through. Marque

I quite agree with caleb. I do edit files in order to try and keep my file system in some sort of order. But the less of this the better. Can we try and get away from this stupid idea that organising items according to who made them has any logic to it? I don't want a folder full of clothes by XXX. I do want a folder for shoes, a folder for jackets, and so on.

Hi Arthur,
Great to see you :)
As always you bring up some excellent points!
Unfortunately, I, suspect that the majority of Poser People; either do not want to be bothered with going into the files and changing the subdirectory or either they don't know how to go into the subdiretory.

When you are a new Poser user this does not seem like a real problem, but after your files number in the thousands, it can become a real pain. Hopefully, the merchants will read this and take pity on us :)

ladynimue

as long as you don't rename the geometry subfolder or the texture subfolder, you can rename the character, hair, face folder (and items) to whatever you want. although some "complete" characters look for specific items in specific folders, so that would mess it up.

I took control of all my Poser stuff long ago. I actually went through each item in my collection, and unzipped everything to a temp folder. Then I renamed everything I wanted except the geometry folders. I used CorrectReference to fix any changed or incorrect texture references. You talk about problems? Incorrect texture references are the worst problem I've found so far. It's amazing that the artists don't take greater care with those.

!I know! It's annoying as heck! And this is from somebody who is a regular user of exclamation marks. Pay attention you vendors ;)

Gotta agree too. 3 items bought on the same day had about 60 items all prefixed !.

Let's not forget all those readme files called "readme.txt" Guess what happens when we unzip stuff into our Poser folder? They over-write each other.

DAZ did this with Vicky 3 so I deleted all those "!" marks and let them all line up with the other Vickys. I only use the exclamation point for items I use frequently because my list is so long. I was surprised that in Poser 5 they didn't go back to the old cascading list (Poser 2 or 3?) instead of the scrolling one which I hate. It takes too long to find anything.

geo's folder- aww man -now you want me to change my name- LOL- j/k :)

I can't stand the "!" files or the flders that simply say "Runtime" cause that doesn't tell me what it is

I completely disagree---see thread above. Either you folks have way more art time than I do or you enjoy file wrangling or you're all so intellectually gifted that you can actually remember exactly which of a couple of dozen characters those lips belong to....I can't. The only thing worse than seeing 'lips_red' is to run into a bunch of mats labeled 'L003' or '003564'. I use Macinstaller to install everything and often don't realize that someone was lazy with the file naming until it's too late and my mat poses are a nightmare.

Patricia, see if you can find a cheap (or better yet, free) renaming utility. I use Flash Renamer and it is a godsend. Allows me to add the character name to all the files in a MAT folder in one batch. Saves me tons of time and effort. Combine that with Correct Reference and I spend much less time moving things and editing files than I used to when I install something new. Kate (who also hates the special character deal but hates the .obj in the library file instead of geometries even more)

I use renamer to get rid of ! and other junk and it works really well. (It's fast and free!) I also unzip stuff to a temp directory and rename files like Lips-Red to DummyLips-Red. Merchants - you might want to consider customizing your thumbnails with your initials or a logo - that way even if your files are renamed by your clients, they'll still know which packages are yours. I catagorize my stuff by genre, not by merchant. It's more important for me to know where all my sci-fi outfits are, than if it's a Traveler or Dark Whisper outfit.

P3DO Has a pattern renamer in the Tools menu which allows you to add a suffix or prefix to a group of files, for changing "lips_red" to "Sue Lips_red - vendor" or whatever.

heyas; using ! or 00 or whatever on the front of everything is for when you're working on stuff. hey, i keep all my in-progress cr2's in the 'people' library, cuz that's the one that's open first. (no, i dont keep my humans in there.) nobody wants to have to scroll here and scroll there to find stuff they have to load fifty times a day while they're working on it. i sympathize with you, really! but for heaven's sake, that is NOT the FINAL resting place for these things. when you FINALIZE the stuff, put it in REAL directories (and filenames). and that, by definition is not one that starts with ! or - or whatever. okay, there's a difference, there.

Right, right RIGHT!!! I agree totally! Especially since I'm in the middle of renaming the 27 DAZ '!' folders and editing the contents. I heartily resent paying for stuff and then being forced to WORK too! Can't these idiots (not just DAZ, but ALL of 'em), get it into their heads that if you BUY a product, you'll use it anyway, no matter what directory it's in? Let ME worry about organising my own folders. Just make a decent product in a folder with your initials, and I'll take it from there. Sheesh! mac

lol I had not seen this issue until V3..cause I dont generally get other people's stuff. I make it myself..anyhow, yes, I hate the ! thing. of course, I went in and changed them all..even made a program that did it for me automatically. However, when Daz released the update for vicky..it wouldnt run because it couldnt find the !file. So, I had to reinstall the thing..run the patch, then rename it all again. Only took a few minutes with the autoreplace program, but still..I dont like this either. I see some logic to what bloodsong said..ie having that there when making it, but not when its released. I think that I may have released 5 pose files with that in with the long braided hair..but I didnt make them (a beta tester did), I just added them to the package. I too love some of the names (like 98iuy73 or similar) some of these things have..lol, now THATS descriptive! (NOT) :P BT

Anybody ever come across a renaming utility that's Mac compatible??

The problem is, if "everyone" puts a ! or - at the beginning, pretty soon it becomes pointless. Might as well just leave it off, because all the items in the directory will look alike. Melanie

Hmmmm... I see the flip-side to this thing... I am a beta tester. If I start renaming my folders and people ask, do you have such-and-such, can you test my textures... Well... it would be hard at times to try to keep countless shirts apart, or pants, or shoes, to match those jobs. Who can remember a year later who made what unless it's indexed in a database with a picture? At least now I can look up the product name or the merchant right in my Runtime folder. As for the !!! at the beginning... it doesn't take THAT long to delete, especially when you unzip to a temp folder first!

Phooey. We shouldn't HAVE to delete the '!!!' no matter how short or long it takes!! Pah.

i have to set some things strait here: darrell, one of the creators of "sword maidens" contacted me privately and said he never received my email nor he was contacted by renderosity's stuff when i complained about the figures in store contact forum. he's going to fix it, so, from my point of view, this stuff is settled. thumbs up for "sword maidens"!

Incidentally, I also change geometry subdirectories. It's no big deal to edit the cr2 and change runtime:geometries:wibbo:modelsbywibbo:shoesbywibbo:newboots to runtime:geometries:Poser4clothes:shoes

accually its best to leave geo files in there original place within the geo folder, you start sticking all shoes into a shoes directory your going to end up overwriting files, and you think that the little things cause problems, that would end up causing you major problems down the line. Please keep in mind, this is not a bitch, gripe what not, its a plea, asking not to do the !,-, + etc. infront of the category names. Its just simpler for everyone in the long run if merchants could do this as a curisty, some merchants have switched some of there products already, thank you guys, you know who ya are ;). P.S. yes, i still can't speeell

Besides, it adds an extra character to the name and my directory titles are already only partially showing on the llist now as it is. I've removed the extra characters from all but the Vicki 3 directories. DAZ said they had to stay there for some reason. But all the rest of them, I've removed those characters so everything falls into alphabetical order. Which makes it a waste of time for the creator to put it there in the first place. Every time someone creates another item with the same character in front, but with a name higher in the alphabet, the other artists get pushed down from the top, anyway. Did that make any sense? I don't think I'm saying it very clearly, but I hope you know what I mean. No one's items ever "stay" on the top because someone else's will inevitably push it down the list through the alphabet. Anyway, what's with that need to be on the top of the list for? Some items I only use once in a while and I don't need to locate it at the top every time I need it. --shrug-- Melanie

I think the store should insist on a naming convention for poser stuff ie all material pose files start with the word MAT or poses with POSE, hair figures with HAIR etc. People installing stuff willy nilly is extemely annoying.

DAZ apparently needed the "!" in front so that their patches would find the source. Other people report that Vicky3 works ok when renamed, and I don't think that it mattered what the early versions of Vicky and Mike were called when they were upgraded. I'm on a Mac, so that may be different internally... but all a patch or upgrade should do is search the drive for the early file. What's going to be fun is... when Mike 3 comes out... and HE has another 30 files starting with "!". There may even be... children. (I have a look on my face similar to Saruman's.) Carolly