My Merchant Utility decided to die so I went to redownload it. Went to freestuff, chose utilities. Since when are scenic backgrounds and clothing stuff utilities? I thought part of the idea of getting FS approved, was so it would not only be "clean", but be categorized correctly. Tons of this stuff is NEW.

Im not amerchant but I agree with you. I dont understand the utilities area myself, too mixed up 90 percent of it is not even a legit utility for Poser. Searching through there gives me a headache at times. Lots of dead links and broken images in Poser's freestuff, needs seriously updating. Shame cos I would have liked to have some useful utilites for P4. Clother clothing shouldn't be there IMHO and neither should skys, backgrounds and all that other useless stuff that doesn't have anything to do with the word 'utility'. Needs an admin/mod to clean it up.

"utility" is a euphamisim for "buttknocker"! :O

Oh, it's not so bad... you should see my kids room!! Just kidding! It's kind of a bummer, I was searching the "Poses" and it seemed like 80% were Mat Poses... Now I know they're poses, but wouldn't make more sense to put Mat Poses into the Textures area? Maybe it's just me... My two cents are spent!! G

Hi all, We do not insist on members selecting a certain sub-section of Freestuff unless there is an obvious problem. For example we would not accept a pose set into the hair section! However there is room for interpretation on some categories and "Utilities" is the biggest one of these. If you feel very strongly about this then I'd suggest that you contact the relevant member and respectfully suggest that you'd have been able to search more easily if their item was placed under "X" instead of "Z" category. I will ask the site programmers about recategorising the Poser freestuff section as a lot of the categories simply don't make sense any more ("Millie" anyone?) However I have no idea how complex this job would be and it would probably mean somebody having to go through and reindex the entire section. With well over 7,000 poser files this is obviously not a quick or easy job :-

7,000? we passed 10,000 last year..;) sorry, not trying to scare you..;)

7,000 poser files. I had to go and check though... you nearly gave me a heart attack! Indeed we are well over the 10,000 mark as a whole. A testament to the community's generosity, in my view :-)

I'd help clean it up, I'd gladly do it for free. Maybe you guys should include a Misc category for catchalls? Or, how about, deleting the old accounts that are no longer there? Can't contact someone who is longer on this site. I'v tried. :)

Message edited on: 01/26/2005 17:36

Hi zippy, I am currently working through freestuff from the back to the front, deleting dead links and thumbnails. When a member becomes inactive, we don't automatically pull their freestuff because in many cases the items are still linked to a valid file. So we wouldn't want to remove a working item. So far (since last October) I have removed or fixed over 1100 dead URLs and countless thumbnails. I have suggested to the Admin whether we can have some clean up of categories (for example "Pro pack" which nobody every posts in) and get some new ones, for example Backgrounds, Poser 5 materials, dynamic clothing, etc. I'll let everyone know as soon as I get an answer ;-)

Thanks Karen! It can't be a huge amount of fun going thru all that old stuff. I agree that it shows the generosity of this community. Glad we've got you on the job!

So far (since last October) I have removed or fixed over 1100 dead URLs and countless thumbnails. ACK! Hopefully you're not doing all that manually? I wondered who Millie was? lol. I can see Vicky/Mike. But Millie? :)

Yeah, Millie - as I understand it that was the original name for Vickie 1 - stood for Millenium Woman.

Heck, I always thought Millie referred to the original Millenium Teen girl. Learn something new everyday... Good luck with the organizing, Karen. That can't be an easy job!

It's not the most thrilling job in the world, I admit, but I get a sense of satisfaction when I look at the last page of freestuff and see all the thumbnails loading instead of a page of little red broken Xs like we used to get :-) I volunteered to do this because, free stuff was the thing that first brought me to R'osity, and I think that's true for many people. If you were looking for something, you came here... Then it started to go downhill a little bit with many broken link and nobody had time to do anything about it. The reputation dipped, freestuff was taking AGES to be approved (like over a week I believe at one point), the search engine was useless... So now we've cleaned up most of the links and items are now approved generally within 8 hours if there are no problems. The search engine is still the same but oh well, you can't have everything LOL

Maybe you can get the admin to install an automated script to help you out? I'm a freestuff addict myself. I still see red x's in my broswer though but, it could just be me. Gotta love IE's red x's.

Karen, there's definitely a difference since you took over! Thanks for all your work. While you're thinking about categories, how about eliminating "Poser-Ready Props" since there's no meaningful distinction between that and "Posable Props".

Ockham, I will put that on my little list, thank you. I agree, there shouldn't be any difference between the two. Zippy, at this stage we can't run any type of automated checker because of the way the links are coded. (IE as a download button, which is a FORM action, and not as a text link.) It was coded this way initially to avoid mass downloads - I believe that previously it was done in a way to allow crawler-bots to download the entire site at once, which would severely slow the site and sometimes crash it completely. Pakled sent me a list he had of broken sites and that has helped me somewhat. I do give people a couple of weeks to respond before I delete their items, in case they are out sick or in the process of moving hosts, etc. So if you do see some red Xs still then they will probably be gone soon ;-)