Greetings! It's been a while; hoping to be more active again soon but what better way to reinaugurate myself than to make a scene?

Seriously, I don't want to actually whine or complain since I think the disk archiving and preservation project is essential and I'm happy to help either way.

But, ... I really need to protest the fact that contribution points aren't being awarded for providing verification of existing records. I've helped to verify at least 3 or 4 different disk sets (so far) by independently locating and imaging alternate copies of the disks that turned out to have identical hashes. Locating these second copies proves the validity of the original uploads.

This may not be as exciting as getting a never-before-seen copy of something new but it's still crucial to what I see as the long term goals of the project (certainly to mine).

Locating, imaging, and submitting a secondary copy for corroboration requires just as much effort, time, and money as tracking down something for the first time. Given that, I feel like it deserves just as much recognition.

Cheers!

Thanks for speaking out. Your point is valid and fair to which I have zero objection. To tell the truth, I've never really pondered the reasons for not crediting people for that, but now that you brought it up I could perhaps name a few.

For starters, no one has really demanded for points until now and I personally never thought about it either. It was seldom performed, which didn't suffice for such practice to flourish. Besides, it doesn't really involve enormous sacrifice, most people don't buy disks for TGOD but for themselves in the first place. Furthermore, the favor is mutual as we also help you verify YOUR disks/images this way, which, if anything, can be modified, too. So, with all due respect, I think you're overdramatizing a bit right there.

Anyway, while the above may sound like tons of excuses there is nonetheless one more substantial argument against such type of crediting. You see, when people know they do this as a free service for everyone they are much more likely to do so honestly and with no ulterior motive. However, if they are aware they can get points this way they could start cheating a little. They could benefit from unverified sets presuming those are unmodified and claim their own dumps match ours hash-wise whereas they may never have the former in the first place. It may sound far-fetched, but it is possible and could impact your experience badly.

Of course, we could credit only the trusted people, but then fairness is at stake, so this is out of the question. Also, you must understand that the status is, at the end of the day, a little lower priority than the files themselves and rating them the same high (you can't get any lower than 1 point, though) would seem a little dissonant. Ironically, the accuracy of the status is more important than the status itself, that is, other than "Unverified". So, should the accuracy be compromised I'd rather they were all unverified.

Conclusion. The above is by no means to say that I'm against crediting people for verification per se. I'm game. But I'd like everyone to read this and reflect on it carefully before we make it into actual practice.