Due to the recent influx of moronic n00bs and equally moronic programs on ticalc I thought I might collect some ideas on how ticalc might fix this problem. If you have a suggestion (especially a far-fetched one), please share it.

stricter file-approval would be nice

Kuro, I hate to say this, but you're becoming somewhat of a deranged and slightly evil idealist.

Absolutely, note that this isn't just theoretical, I will probably be chatting with the filearchivers on Friday, so I'll let them know of anything you guys come up with.

I'm flattered and offended simultaneously.

Perfect timing.

Yeah, let's not make this a crusade against individual users.

We don't want to alienate well-meaning new programmers, even if their stuff is crap, Kuro. The word "Purge" is a tad strong.

have you seen some of the crap there? i saw one program claiming unbreakable string encryption! turns out, the password itself is saved (unecrypted mind you) as the first 4 characters in the string....

it is a pain to find anything decent in the archives, as there is just too much "stuff" - most of it either crap or the same as something else

That's true, but everyone has to start somewhere. Don't tell me you weren't proud of your first sucky programs.

i was, but i never uploaded them. Did you upload all the crappy progs you made?

So far i have uploaded ONE, yes ONE, program to ticalc - and it actually worked very well (although it wasn't extremely useful). Only like 20 ppl downloaded it, but oh well

But you know some people would never get involved if there weren't a way to share their program.

In the end ticalc.org wants to be the end all when it comes to a file archive, good software or bad. They want to be the biggest and best archive out there, even though they pretty much are the only major archive left now. So expect just about any file submitted to be accepted, unless it's offensive, rips off stuff, or something like that.

That being said, they need to focus on getting people to write reviews and submit rating scores to filter out the bad from the good, and then sort their archive lists based on it. Right now they can't because 90% of the programs on their site have absolutely no rating, so they need to attract more reviews/ratings. Maybe make stats for the current review/rating system so people compete to see who has the most reviews or ratings, or make the system simpler and combine the two like download.com used to do, where you would give programs a brief description and give it a thumbs up/thumbs down and then score it based on the average of thumbs up.

Another thing that couldn't hurt is have ratings and reviews for authors. that way, if an author is trying to be the Ed Wood of Ti Programming, it would reflect in his author ratings and reviews. Featuring more high rated programs (like feature 1 a day or something using a script) or bringing back POTM couldn't hurt either.

A more tightly-knit community certainly wouldn't hurt...

I think POTM would be a good plus. Who's Ed Woods/

Of course not. However, it would be very nice if these...erm...people could at least pretend to be able to step out of their world for a bit and say, "You know what? I just made a program that takes up 400+ bytes of RAM and does something that [2nd][Format] does more easily and efficiently. Should I upload such a useless program? Will any significant number of people download it?" Not to be offensive or anything, but many of the people who have uploaded such worthless programs seem to lack this self-measuring.
POTM is good, so is a better ratings system. Maybe a "Top rated program for the week" or something to that effect.

Perhaps a lowest-rated prog of the week too, then that file gets deleted.

That would be pretty sweet. Not only would it get rid of some of the crap, but it would encourage more and more ratings

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Wood

the problem with that, is if a bunch of people get mad at someone.....like when Andy Janata was flaming earlier this year, and everyone got pissed at him. or you know how there is some "Anti-Kermmish" sentiment on places like MaxCoderz......not a good idea at all

Mmmmm, that's a good point, we don't want ratings to turn into some kind of popularity contest that has no bearing on program quality...