[MoviePropMaster2008]

With more and more new members updating this site, I'd like to make points of the following:

1) Keep it brief.
I fear the some new members are confusing IMFDB with GUN-Wiki or the Wikipedia clone of gun history. We don't need long winded histories of the firearms. You can put a LINK to another source for that. This is guns in MOVIES site. Not the unabridged history of the gun's roots, campaigns, usages, etc. Even Specs are questionable if they start taking too much room. Frankly I don't like scrolling down pages and pages to start seeing what movies the gun appeared in. Surely, you can write some info if the gun is semi obscure or some background info is important. But anything more than a brief overview is ... overkill.

Also.....
Listing every variant ever made of the gun is unnecessary. Listing "some" multiple variations is acceptable if the public may be confused as to which gun appeared in which movie/tv/etc. But listing every obscure variation of a firearm, especially those which have NEVER appeared in any movie/tv/videogame/etc. is unnecessary. Again, we are not the FIREARMS trivia and history site. There are other sites for that depth of history and detail.

2) Let's put a Moratorium on NEW PAGES until the old ones are done...
One of the biggest complaints I hear on the net about IMFDB is that we have so many empty or lame pages. Well there are a handful of members who are working very hard to populate these pages with gun images, screengrabs and information. But it's like the ocean tide, it never stops. Now new pages are understandable, but we're fighting a losing battle of 'catching UP with completing so many of the pages that are already here'. Everyone should adopt an orphaned page (i.e. a page with NOTHING on it or very little on it) and try to help it along. I don't like having visitors randomly visiting movie pages only to see it with a few lame lines or nothing at all.

I am also tempted to remove pages with little or no guns in the movie at all. One has to ask "Will someone ... anyone ... ever wonder what guns were in this movie?" If there is only one gun or the firearms are rarely seen and have no real importance to the story, then why does that movie have a page at all? One should consider this before creating a new page.


3) Don't assume everyone knows your movie/tv title.
If the title is not universally known (like Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones, etc.) then put a few sentences as to what it is (especially obscure television shows). And how hard is it to post the movie/dvd poster for the show on the page so we can visually see what it is?

4) Learn how to use image correction software!
If you don't know Photoshop, there are tons of other software out there to fix images. We are seeing people uploading screengrabs that are over 1.5 Megabytes each and 1500 pixels wide. WTF? The average thumbnail of the screengrab on a page is 500px (though some members push it to 600 px), so the master image doesn't have to be bigger than most member's screens. Also files that big eat up tons of space on IMFDB's servers, thus slowing down the site. If you're wondering what I do, I make my master screengrab image about 700px wide and keep it below 300k in size. If there is important 'hard to see' information in the image then bigger is okay, but keep it within reason. That's my style choice, others have slightly different choices, but we're all about the same.

5) If the gun is based on another design, check on that page FIRST before you create a new page.
We see tons of new pages being built for guns already exist on other gun pages. These are descendants or variants of an older gun. IMFDB's protocol is that the original gun comes FIRST, and the other variations that stemmed from it are lower on the master page.

6) Images from Bootlegs are forbidden.
We've only recently seen multiple members trying to post illegal bootleg images. The images on pages for movies that have NOT been released on DVD yet are taken from publicly released publicity images or the high def trailers (all of which have been released to the public). I've even seen "Academy screener copy : Do not duplicate" watermarks on some images, which means they were stolen Academy screeners which is doubly bad. If you post bootleg images, an admin will ask you to remove them or we will. If we catch you continuing to post bootleg images, sadly, you will be banned along with the vandals and kooks. We don't need to give studio lawyers a reason to turn a negative eye towards this site.

7) Check, double check, triple check before you change another member's inputs to a page.
I know. We're all adults here, well most of us (there are quite a few minors who are active here), but edits to someone's page are welcome if they are correct. Obviously wrong info being edited onto pages what others have worked on, unfortunately tends to rub people the wrong way. So double, triple check and make sure you are right before changing someone else's info. It will keep ruffled feathers to a minimum and all of us appreciate when someone catches an error we made, since it all works towards making the site that much better.

A final notations on some of my 'summaries'. I've strayed from these rules only a few times, primarily because of the preponderance of 'urban myths' that I see on the web. Falsehoods regarding which federal law banned what gun and when it was available for sale, muddies the waters of the gun's movie history, since a weapon cannot be seen in any film 'before' it was offered for sale, and becomes increasingly rarer after it has stopped production. Shooting down falsehoods on the Internet is justifiable (like people saying the "Brady Bill banned the Import of the Steyr AUG, and other such nonsense" (Fact: The AUG/SA was banned from further import by the ATF years before the 1993 Brady Bill even existed)). I just noted that, if persons wondered why I put in some 'political history' notes in some pages.