Talk:Ian Mapleson

Cleanup needed (moved from article page)

Temporary edit (someone please contact me so I can help correct my site), by Ian Mapleson (mapesdhs@yahoo.com), 20/May/2015: reading the info below, I have to say it's all completely over my head, I've not heard about the icon issue, UUcode, etc. before at all. I think what's missing here is a lack of recognition that back in the early 1990s, uuencoding files was a very common method of sending data across the net, whereas today I can understand why many would not have heard of it (thus, "unfathomable reason" is a bit harsh, it would be like someone today asking why anyone would use MySpace, whereas when that system was new, it was the current vogue, the norm). Note I still "run" the DHS site in that I continue to control the content, but I haven't updated it in a long time as I really haven't had the time - I basically froze it before the release of Doom3. However, if there are issues like this, I'd be happy to make any changes necessary to resolve them. Note that of course I could just edit all the text below, but I don't want to do that. I'd rather hear from someone here (site admin?) who knows all about this icon business (please email me!), let me know what I have to change on my DHS site, then this page can be suitably updated and all the text I'm typing now removed. Cheers! :) Ian. PS. You can confirm this is written by me by finding me on FB, just ask. Btw, re these icon files, maybe I still have them in some original form? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.31.52.82 (Ian Mapleson) (talk • contribs) 11:42, May 20, 2015‎ (UTC)‎.

Although UUencoding was indeed common in the mid-1990s, to most users it was "invisible" (it was something offered as an option by their email client), and few if any people ever got to see actual raw UUcode, just as few people get to see actual HTML or RTF encoding (one has to deliberately open such files as text rather than as their designated type). Hence a lot of people failed to recognise that the icons page on DHS was a page of UUcode, and needed to be run through a decoder to obtain the actual DLL or ICL (whichever it was) file; even back in the 1990s, it would surely have made more sense (and taken up a little less space on the server) to offer the actual icons file as a download. The icons page was still there the last time I looked, and it's likely that a standalone UUdecoder program can still be downloaded somewhere in order to recover the file from the page, so it's not too late to correct this. — RobertATfm (talk) 14:00, May 25, 2015 (UTC)

Article

This article is basically a big, completely sub-trivial waste of space - it's just meaningless unless you're Ian Mapleson. 46.208.160.99 18:49, March 19, 2015 (UTC)

Or unless you're a Doom fan and intelligent, which you clearly aren't. Did you actually read the article? How is an article about one of the most important contributors to the first Doom site "trivial" or a "waste of space"? — RobertATfm (talk) 08:08, March 20, 2015 (UTC)

I somewhat agree with the first post. This article sounds like a lot of heresay, and even if it isn't, it's completely inproperly written for a wikia article of any sort. If I knew specifics on the situation, I'd fix it myself, but I don't. Someone who knows the history better should repair this article and remove all the crap.

73.222.116.75 22:15, May 20, 2015 (UTC)

I suspect that quite a lot of stuff on here is hearsay, but that doesn't make it invalid; this isn't Wikipedia or a court of law. And although I agree with you (and with Ian) that his article needs to be rewritten to give it a more neutral point of view, I still don't agree with the OP of this thread who reckoned that this article was altogether irrelevant. Contrary to the way they like to delude the fans (and themselves?), Doomworld is not only not the only Doom site, it wasn't even the first; that was DoomGate, about five or six years earlier and still going strong. As an article on an important contributor to a Doom site of prime importance, this article is thus totally relevant, albeit badly written. — RobertATfm (talk) 13:44, May 25, 2015 (UTC)