Developer and Siteop Notes



Many sites, especially those considering themselves involved in what they call “scene”, try to implement more and more features into their system, to make their own site look more fancy in order to be “special” by creating a certain kind of “atmosphere” users find unique. Even smaller sites nowadays have “sitebots” which announce new uploads to one or more IRC channels their users are in. 

Most sites require that the SFV file of an ISO/VCD/MP3 release is uploaded as first file. This brings the advantage of being able to SFV-check all other files immediately after their upload, only giving “credits” for your upload if the file passes the SFV check. 

Some people tried to make their sitebot announces more fancy (themselves they call this “more elite”) by letting the bot say the size of a release when the SFV file gets uploaded. If the files’ sizes are listed in the SFV file this is an easy job even if those files are not uploaded yet: simply add all filesizes and the sum is the size of the release. 

When some other sites tried to make themselves even “more elite” by adding their sitelogo as comment to uploaded SFV files, other sites again took countermeasures against this by simply stripping all comments out of uploaded SFV files to get rid of other sites’ banners. You can guess by now that because of this the files’ size and date stamps got lost most of the time to the disadvantage of those sites which tried to gather information about a release’s size after the SFV upload.

Unfortunately, there is no standard solution to this self-made problem. Filesize stamps aren’t added to SFV files by default from all available SFV tools and the probability that some other site strips out all comments from the SFV before it hits your place is somewhat high. Our recommendation is to use a guessing system based on the “standard file size” (currently 15.000.000 bytes) for ISO/VCD releases and the number of files (which can easily be extracted by counting non-comment lines of any SFV file) in case filesize stamps are not available in the SFV file. Good luck :)