I have changed the ratings system to stop abuse. No longer is it possible to down-vote everything and then three star your own maps. There is now only one way for a map’s rating to go now, and that is up. This should preserve the usefulness of the ratings and greatly increase the work-load of anyone trying to stuff the ballot.

Unfortunately all the legitimate votes were also lost. In the future if anyone does try and stuff the ballot I can reset the ratings only for that post so hopefully this situation will be not repeated.

I have also turned on comment moderation, this means for normal users is that your post may have to wait a few hours before your comment appears on the site.

Most importantly I want to say sorry to those who originally got behind the ratings, thank you for trying to make this site better and SMR maps more approachable. I hope you will be willing to vote your favorite maps again.

Along with the change from 7z to zip I also spent some time adding a ratings system.

The system is a three star plus, one .  My reqonmandation for voting style goes like this:

• A vote of 3 stars means a above average quality map
• 2 stars would be an average map
• Below average is 1 star

Rate a map based on how much fun you had on it, on how well the map’s terrain was planned and painted, but beyond everything let your opinion guide you.

I would please ask that you do not rate a map down because of crashes, slow downs, or other major problems. If a map has a bug please leave a comment notifying of such, I will try and determine the problem and fix it, or if I am unable to I will forward it to someone who can.

These ratings should help newcomers as well as long term players in finding fun, new and or simply over looked maps.

So please vote, and do so knowing that you are helping others enjoy the SMR experience.

I have changed the compression used for the maps. Instead of using .7z now everything is compressed in .zip. While I love 7-zip, the best file compression program in existence, the use of .7z and the need for a user to have 7-zip installed acted as a deterrent to new players. So this afternoon I took a few hours and converted everything to zip. These files will be larger than their 7z counterparts but they are still small as far as downloads go.

Because I did some things automated some of the links may lead to non-existent files. If you encounter a 404 page anywhere on this site please leave a comment on the page that it was linked from, I will be sure to fix it right away.

I’ve been meaning to do it for months now, and I finally got my act together and added it, a image gallery.

As with most things about the site it features the work from the Sid Meier’s Railroads community. Prior to this images were scattered  throughout the Hooked On Railroads forum, now they have a central location to take nest.

The section is currently populated with images from my Sid Meiers railraods screenshot collection of which only a few were captured by myself. Sadly I cannot remember who was responcible for most individual photo, but I do know that quite a few of them are courtesy of Lowwell, Jancsika and Rodea.

The next thing on my to do list is go through and tag the screenshots, add descriptions and authors, or at least the authors I remember. If you know of an image’s author please tell me in the comments, my intention is not to withhold credit, I am sadly simply not perfect.

Most importantly, if you have an image that you would like to add to the gallery just post it here in the comments, I’ll add it pronto.

A few months back hooked railroad’s wiki was broken due to a change in the site’s core. They decided not fix it and instead put out the call to find another host. After a bit of waiting it is now safely hosted here on Sid Meier’s Railroads Simple. It has not been updated for ages and, well theres nothing wrong with that. I will be locking it to preserve it from vandals so it should be here for ages and hopefully generations to come. Check it out if you would like, it also contains some non-Sid Meier’s Railroads pages from Hooked Gamer’s other wikis, I’ll leave those for anyone curious.