I’m about to enter a game for a system where I do not yet have any other games (BBC Micro) and on a format that I am using for the first time (5¼" Floppy Disk).
The game is not currently in Core, so I will submit it when I have entered it in the app.
However there are many ways of writing the system name - “BBC Micro”, “BBC”, “Acorn BBC”, etc. From trying to search for the entry, I can see that the correct format you are using in Core is “BBC Micro” but there would be nothing stopping me entering a different name in my app then submitting that to Core. It would make more sense for fields like this for the app to show the list of system names as used in Core.
Format is similar. I don’t know in the app whether you use ‘5¼ inch disk’, ‘5 1/4" disc’, '5¼" Floppy Diskette" or any of scores of variants on that theme. Again, where the options are fairly limited and well known, the drop down should show what is being used in Core.
I know that when submitting, the web-page that the app sends me to shows only the valid values for each field, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to have to guess first in the app, only then to have to correct it when submitting via the web form.
Edit: It turns out that the only option when submitting is “Floppy”. That’s far from ideal. We have several different types of optical disk listed - GD-ROM, CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-Ray, etc. as well as the generic “Optical Disc”. Why only one generic entry for Floppy Disks? It was not uncommon for games for PC and BBC Micro, and possibly other platforms to be available on both 5¼" and 3.5" Floppy Disk formats, and it seems reasonable that people would want to be able to differentiate and search by these versions, especially if they were trying to collect all releases of a particular title. Using the edition field is an unsatisfactory solution, due to it being a free-form field and therefore likely not to be consistent in naming.