United Statesmobiusman, I was for normalizing the names as well. It just hasn't been changed yet. Flag option would be cool.
State flags are unrecognizable. If you want to use anything to denote states, use the 2 letter code, but I don't think it's terribly useful at the moment.
Also 2dos, the sites don't really have any sort of official partnership any more than SDA and SRL do. There might be some cross-linking eventually, but we anticipate the management structures will stay separate. SRL Profile showing up on just the profile page would definitely help us in contacting people on IRC though especially until private messages get implemented.
Hi Healbus,
A small number of largely developed communities are understandably reluctant to duplicate the data and have two places to manage things.
Some ideas have been thrown around to address this such as just linking to other reputable sites or having some sort of API between the two. I don't much care for the linking solution because it can require our users to get accounts at other sites to submit runs. Linking would also prevent our users from having runs for that game tracked on their profile, which does not seem ideal. Having an API brings up similar questions of who is hosting the source of the data and who defines and maintains the specifications for the format as categories change over time. Doubling data isn't ideal, but I also don't like precluding our site from adding games, so eventually some solution will have to be reached that probably can't address everything. See also this thread for discussion on PBs, for which the decision on that may affect how/if we interact with community leaderboards: http://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/jvbcn
We can figure out a hard stance on this if necessary, but as we continue to evaluate expansion, we may come to a better conclusion over time. If the community feels like we need to make a discussion thread to come closer to a conclusion now, we can do that. The end goal is to support all games in some fashion, and I would consider the current state of adding games to be somewhat temporary as the site continues to organize and improve.
The Games section of the forum isn't expanding in a practical manner at the moment so some navigation changes will be necessary eventually. Pinning forums is also a good idea, but I imagine the forum changes will take quite a bit of time.
MLSTRM: (Graphical series) Having the option available is probably good for now, at least for series, since Pac already had that implemented on the front page at one point. We're at about 100 series right now, so I'm unsure if the page will expand too much as the site grows to make supporting that practical later on. I think the games sort is expanding to be large enough for that to not really be practical. I personally find it difficult to discern some games/series from box art/images, so I don't think it should be the default. It may be reasonable to save the user preference on image/text for the series page as well.
Pac is working on some other stuff, so I'm not sure where these items falls on priority.
This goal of this thread is to collect feedback on how to organize times with videos, times without videos, and possibly unsanctioned personal bests moving forward. For now, things will remain largely as they are regarding this. More discussion will be helpful in making plans to improve the site. Some of this was briefly discussed in another thread, but I would like to emphasize some ideas and issues for discussion.
Runs can be mostly divided into 3 different types of data: Case 1: Times with videos Case 2: Community sanctioned times (on leaderboards) with no videos Case 3: Unsanctioned personal best times (not on leaderboards) with no videos
Case 1 is currently supported for all games. Case 2 is supported for games where moderators have chosen to support it. A checkbox was recently added for users to filter to Case 1 “Videos only” Case 3 is not currently supported by the site.
Case 1: Times with videos are available for public scrutiny and are largely verifiable. Some games only currently support Case 1. speedrun.com currently allows individual communities to choose whether or not videos are required, which creates some inconsistency between games, which can be okay.
Case 2: Many communities have chosen to support times without videos. Some communities outside of speedrun.com enforce a threshold beyond which a video is required, which could also be an option implemented here. From a moderation standpoint it can be difficult to handle issues relating to this type of data set, so some communities choose not to support it. Lack of transparency of top times was a frequent issue at a previous record tracking site, and the general accuracy of the data was frequently questioned. It seems that this data is still something people want as an option for moderators to choose to support. Being able to sort to only videos helps users to get to the data set they want to look at.
Case 3: To what extent do the users want to use this site for tracking personal bests? As it currently stands, a user cannot track a personal best with no video for games where video is required. Is this something we want to support? It could possibly be implemented as a separate data set only associated with the user, and one idea might be a freeform data set with little to no moderation.
Should we look to support a data set of less moderated times specific to each user that are not featured on the main leaderboards? If this is something we should do, are there better ways to offer this functionality? Is this something the users want the site to handle, or is it out of scope?
Hi duckfist,
I've been working behind the scenes with Pac on site ideas and organization.
Now that the games list is properly organized to scale with game additions, I think we can look to start supporting games more liberally in the near future. (Possibly within 2 weeks) With this in mind, I do think it is heavily necessary to establish some basic fundamental ground rules, recommendations, and expectations for game moderation prior to that point. The admins/moderators have been functioning somewhat asynchronously up until now, and getting some expectations and communication in place will help greatly with organization in tackling larger scale efforts to add, moderate, and maintain games. I will be working to get these items established and clarified for moving forward.
I would also like separately to organize site to-do's and look at establishing some idea of priority/importance for these, which would be open for discussion. I'll write up site goals in some form, but it may or may not be an official mission statement.
