Dude may or may not have stolen 24kg of sand.

I had to reblock it w/ adblock after the update occurred.

@ViperViper the fact that people had to dig into forum posts and ask on the discord to actually find out it was paid promotion is p freakin sus (made more ambiguous by sr.c's usage of "Promoting Content" on other socials applying to no-money-involved interactions), and the fact that none of this was disclosed on elements such as the front page stream when they were promoting the game def raises some flags.

Whether its actually illegal and worthy of any investigation, i don't rly know. And even if it were illegal, I doubt there would be much regulatory attention given to a Speedrunning Forum anyway.

Unless elo gets looked into for dishonest advertising practices, it'll likely be there until the dev stops paying,

Finally, a good update.

It may have been rushed out to fix one of the worst updates pushed thus far and lacking some important things, but its still a good update.

Given it says User Research instead of Beta Test, i assumed that just meant "we legally need explicit permission to collect this data, so please sign here so we can. it's for the good of the site, we swear!"

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Might as well drop my thoughts

Profiles:
- Let people turn the stats off, either individually or as a whole. I know that entire section just exists to cram another ad-per-page in but I do not want my entire activity on this site publicly logged and easily accessible. Especially stats like "runs reviewed" or "last visit." I'd rather just another large banner ad that takes up the entire space those boxes fill, because at least I can prevent the banner ads from stalking me.
-- Stats like "runs reviewed"/"last visit" would be good info for a Super Mod to have on Mods (in the extent of their specific board), but not something that should be public unless a person chooses to make them public.

Boards:
- The Game News tab should not be below the Game Stats tab and it certainly shouldn't be below a fucking autoplaying video ad. Yes, this site is already unusable without adblock so its basically required anyway, but still.
-- Moderators should at least be able to change the order of these boxes, even if you stick the awful autoplaying video ad in the same spot.
- Zoom everything in on the boards pages like, 10%. There's no legitimate reason everything has to be that small.
- The info tab in the Edit Game menu looks good, tho there's still a lot of superfluous information in there (why are the Game Type checkboxes still there and grayed out? why not have a platform dropdown?). Every other tab remains mostly unchanged or looks bad, but is functionally fine which is all I care about for mod settings.

Run Comments:
- People need to be able to turn off run comments at least, if not have them be something you opt into. As with any comment section, it's basically open for all kinds of exploitation
- There need to be moderator-run filters available for comments and a way to review comments before they go up. Let people regex out the slur spellings or community-specific shit.
-- Extend this out to individual users too, to block unwanted comments from being seen by anyone but maybe moderators of the board.

In general tho, while I appreciate at least listening to the criticisms that "nothing has been done for the average user while Elo's continuing to find new ways to monetize the site" in the wake of the Severed Steel criticism, this seriously feels like it needed one or two people to stop on by with a critical eye and point out the issues present. Be it the beta tester idea thrown around here or something else.

I'm not sure its a controversial request to improve the awful search system.

Tho if that search system update came with an NSFW tag for games, while opening the floodgates to any NSFW games being added to the site under that toggle, then it'd be both controversial and a good idea.

I still see the ad when I turn adblock off, but I've got it blocked w/ adblock on.

There's really no rule saying a run even needs to even have a timer on screen (unless its there in your community's rule).

Luckily they're not too difficult to block.

So nothing would change?

Does that mean its just random/by last submitted run when multiple games have the same number of runs?

It's def an upgrade imo, at least for my general use.

Originally posted by Camcorder- The blob post that was written by Meta about Severed Steel a few months back was not part of any kind of paid (or unpaid) promotion, it was just a post about a cool upcoming game that the author was really excited about.

This has been mentioned multiple times, but people just don't trust Elo, and I can't blame anyone because we've yet to be provided a reason to. People were skeptical of Elo's acquisition of sr.c due to previous Elo-owned sites. A year in, we've seen 1 attempt of sr.c trying to gain the community's trust (having mods in the community) and various attempts to seemingly take the residual trust built by previous owners and completely turn it to dust.

The way users see it is "SR.C blog poster writes a major fluff piece about a game, bordering on an advertisement -> that user then gets promoted from a blog poster to community manager -> a month later, the game that they fluffed up is now in a financial relationship w/ the site, with said CM as the board's head mod."

If there was a reason to trust the website, then sure this could be considered not a big deal. Meta probably did actually like the game, and the business relationship likely came from Meta's interest as oppose to his interest being fabricated by money. But given there's no trust, no one is willing to give the benefit of the doubt on that, and assuming malice is frankly where any reasonable person would go when a corporation does something that makes them money against the will of a userbase.

Even this promotion has actively hidden any mentions of money exchanging hands, which actively completely destroys people's trust and in some places is outright illegal. The only bit of confirmation of this being advertising is about 3 clicks in (assuming you see it on the games page and not the front page stream, at which case there are 0 direct links to that information), in response to a forum post of a user not knowing whether or not the game was an ad or not. Which leads to the final point:

Originally posted by Camcorder- We know that your trust is a precious commodity am sorry we missed the mark here
- We do read all of your feedback and take it to heart
- We will continue working to improve the site, both with features/fixes and better communication

The fact that this all went down makes me doubt these 3 lines at all.

- If y'all understood that our trust was a precious commodity, you'd not actively avoid disclosing this partnership until questioned. The game was spread on the front page w/o even mentioning that there was a business relationship at all, and even in the games page ad, the wording "Promoted Game" is incredibly ambiguous. Sr.c has used "promote" to reference things where no money has exchanged hands at all. Disclosing business relationships builds trust, and hiding them absolutely guts it.
- If y'all read feedback (particularly these forums or social media like twitter/reddit), you'd understand that people already feel that the community has been exploited by Elo, and the last thing people want to see is Elo finding new ways to monetize boards while not providing anything of benefit to the end users.
- And if y'all wanted to improve the communication, you'd have disclosed all of this in a blog post, or at the absolute bare minimum tweeted it out. Just say ANYTHING. At the v least, y'all could copypaste Meta's post on the Severed Steel forums about being an ad into a blog post and hit submit, or tweet out a picture of that post. It'd be awful but it'd be better than the Literal Nothing we've gotten thus far.

I'll just throw my 2 cents in:

First, devs aren't to blame. Naturally, a dev wanting to appeal to speedrunners would reach out to speedrun.com for advertising. Common sense, and not particularly bad behavior. The site is already plastered with ads to the point of being unusable, might as well have some of those slots filled up by things the minority of people without an adblocker installed would enjoy?

The real issue is w/ Elo. Naturally, this is ANOTHER change that is neither communicated with the community nor wanted by them. A lot of the advertising for this game is not properly disclosed as advertising, making it either outright illegal or at the v least, a "convenient coincidence" that further plummets the already-skeptical community's trust in Elo. Though frankly at this point, I can't imagine there's a single person left on sr.c that doesn't have a reason to dislike Elo and what has happened w/ the site in the past year. This is just a monthly occurrence at this point.

And for anyone reading this thinking "cmon guys its just a tiny little box, you guys are overreacting 4head." This is just an extension of a year's worth of destroyed faith, to the point where even many of the site's defenders have to admit that the critics make a compelling argument. If this weren't paired w/ the promise of heavily wanted features without an ETA, an excessive amount of ads that crash some browsers, months of a borderline non-functioning website, unwanted features, significantly decreased transparency, and an utter lack of meaningful communication for any of these changes while regularly insisting "we totally care about the community uwu <33333. we luv speedrunners!!", then yea it'd just be a tiny box 4head.

Strangely enough, some people wanna enjoy the fun of speedrunning games without having their names associated with porn games due to common stigma against erotic content.

P weird imo but understandable I guess.

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The one case I can kinda understand it for, is if you've run something you don't want to admit you've run. I'm shameless in this regard and I'll totally own it, but I get it if you don't want say, HuniePop, on your profile.

if people want to run one of the 5 combined eroge that somehow slipped their way onto the site, they deserve the ability to use an alt.

Someone needs to advocate for the obvious troll accounts.