United StatesThe game page search bars site staff uses for attaching a game to a series or a mod to a base game are broken today for some reason. They were working for me as recently as yesterday I think. I made a note to handle both the other requests as soon as that is working again.
For adding games in series, there should be a button in the top left of the page right above "results per page", it's a little less obvious than it used to be. If it's not there for you let me know. http://www.speedrun.com/scooby-doo
We want to add a "score" type timer eventually. The timer code needs refactored to handle more generic timer types like this (along with an arbitrary number of arbitrarily named timers/)
JazzyChoi1991: I added a SM64 Rom Hacks series. I don't think FrostyZako has logged on since I did that yet.
LozBlind: This seems fine since the forums suggest you've been doing a lot of board maintainance.
MaximumLeech: I'll add you for Trine 1 since the current moderator doesn't have a run and there's some question of availability of moderators for the board. (One moderator isn't ideal even for small boards.) Since you don't have a run of the other games, I think adding you for the whole series might be a bit too much on my part.
triton: I think we should wait a week or two for inactivity. It's a bit of a risk to me to add you with the intention of deleting a time I know nothing about. The user has a reasonable number of recorded runs on the site that are probably legitimate. Someone that wasn't me added you for Garry's mod.
Jumpyluff: I'm pretty sure I didn't make this change, I'll talk to staff.
Mario Kart Stuff:
- If people aren't posting under the forums with usernames of runners with runs, it is very difficult to gauge consensus. A strawpoll is a very poor measurement compared to posts in a forum thread, one is anonymous, the other is not.
- There is a difference between the notion of "the community wants this" and "me and my friends talked about this in discord" Some members of the community probably don't hang out in discord.
- Category bloat can be a problem. There is some balance between too many and being too restrictive.
- There is some desire to have game in a series be relatively consistent with each other. However, sometimes the games and communities are different enough that different decisions can be made for different games. Trying to overly maintain consistency has been an issue with certain series in the past.
- If MK runs need restructured to a subcategory layout, let us know what needs changed.
- Sort it out in the forums for now please amongst people with runs of the game.
I would want concurrence from some of the others moderating games in the series. I have no inherent preference, but I don't want to change things unless most people seem to agree, as it's kind of a weird case.
Some of my opinions on the "boards on other sites" topic are here: http://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/pb5j2/1#mu5fe I think the current situation with "locked redirect" is stupid and hinders site users as a whole, but there's not a good solution right now.
I think the current development plan is primarily fixing bugs from the update, and then we'll look into future functionality. It's been a busy month for some of the staff with ESA and some personal obligations.
If he wants to post here I can make the change. (It's not 100% clear that there isn't some other guy with essentially the same name.)
It shouldn't be possible for mods to delete runs as of a few months ago. They can only be edited and rejected last I checked.
I don't know exactly why the run count might be wrong.
I'm adding this series for Super Mario 64 Rom Hacks, which lets you guys add your own games. Per this post ( http://www.speedrun.com/post/crc9h ) I'm adding FrostyZako as mod to all the rom hacks, since he moderates over half of them anyway and has been requesting many of the additions recently. I'll leave it to them to decide who else to add. (The series doesn't search well in the search bar for some reason.) I'd recommend having at least a few people as super mods on the series.
Site staff still has to label games as "Rom Hacks" and attach them to SM64 for consistency, due to functionality not being implemented to for selected users to handle that currently. If you need to ping us to do so, do that here: http://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/be179
If the SM64 mods want anyone removed due to inactivity or disinterest in maintaining the rom hacks let me know. I haven't heard much discussion on that topic, so maybe it's fine as is. You may want to ping me in the "The Site" forum if I don't follow up on discussion in this thread.
I'd recommend creating a forum thread here for requesting game additions, since the site doesn't have a great way to forward game requests, so we can just point people to a thread to post in. (Similar to this thread: http://www.speedrun.com/iwbtgfg/thread/toidu )
PixelKaye: Let's give the Twitch message a week or so, and if it doesn't get a response we'll look at changes.
LoveBot: It looks like you were added. Most often if the game versions are radically different, it actually makes more sense to add a separate game to track it than cram it as a new category in a game it's not comparable with other than by name. Either way is probably fine enough though. You submitted the game request like 6 or less days ago, the form hasn't been processed particularly fast lately. If it's in pending actions it will get processed. This thread should not be used to bypass that form.
InfiniteSheldor: Since the user has been offline and you moderate a couple other games in the series, this is fine.
geiken: Run was verified apparently.
kobepilgrim: Twitch's message notifications are horrendous last I checked. Everything defaults to a spam box unless you explicitly set it to do otherwise. Even after undesignating things from spam, you won't see new messages unless you manually check, or you are on a page of the site as the message is sent.
JazzyChoi1991: If the rom hack runners seem to agree to this, I'm fine with moving all the rom hacks to a series and doing that, but I'd need to see a forum thread or something to suggest consensus on that. (I'd also rather have them add games than the site, it would make my life easier.) Could you link this document as well? I've never seen it.
StarOfDoom: He's posted on the forums before, maybe try there. I don't see a need to be overly concerned about backgrounds, personally.
LaserTrapGamer: It looks like you were added. I didn't touch anything.
StrawberryMilk: Since you don't seem to have a run in queue, I'm not sure there's good reason to add you.
GhostScit: I don't think I touched anything. If you were regular moderator (green sword), it's mostly up to the super mods whether or not you're there. I don't see a run by you regardless.
SeriouslyRidiculous: It looks like you were added, I didn't touch anything.
Ewil: Since you're on pretty much every game and they don't have runs of that game, I'll add you. The guy who added it didn't add a run, which is odd since I've been checking for that more heavily in recent time.
CrystalKrazy: 28 days and run in queue, I'll add you.
SDiezal: The runs were processed. Generally just give it some time.
bmac_attack_64/DrYoshiyahu: I moved DrYoshiyahu to a super mod, so he can add people now.
peck324: It looks like your run was added. Beyond that, please discuss it with the moderator for now.
xJackieBx/Zecora_MLP_1: Refer to previous post mostly. "I don't like the things he said last week" isn't a great reason to move mods around, sorry.
Zecora_MLP_1: Don't delete forum posts unless they're just abusive. It just makes people annoyed. If you don't want the board to have a bunch of complaint threads, just make a single thread that all of that discussion is restricted to, then people can argue all they want and it doesn't flood the whole board and people don't have to come to this thread to voice dissent.
Peewi: I'll just add you, since the mod has been offline a while.
NiiroKitsune: Moderator inactive, added.
dominantmasterXgamer/RC-3P0: Ozotuh's response is pretty accurate.
PrettzL: My post should still speak for itself, but I'll give a personal response (nothing guidance/rules related here.): If it was a board I moderated, I wouldn't really care much about an additional category listed behind the featured categories if people wanted it so long as it was well defined and didn't bloat the category list too much. Consensus is also good.
Let me know if I missed any posts.
Frosty: I can't change your name, it says "fails to rename theme folder". I'm guessing you have a custom there or something maybe? (Or maybe there's a theme named frosty somewhere, which would indicate an issue there.) It might be a while before it's fixed due to the other higher priority issues right now.
Probably would be better to just make a SM64 Rom Hacks series at this point. Would need a bit of time set aside to move all of those.
The user has no pending actions, so either he didn't submit it, or he didn't notice the notification response, or something in the site is glitched up. (I don't remember if I processed that particular game or not.) It needs resubmitted in any case. The queue is at most about 7 days behind. I'll catch it up some today.
That limitation is there to prevent abuse by people adding games under series right now. I would like it to eventually be "you can only link up to games you are also a mod of", but that requires a bit of implementation. Asking staff to handle it for now is the way to do it.
MiniOmegaKing: In the interest of pushing things in a more sensible direction I'll add you, but I think you should try to sort out a bit with the other moderators. If I recall, I think one or both were added due to substantially inactive moderators of the boards in the past. Setting standards for a relatively inactive community can be a bit ambiguous. If you want to point to this post: Most difficulties should be supported for most games. There are various ways to highlight one over another, such as using subcategories. I added you to all the MGS games except Phantom Pain because it already has 6 mods. The older games seem to be operating somewhat independently as is.
DarQ_Massacres: Moderation seems relatively active enough, and there don't seem to be any apparent problems. Discuss it with them if you want added. All messages in this thread are responded to in order by an admin (shield) or full mod (yellow sword) unless we accidentally miss one.
messenger: I added him back per your other post.
xJackieBx/Zecora_MLP_1: Please just link a thread next time. I'm not reading through all of it, but my generic opinion is that if something related to an online game is one time attainable, it should be considered (not saying required) to split off into a separate category or subcategory to promote fair competition for newcomers. Some games release tons of one time attainable items, so maintaining a list of one time obtainable items might be tedious in some cases. If a board has a substantial amount of runners, consensus is generally the most correct answer. Have a vote or something.
TheBlazedJp: Normally probably wouldn't ban someone for such trivial trolling, but it's spoofing someone's name and you clearly just registered the name to stoke the fire, so go find another account name or something.
They seem to like testing the spam filters.
Update from my perspective:
Background:
Site staff had wanted to update the site to better scale at lower resolutions and on mobile. This shortcoming of the site had been pointed out by multiple users in the past, and was one large scale update of many that we wanted to pursue. The goal was to convert much of the front-end to using the bootstrap framework to accomplish this.
Timeline:
Most of site staff had seen a few pages of the layout converted over on a dev domain and mentioned that the direction/intention seemed fine. I was aware the layout was continuing to be developed, but there hadn't been much staff discussion for a couple weeks. During SGDQ, I logged in to a realization that the layout was launched and about 7 pages of feedback, many of which were pointing out readily apparent bugs. My perception at the time was that bugs would be fixed incrementally as they have in the past. The bootstrap update was launched, and subsequently the ESA site was pushed out over the next week or so, which has delayed many bugs getting fixed. Most site updates have been accompanied by some amount of minor bugs, this time there are a ton of bugs. Updates have historically been accompanied by a reasonable amount of availability set aside to fix the more substantial bugs; that did not happen within a reasonable amount of time this time. Site staff internal communication throughout all of this could've been better, myself included.
Discussion:
Do we dig backwards out of the mess or do we dig forward out of the mess? My personal preference is whatever gets the site in a stable state again in the shortest amount of time. Not being directly involved with site web development, I do not consider myself in a position to accurately assess that course of action. I was informed that reverting the site is not the preferred or ideal option; the ESA site implementation and database changes would cause substantial conflicts.
I don't at all agree with the timeline that occurred. I also don't agree with pushing out such a substantial amount of code that hasn't been well tested for basic functionality. Quite frankly, neither the timeline nor the lack of testing is something that should ever be done with a site with this many users. That's where we're at though. It is still my personal opinion that if the update wasn't associated with a large amount of functionality bugs (and to a lesser but still important extent, some spreading out of items and extra menus), the layout would be an improvement by converting over to Bootstrap. If the bugs get fixed and layout improvements are implemented beyond that, I think we'll be in an alright spot. Ideally this week provides more fixes than last week.
My position has historically been handling day to day operations, I will continue to handle that as before. I also do not wish to go down the path of giving estimates for another developer's work.
I don't know if this post contributes much to anything other than some amount of transparency; it's a bad situation all around until these things get fixed.
- Kirk
