We've been getting a lot of requests for Alpha/Beta builds of games recently.

Best example at the moment: http://www.speedrun.com/ahitab http://www.speedrun.com/ahitbb

My concerns: A: I think it is desirable to support Alpha/Beta builds short term B: I think it is desirable to not clutter games with Alpha/Beta categories/variables long term. C: I don't like removing good information.

My suggestion (after consulting with some of the other mods) to remedy this is to "Archive" certain games/game builds. Archiving would basically remove them from normal searches and hopefully attach them as legacy information to the current game.

There are not currently short term plans to implement this in the very near future, I just wanted to get the thought out there and see if anyone had better suggestions.

For now we may have these copies of games, but just be aware there is reason to it and thought to remedy it eventually. Creating the separate game is the short term solution that aligns most with long term solutions I feel.

Maybe utilize the ROM Hacks category (and rename it to "Other Versions" or something)? That's already attached to specific games and moderators could have the option to limit exposure of select games/ROM Hacks.

This thread is pretty old, but it wasn't too far down, so I figured I should put this here.

There are also cases like this: http://www.speedrun.com/Distance Steam early access (pc) game that gets weekly/monthly updates which instantly invalidates all previous runs, and once the game is fully released, it's likely people would rather use the release version than to keep old/incomplete versions backed up.