If marathons were actually archived it would probably be fine, I wouldn't say simply hiding the forum after 4 weeks of inactivity qualifies as archiving though.
Not sure if this has been brought up before, but could you display the amount of runs someone has verified somewhere? Ideal spot I imagine would be on each persons Info page. It would help a lot to see which mods are actually doing things, at least in that regard
I want full moderator logs associated with each game (accessible only to moderators and staff) at some point, which I think more directly addresses the issue. This work isn't slated any time soon though.
I think that idea from Werster would be good if coupled with the ability to see how long ago they last verified a run.
It would open up a lot of questions. I'll comment on this in some detail for the sake of discussion, but I don't think we should make policy changes without substantial discussion and/or consensus. Since we don't have a detailed list of rules (which is a suboptimal circumstance itself), most of the site policy has been set by precedent which drives the expectations of the users, and major changes to this would need communicated and/or documented in detail.
In order for the proposed "user must have run" game request policy to have real effect, it would pretty much imply that you need video proof of your run, otherwise it encourages people to lie about having a time. Assuming that, if a user runs an obscure game with no video and wants to post a time, they have no way to do that. It also encourages doing a single playthrough for the sake of meeting a criteria for having a time, or lying that a youtube account is yours to make it look like you have a time.
I would point out that generally any time a user is terribly inactive and/or the board has no runs, we've most often allowed other users to have the board. Though now, the site has been around long enough that it's now easier to look at someone's profile and get a gauge of how involved they are with the site, but we still get a lot of new users requesting games. There are also some active users that moderate obscure boards they don't have runs in because they take interest in the game.
It's a difference between the current adding more games and having to make changes later and the proposed adding less games and making less changes later.
"I think that idea from Werster would be good if coupled with the ability to see how long ago they last verified a run."
I don't know how much I like that as a metric, because it's incomplete data.
For example, I'm on here pretty regularly, but I think I've only verified one run that's not my own. In the case of Quest 64, we have enough moderators to verify runs within a few hours. In the case of Legaia, no one else runs the game, so I guess I could create dummy runs to verify them and make me look more active, but it's pointless.
My suggestion is a mix of the two submission approaches: allow established and active moderators of other games to set up boards without a run but require new/potentially inactive moderators to have one. This should make it less likely for mods to disappear after requesting a game while preserving the ability of reliable users to set up boards for games that might not otherwise be added.
It doesn't fix the issue of someone making their own rules for a game with an existing community, but I don't think requiring a run would help much with this problem. I think the only way to really solve that problem is for the global mods to spend a long time researching each game submission, which isn't really reasonable.
Something to think about, anyway.
There was a preliminary list of users by country like this on a page at one point. I'm not sure why that wasn't fully implemented, but it's probably something we can accommodate. The update schedule is a bit limiting right now because we're looking to update the site front-end soon, which could make it difficult to merge in other changes at the same time.
Here's what kirkq was talking about: http://www.speedrun.com/users/SA You have to use some trial and error to find the right initials for each country. China's is CN.
Instead of trial and error, you can also check this list: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#search
something like this? https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso:3166👎ed-3:v1:en,fr
Suggestion: An option to hide milliseconds from being displayed except for times that are equal to the second. Something like this:
3:38.308 3:38.570 3:40 3:41 3:44.030 3:44.700 3:59 4:21
That would allow milliseconds to always be an available option to enter. Oh, and align time the time column to the right instead of center.
Sorry if this was mentioned before (went through a few pages of posts but I didn't see it, then laziness got the best of me) but have you ever considered a "commenting" section? I will use the MMRTA boards as a reference (http://megamanleaderboards.net/). When you log in your can post a comment (just individual congrats, ASCII faces, shit memes or whatever else you want) attached to the run. It would be separate from the forums since that should be a place where more game related things should take place (strat discussion, rule changes and other things rather than personal messages). While I know that Twitter is a great "solution" to this it might be nice to actually have it attached to the run itself since that is what draws attention. Once again, sorry if this was mentioned before or if there is a similar solution but I am just too dumb to see it :<
WeForgot
xHaviiHx: Forums need some general quality of life improvements like this at some point, as well as some reorganizing. I'm not clear on the status of the previous oddities with topics being marked "New" either. Maybe they were fixed?
ROMaster2: I think being unable to display 3:40.000 would be a shortcoming. 3:40 generally implies "between 3:40.000 and 3:40.999. Maybe your idea/point was that both of those ideas should be allowed within the same board?
WeForgot: My thoughts on a comments section have always been that it would need to have sufficient controls to prevent user harassment. To me this would include things like no comments on runs by non-users, and allowing users the ability to remove comments on their own runs. With these tasks attached to it, it's a more complex task than just simply adding the comment box.
It would be nice if you could follow a whole game series, as opposed to following all the games individually.