Suggestion to Improve the Functionality of Series Pages
2 years ago
North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

I would like to suggest an update to the current functionality of game series pages. In its current form, series pages have barely any moderative functions, that means it basically just shows all games that belong to the respective series and they simply represent a community via Discord servers, Twitch directories or series forums. It does allow you to add games to the respective series though, which is kinda powerful.

In this fashion, my first suggestion is to give each series a switch that mods of it can use to transition between a "representative series" (which every series currently is) and a "functional series". Obviously, this option could be locked and only available to site staff concerning more important series like 2D Mario or 3D Mario. Generally speaking, the option to actually toggle the series mode could be something that a distinction between normal and super moderators would be useful for.

Here are my ideas for options that a functional series could contain:

  1. Feature a button that allows a series mod to automatically add or remove a person as a mod to every single game that belongs to the respective series. This way, a newly added series mod could add themself to every game part of it. (For all intents and purposes, this option alone would already be a tremendous help for my needs.)

  2. More extensive than the first option, but at least as important and efficient would be a dedicated page which shows a table of all games part of a series. The left column would display each game while the top row would show the name of everyone who moderates at least one game within this series. The most right column of the top row would allow to enter a username who then becomes part of this table. The rest would basically be a set of boxes which can be ticked to add or remove people as mods from each specific game at lightning speed. By clicking on a name in the top row, you could also have each box be checked/unchecked immediately. And then of course you can save these changes before they actually take effect. Only downside is that it might take a rework of the notification system to prevent spam.

The specific background behind these suggestions is that the series for Super Mario 64 ROM hacks has well over 100 games that belong to it at this point. Nearly every one of these games has fundamentally equal rulesets and, generally speaking, these are hacks, so they basically play all the same. If you know what to do for one game, you know what to do for every other one. Therefore, it would only make sense that a mod of any of these hacks could generally also take care of every other hack, and that's actually how we handle it at the moment. However, there's currently no good option for us to add moderators efficiently. We'd have to manually add someone for more than 100 games at once if we wanted to make sure whoever we add can actually help us out in full scope. Likewise, removing someone would take the same effort, and given that people might quickly lose motivation to verify this many submissions, it would be very painful for us having to replace people at fast rates and not just a single time. It's even worse that the only motivation to add people comes from a lack of motivation of everyone else to verify any runs in the first place, so if that's the case there's no way anyone would feel motivated to add someone as mod to 150 games instead, which can be quite a problematic downward spiral.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
TheSecondTry and Quills like this
Glamorganshire, Wales

Some good points raised in this, I do however strongly disagree with 1), being able to add someone as a moderator to every game in a series is something only site staff should have any power to do in my opinion, it would almost never be necessary and could cause a myriad of problems - the time spent doing it manually is the price I suppose. With Super Mario 64 ROM hacks I'm sure, if the time spent doing it is too great, you can seek site assistance, it's just such a unique case. 2) is useful, but sounds useful only in the context of giant game series, Ig the changes you've listed are geared entirely towards moderation changes but even in this case I cannot endorse having someone moderate '150 games' because they're similarly engineered, it should generally always be done by a player base.

Canada

As I understand it, many years ago series moderators effectively had full control over all the games in their series (not quite to the extent you're describing here), and for various reasons this ended up causing a lot of problems and series mod powers ended up being massively nerfed as a result. I can see the value of this for something like ROM Hacks where there's so much overlap (maybe this makes more sense as Game->Sub-game thing), but having this be a global thing for every series on the site is probably not a good idea.

Oreo321, MrMonsh and 2 others like this
New South Wales, Australia

It's not one single person moderating 150 leaderboards Dan, that's just how much work it is to add a single new series mod from the playerbase. As it stands now Zako will always have to go through hundreds and hundreds of games to increase the number of mods and replace dormant ones, and that is simply too large a job for a volunteer.

As for it seeming like an impossible task to moderate that many boards, it isn't. We just need to add more mods. Our run submissions are always spread out over a diverse selection of hacks, with most of them going without runners for long stretches of time. A cursory glance at a top runners profile will show they run dozens of hacks. Furthermore, hacks aren't merely similarly engineered, for the most part they function identically to each other and the people moderating the boards are extremely familiar with how these hacks are made and can easily contact the creators for specific information. On top of this, individual leaderboards also have mods that have been chosen specifically for their knowledge of that specific hack, be it the hack creator, or the runner who routed it, etc.

Our community is always growing and is very much involved in this. That's why we'd like to make it easier to include them.

Edited by the author 2 years ago