The recent X3 drama brought up the topic of our two different leaderboard sites over on the classic mega side too, and I feel this discussion is important enough that it should be out in the open instead of splintered across private messages between various people and semi-private chats, as it has been so far.
The current situation is that Mega Man speedrun leaderboards live on megamanleaderboards.net, which has existed before speedrun.com and is preferred by the majority of Mega Man runners (or classic mega runners at least) for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, many players who run many differents games would like to have all their runs in one place. As full migration to speedrun.com is clearly off the table, this would mean having the games on both sites.
The ideal solution would be full automatic mirroring. Joka has stated that this would be technically possible, but a lot of work that nobody wants to touch.
The realistic options are, if I'm not missing anything:
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Have runs on mmlb only, have srcom direct users there with something like what's now on the DKC boards at http://www.speedrun.com/dkc1
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Have people manually mirror the boards. Some individual games are successfully doing this at the moment, but it's unlikely to work on full scale given the sheer number of games and the commitment required.
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Have the boards open but unmaintained. This lets people get their runs on their profiles, but it will also result in people looking up Mega Man leaderboards and finding ones with outdated records, players with multiple entries, many missing runs and such, as you can currently see for Mega Mans 1, 3 and 6.
Unfortunately 1) doesn't seem to be an option. While the DKC1/2/3 boards have this feature, it is an exception, as the site admins don't allow it in general. Also, the admins disagree with this principle and have a different vision for the site more in line with 3).
An issue I see with 2) and 3) is that it isn't quite clear where runs should be submitted to if you want to be a part of a competitive ranking. If you just want a central place for PBs, there's no issue. But this raises confusion between using speedrun.com as a PB Tracker and using its leaderboards for accurate times and rankings - the site isn't really compatible with having both at once.
The best solution from my point of view would be: ¤ Create an empty leaderboard page for every Mega Man game with a link to MMLB (similar to the DKC boards). ¤ Let people enter an "MMLB runner name" on their speedrun.com profile page. ¤ Pull data from the MMLB API and show it on their speedrun.com profile page
By far the easiest solution I can think of. I could even write the code for them.
Highly unlikely that they would accept that though.
Personally I would like to see 1) by default with 2) allowed case by case when a single game's community is demonstrably committed enough to keeping it up to date. The position of "nobody should be barred from submitting runs" sounds nice and all, but it effectively is actively choosing the option 3).
I wish speedrun.com luck with its aspiration to become THE central leaderboards resource, but big goals should come with the work to back it up. Mmlb is still ways ahead of srcom in terms of features and usability, there's no support for automated mirroring, and seeing how little has changed over the last few years regarding either it seems safe to say the situation isn't going to change any time soon.
If the site administration insists on staunchly opposing option 1), at the very least I'd like to hear it stated outright that they are ok misleading people with shitty leaderboards with false information for the unforeseeable future. Because that's the situation now and I don't see a reason to expect that to change.
The second best alternative would be manual synchronization, like the X community is attempting now. But considering how many runs are submitted per week, it's pretty unlikely that they will be completely in sync at any given point.
This all depends on how dedicated the moderators are at keeping a site that none of us really check anyway, in sync.
Trying to maintain two leaderboards manually would be a lot of extra work and would, in my opinion, eventually lead to more confusion and burnout among the classic Mega Man community, who are broadly happy with the board we have and aren't interested in migrating or maintaining additional game pages here. The incomplete/inaccurate boards with no prominent links to MMLB (as well as the nonexistent boards) have also caused confusion for people who come to our streams and don't know what the record is or if anyone runs the game.
I realize that's because Speedrun.com is what most people know about. They think everything is on here if they're not told otherwise when they get to the game page. But that doesn't mean the structure of this site is the best fit for a community whose leaderboard predates SRC and is tailored to what we need, with features SRC is unlikely to have in the near future, or maybe ever.
If Joka's automatic mirroring from MMLB to SRC isn't possible, my ideal solution would be a prominent (not tucked away in the Rules tab) message and redirect like DKC currently has, but also allow people who wanted their Mega Man times on their SRC profile to submit them (and they'd be approved by whoever runs the board, after checking to see if it's been verified at MMLB). Times would no longer display on an incomplete leaderboard, but they'd be visible in your profile, which would solve the PB Tracker problem. Everyone who uses the site gets what they want this way.
If that's not acceptable, and SRC is unwilling to provide a DKC-style redirect for the Mega Man community, it seems like they're essentially forcing us to manually update these pages in addition to the leaderboard we prefer to use in order to keep them accurate. It's hard to see that approach as anything but antagonistic to external leaderboards and the runners who prefer them. If this impression is wrong, I apologize, but it's the impression I've gotten over the years.
I hope we can work something out that's better than the current situation, but I personally at least don't have any interest in leaving MMLB or doing anything that leads to its deprecation.
I apologize in advance if any of the tone here sounds poor. These are mostly my opinions, which in some cases may not translate to "site policy". Writing this up with accurate wording is time consuming, so please try to consider it holistically instead of focusing on wording. I deal with this issue on a semi-regular basis, and so do you guys. We're on the same boat for similar reasons more or less.
I sent the following paragraph to a couple people asking yesterday:
"The site is stuck in a constant unstable cycle where site users can't have runs listed on this site because of the combination of the site not having API functionality to do this and the community not wanting boards here without the API. I understand that the primary issue for the community is the lack of site functionality. The issue on my end is that the current circumstances put site staff in a position where we are saying it's okay to prevent users from tracking their runs on our site for certain games, which I really fundamentally disagree with on a personal level and from a precedent perspective. So originally it's fine to delay this until we get an API for this, then we never get an API for this, so then it's like this forever, which really isn't a fine way for the site to run day to day, and isn't a situation that I support."
I'm not going to say point 1 "Isn't an option", so to speak. I wasn't consulted when it was put on the DKC boards and it is still my opinion that preventing people from submitting runs on this site for any game is a bad solution to a complex problem. I've been minimally complacent towards, aware of, or tolerant of those circumstances since the issue is complex. I totally get the "If it's okay for A, why isn't it okay for B" argument. From my perspective it wasn't a good solution for "A" to begin with. I personally view the "only redirect" solution as antagonistic to a generic user of this site. The sources of that problem certainly relate to the fact that the development hasn't happened for an API. I certainly wish we had functional ways to deal with this.
Hard coding option one is probably relatively trivial, but from a coding perspective, it's Pac who would have to do that right now. It certainly could be made to happen with low effort. The ideal solution still remains to be API synchronization that everybody wants but never gets developed on our end, so we're here still.
In response to joka's point, the API combing to generate the runs on the profile in my opinion doesn't get at the root of the issue. Any generic API usage of the site would likely not be populated with a simplistic solution. If we were to tackle most of the additional hoops to populate the runs in the API, I think we'd already be halfway to synchronization.
I still agree this site is missing some desirable features you guys have over there, and I agree that the development cycle has been quite slow as of late, and these are fair points.
I'm not saying option 1 isn't an option, I'm more saying that I personally view it as a continually bad option for the users of this site. My opinion is just my opinion. In a similar vein, I also view the lack of API synchronization as a continually bad option for the users of this site.
BaronHaynes third paragraph is actually closest to what I would find more stable. If there is some variant of that that would be considered acceptable, I would greatly prefer something in that direction. If additional functionality is needed to make it acceptable, it may be more feasible at the moment than full API synchronization.
I don't think anyone here disagrees that option 1 is a bad option. The problem is that as neither the additional dev work nor the manual labour for option 2 seem to be happening, realistically the choice is between options 1 and 3. The opposing view isn't that option 1 is good, it's that option 3 is worse, and I find arguing against option 1 without acknowledging this highly disingenuous.
Here, let me apply the same rhetoric the other way around:
"The site is stuck in a constant unstable cycle where site users are finding false information on this site because of the combination of the site not having API functionality to automate moderation and the community not wanting to do it without the API. The issue on our end is that the current circumstances put runners in a position where we constantly need to correct false impressions gathered from this site, which I find highly frustrating on a personal level and from a precedent perspective. So originally it's fine to delay remedying the situation until we get an API for this, then we never get an API for this, so then it's like this forever, which really isn't a fine way for the site to run day to day, and isn't a situation that I support."
I can share these results here, since they seem somewhat relevant: https://goo.gl/1vcTFs Details: https://goo.gl/znC91l
I want to echo what Polari's saying, insofar as I think it's important for speedrun.com to acknowledge that inaccurate leaderboards maintained on SRC are at least as big a problem for us as submission lockout is for you guys.
There's no doubt this has become the centralized hub for leaderboards within the community and, in many cases, outside of it. When people want to find out about a game, they either go to youtube, or they come here. Coming here is a huge step up from going to youtube, where people have uploaded TASes or claimed WORLD RECORD and PERFECT RUN on something they didn't even do. I come here first when I want to know about a speedgame.
SRC being higher profile than MMLB makes sense, and it's clear you're aiming to be an increasingly accurate authority on every game. But it shouldn't come at the expense of functional, content external communities because you haven't had a chance to come up with a good solution yet, who have to come here and play ball or else deal with this inaccurate information being out there. People in the broader community even start to stick their nose in and tell us what to do, in a "why do you get to be special" sort of way. It causes a lot of unnecessary tension.
To that end (and I can only speak for myself here), if the API or Joka's automatic mirroring solution is unlikely, I'd be satisfied with game pages that
a) don't display any leaderboards b) feature a prominent redirect to MMLB c) still take submissions for the purposes of a complete SRC profile, and d) require those submissions to have been verified on MMLB first.
The important thing about this is that it prevents newcomers from stumbling on a leaderboard on speedrun.com that doesn't indicate that it's inaccurate or sporadically maintained, but still lets people round out their profile if they want. This wouldn't be ideal (that'd be the API), but it would be far simpler than trying to manually maintain two concurrent boards. We could check to see if the run is already on MMLB, confirm it's the same video link, and up it goes. Only the people who are interested in tracking all their PBs on their speedrun.com profile would use this feature, and it would be advertised as an option in the game page redirect notice.
Options 1, 2, and 3 are all in different ways bad for various reasons; I wasn't intending to imply that wasn't true. I agree that inaccurate leaderboards maintained on SRC are a large problem for the Mega Man community and submission lockout is a large problem for SRC. Similarly, the lack of a synchronization API developed by SRC is a large problem for the Mega Man community and SRC. Comparing the weights of these problems is subjective and dependent on perspective, and I think that is reflected in the discussion.
In regard to BaronHaynes most recent post, with emphasis on point "c":
When I previously posted I didn't read into the point well enough to catch the nuance, my mistake. I interpreted "Put up banner, let people submit runs." It looks like you were specifically speaking towards "Put up banner, don't show runs, let people submit runs", which creates complication in implementation.
They way the site is set up, it is difficult for a run to exist without showing on a game and without being accessible through the existing API for runs and still showing up on the profile and still allowing submissions. If we were to "hide" the board behind a messsage, the WR Twitter and Twitch bots will still be very confused by the existence of these runs, if the runs were to exist in this state. The existing API for runs doesn't know the difference. The user profile would also have inaccurate rankings under the base assumptions such as 1st place on a run that most likely isn't actually the MMLB first place. It's certainly not impossible to implement something that works like this, but I think it's an amount of effort going quite a bit beyond just hiding the page. I don't think we can get that to happen in a week or two right now. I also question whether implementing this specific method would actually help the underlying issues or just create more confusion overall.
Point "a" and "b" of implementing a redirect would be low effort to implement. It's just some small site code changes.
Point "d" of requiring submissions to be verified on MMLB requires moderator effort and some cross-compatibility of moderators, which seems to be an implied necessity for any sort of "host some runs here" type solution.
Editing for the third time: Pac and I are trying to line our schedules up to discuss this. The time zones are such that he's asleep when I'm not sleeping or at work on weekdays. I concede that it is stupid we haven't found a time yet.
It's fine. The situation's been what it is for years already, a week or two is nothing. Just good to know it's on the agenda.
Pac and I discussed this. Since there's not really a viable short-term middle of the road solution on our end, we can put up redirect pages until the API better supports synchronization or something of that nature. We need a list of Mega Man games that want to go this route. Unfortunately I can't promise the pages will be up by SGDQ.
Mega Man DOS, Anniversary Collection, Legacy Collection, Game Boy games (Dr. Wily's Revenge, II, III, IV and V) would also fall under Classic Mega I believe? Only the first two currently have boards on srcom though.
Also man, I never realized what a huge mess some of the less prolific games's leaderboards are. Going through the Mega Man clones category on mmlb, almost all of those games have a board on srcom too and it's a total crapshoot which site is the better maintained one.
