A new Speedrunning site
Deleted
2 years ago
United States

I like the idea for excess going to charity. It seems like a really nice way to stop anyone from ever getting greedy.

"The site would mainly focus on leaderboards that speedrun.com refuses to add," - not much left of that. and no relevant stuff is there KEKW

Germany

A certain someone has a really well made concept for an open source src alternative as well. It has not been talked on here but on the src discord it has been discussed a few times.

I hope it succeeds

Hako, Bro3256 and 5 others like this
Netherlands

Decent idea, but I don't think donating excess money to charity is a good idea. Not because I think donating to charity is bad, but because I think the donations to a new, open sourced site would receive would be far from "excess" (unless it actually grows to such a significant magnitude in such a short time that donation money is pouring in) for one, and because that money that people interested in the site donate, should go into improving the site in any way or shape possible. Maintaining, but also important to note: growing a site to be on par with a site of this magnitude is not just 'hosting' costs. There is a lot more involved.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Hako, Merl_ and 5 others like this
European Union

[quote=Garsh]however it could closely link with the src api to have some leaderboards that are already on speedrun.com. [/quote] I'm not sure how well this would work out taking rate limiting into consideration (might be an issue on big leaderboards like Minecraft)

O.D.W. likes this
Valhalla

Nobody remembers PBtracker smh

Argentina

[quote=1]I'm not sure how well this would work out taking rate limiting into consideration (might be an issue on big leaderboards like Minecraft)[/quote]

@1 For cases such as Minecraft perhaps you could do a pre-load of the api data into a cache on the site every day at midnight (or maybe once every X amount of hours). Certainly not ideal, but otherwise the user experience with the board would be pretty sluggish.

California, USA

@1 For cases such as Minecraft perhaps you could do a pre-load of the api data into a cache on the site every day at midnight (or maybe once every X amount of hours). Certainly not ideal, but otherwise the user experience with the board would be pretty sluggish.

I feel like I have posted this a couple times in other similar threads, but I made a API "cloning" tool in Node.js which can scrape every single leaderboard, player, and run on the site in a few hours with rate limits, and even generate statistics and etc. https://github.com/dl00/speedrun-browser-middleware/

People should be focusing on frontend development, since that is where most people want to see improvements, right?

Kups and MrMonsh like this
Switzerland

Like a lot of people in the community, I also tried making alternatives but the conclusion I always come to is that it's just a tremendous amount of work and doing that on my free time is always difficult. However, for the Souls community, we made a purely frontend integration based on the speedrun.com API, but who knows how long the API would be available. https://github.com/CapitaineToinon/SpeedSouls

KubeRuns, O.D.W. and 7 others like this
Valhalla

Personally I keep track of my own times, and I'll encourage other communities to see about doing the same. Not necessarily hosting their own website for a series. Can be as simple as a google sheet or some wiki page.

European Union

@CapitaineToinon That site looks super cool :o

I am assuming the server routinely just updates a local database with data from the API? And if so how often does it update?

O.D.W. likes this
Switzerland

@1 Thanks! No it's a purely static website so the client browser's direcly communicates with the speedrun.com api.

O.D.W. likes this
Canada

Honestly even if there was an objectively better alternative (which is a very tall order), I'd have a very difficult time wanting to transition leaderboards anywhere personally. I'd basically need to feel that SR.C had no chance of significantly improving (I'm still holding out hope, as naïve as that may seem) and that the future of the site was uncertain. At the same time, I'd also need to be 100% sure that the new site is reliable, both in terms of actually functioning day-to-day, and in the sense that it won't disappear because whoever's hosting it ran out of money or something (this is less likely to be a problem with open-source, but wouldn't be the first time). And that's just to even consider it, I'd still have to convince the communities that moving over is actually a good idea and that they should join me. I can go setup an alternate leaderboard anywhere, but if nobody can be bothered to use then it doesn't matter.

I could see smaller individual features being "replaced" by more niche and focused sites (for example, not many people track marathons on SR.C anymore, they almost exclusively use Oengus for that nowadays) and over time maybe that could weaken the site's current position. But as things stand right now, I have a hard time believing anyone really can or will make a site capable of replacing leaderboards for communities that are already here (with the exception of IL-driven games, since SR.C just doesn't have the feature set for those). Best of luck to anyone who tries though, you're gonna need it.

Quivico, Pear and 4 others like this
Texas, USA

I've wanted speedrun.com open sourced for a while now. I wish they'd done it while Pac was leading it and I would certainly still be a fan if ELO would allow for open-source, as well: https://www.speedrun.com/the_site/thread/g79jt/72#1trpu

The Code Runners Discord (speedrun tool coding group, basically) has discussed making a whole new site once or twice, but it's a very hefty task.

I agree with Liv and Shiken in that, even if such a thing were created, it would have to hit on a lot of needs that are taken care of already by this site. I simply (yet) see a small team taking on such a large task and getting community buy-in. Odds are, unless someone like Pac stands up and gets addicted to contributing to the site until it succeeds, the project would turn into a side project. And that'll just lead to a bunch of frustrated users who aren't getting the site they need.

So, once again, I'd rather turn this into a plea to ELO to allow for open-sourced site contributions. (Once their current React developer is done overhauling the PHP website, which will probably take a long time)

Quivico and nupali like this