Hello all, I just wanted to address something that is rather important on the speedrun.com site. As of right now, there is a pretty big percentage of site users who don't have social media's connected to their account. I wanted to bring this concern to the site's forum just so that way it has the ability to reach users across the site.
As a general user just viewing, following a game, etc, connecting a social media is rather unimportant. However if you wish to, or already actively contribute to the site and it's content, i.e verifying runs, posting on forums, submitting runs and similar. It is pretty important to list your social media's on your profile. The main reason for this, is simply for contact. As site Staff try to assist with users requests, I personally find it difficult to get in contact with them for any questions or similar I might have. This particular topic is vitally important for those users who wish to or already assist the site with leaderboard moderation, series moderating, marathon organizers, etc. If you have a Twitter, Discord or something where we as a community can get in contact with you, please connect your social media to your speedrun.com profile. It makes everything run smoother and it's a very easy process. The use of YouTube / Twitch as the main form of contact isn't necessarily reliable. Connecting these account is perfectly fine and definitely useful, but as a main form of communication, not so much.
If you have the opportunity to update the information on your profile for outdated media's, please update these bits of information as this is still how we will attempt to get in contact with you.
Thanks all
Also make sure you occasionally check your social media. Doesn't matter if you have your Twitter connected if you never never use it.
As for Discord, another thing you should do is make sure you join the site's Discord server, as well as any relevant Discord servers for communities you're a part of, and make sure you have it set to allow direct messages from server members (that might be on by default, I'm not sure). Makes things a lot easier for when people want to talk to you.
Also, don't connect too many accounts! No one knows which accounts your actually using if you connected every single social media thats possible, I doubt that your using all of them. Only connect the ones your actually actively using.
Noticed something about connecting youtube accounts. When you connect a youtube account and type in the username, it takes you to .com/user/name I think with a relatively old update, youtube changed it so that usernames created should take you to .com/c/name.
Not sure if you can put the whole youtube link, just thought this was worth mentioning
For me youtube is perfectly fine as a main form of contact it really depends on the person I check my messages every day and I normally comment on videos of mods and normally get good results I guess as said it depends on the person and shouldn't be a write off completely. But commenting on videos is a lot more effective then sending a message on youtube as you do get notifications for comments :) tho I use discord and youtube everyday so meh haha
I already had the idea to put the Speedrun.com profile in the list of social media. Until I realized it did not make much sense...
Anyway, here is the list of social media where I have an account ->
- PS Messages (PlayStation Network)
- Youtube (I don't receive notifications)
- Facebook (I'm inactive on this shit)
Also, a small reminder:
Even if someone appears inactive on a particular social media platform, you should still try to reach them there if you need to.
For example, I don't use Twitter, but I do have it set up so that if someone @'s me, I'll get an email and two phone notifications.
Staff, it would be great if users could identify which social link is their preferred method of contact.
Twitch messages no longer work, Twitch Whispers however do. From my understanding, people can disable whispers altogether.
Youtube's messaging system is garbage, no one checks their youtube messages.
If it were up to me, I'd refuse to allow anyone to be a game moderator without the bare minimum contact information, which is Twitch and Twitter / Discord.
@zewing Unfortunately even if we did force all moderators to have those, that wouldn't stop people from linking dead accounts that they don't use or check at all. I'd almost rather people have nothing at all than a bunch of dead stuff, that way at least you can immediately tell that they're useless.
Not everybody is a streamer or twitter user though. As long as the user can list a place that they are active on and can receive personal messages on then it'll probably be sufficient enough. I'd say the biggest thing to add would be the 'preferred contact method', as it's not really uncommon to hear people preferring Discord or Twitter or even Steam some times as where they are most active, and being where they are most active means they are more likely to see messages.
Could requiring at least a social link via Twitter and or Discord be something to consider as I do agree with this on many levels. From someone who has been working on marathons and managing boards it makes its allot easier to have a direct and clear communication path between myself and others. It's very frustrating trying to contact people about issues with runs or about marathon submissions if they have next to no reliable social connections like Twitter to sort out a relatively simple issue.
I'm going to chime in and say that I don't like this general expectation that people must have a Twitter account; I had to shutter mine because it was negatively affecting my mental health state in a bad way, and I wouldn't want people to feel like that's a prerequisite to being a contributor or game moderator on this site.
With that said, I think there's the question of 'Should being a game moderator be contingent on logging in to this site periodically and checking their game's queue on a semi-regular basis, without needing to be prodded on some external site first?'
