For starters, I don't see youtubeman's comment as offensive or disrespectful. If it had been only a few hours or a few days, then I would feel differently about that. 17 days is quite a while and I don't disagree with him being frustrated along with anyone else. I'll admit that sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who's doing much on here. A couple of the new mods have been helping out, but we still have quite a bit of volume to go through and I'm also pretty certain I do at least 75% of the verifications most of the time.

Quite a few of us are busy with IRL stuff, but I can't and am not speaking on behalf of everyone else. I'm only speaking for myself. I work a full time job, and a couple of side jobs as well. I'm 34 with a gf, so I have a lot of adult things that most certainly come first before video games and video game related things. That being said, I do as much as I can for the community, and a lot of that is moderating these forums and verifying runs. I'm an active mod for: SMB1, SMB1CE, SMB2J, SMB3, and SMAS. There's a lot of submisisons across all of those games I moderate, but honestly the largest portion is for the first two. This is an increasingly popular game. some days I don't have time to verify any and some days I can get a lot verified.

I'm not defending anyone with this statement, but do remember that we volunteer our personal time to verify runs for a video game. Time that could be spent with friends, family, streaming, etc. We are not paid to do this (there's a few people who think we are).

I ask that you not hop in people's streams and ask them to verify runs. Especially if your run is very new or you do it repeatedly. I DO find that about as disrespectful as saying that you're going to watch someone else's stream to the person you're currently watching. I have people come by or DM me fairly often about verifying their runs.

I typically verify runs starting with the oldest and working my way to the newest. You can wait in line like everyone else. I don't like to play favorites and skip over other runs to verify a time that's either really good or a run from a big name in the community. Why? Because I believe that's the most fair. Why should I skip over newcomers and less experienced players? It does not matter to me that I get to stamp my name on a run that's great or from a popular player. My personal focus is on players new to the game. I'll sit in your chat and explain the game and what I think you should do for strats. I sincerely hope that my efforts over the years have helped promote a welcoming community. I don't want my actions to suggest "well your time isn't upper tier, so it doesn't matter."

Moving on to responding to some of the other comments.

17 days is not acceptable. In my opinion? No it's not.

Sometimes we do have runs that will sit there for a while because we're trying to figure some stuff out. Sometimes for potential cheating, waiting on additional information, etc.

Would I be open to having additional mods who would be active in verifying? Sure. That's not my sole call though.

There's more work to this than I think a lot of people realize. It's not just a 5 minute dedication for every any% run. What about warpless?

We do get flack at times and I'm sure it won't be the last time. It's part of it as we're never going to be able to placate everyone.

If you have questions or concerns about your run(s), it's best to contact us privately and work it out that way. There could be some kind of miscommunication that could easily be resolved instead of taking it to the forums and pointing fingers.

So wrapping this up, I'm just stating my thoughts and I can't speak for the rest of the mods. This is how I see it and how I do things. Some people might like it and some people might not and that's fine either way. I'm not here to win approval and be everyone's favorite mod. I'm here to do the best I can and help the community and be as fair about it as I can.

Like I said, feedback from the community is important in my opinion. Whether it's positive or negative, it's helpful to identify what we're doing right and what we're doing wrong as long as it's discussed in a civil manner.

"** *I'm not here to win approval and be everyone's favorite mod. ***" - @roopert83

And that's where you've failed - you ARE a favorite mod :)

"* *It does not matter to me that I get to stamp my name on a run that's great or from a popular player. My personal focus is on players new to the game. I'll sit in your chat and explain the game and what I think you should do for strats. I sincerely hope that my efforts over the years have helped promote a welcoming community. I don't want my actions to suggest "well your time isn't upper tier, so it doesn't matter. **" - @roopert83

^^^ You are my nerd-hero. And the golden plunger award goes to...

Serious <3 to the mods that spend their time verifying... it just sucks that the burden falls so disproportionately on a small number of you. <3 to the mods that verify - I don't want to name drop, but the mods that do work (we know who you are), you are awesome.

I just know that it doesn't have to be that way. Again, not to name drop, but if the two people that were temporarily modded months ago stayed modded, I would bet that the verification queue would be almost perpetually at zero... one of those two was seriously talented at timing and loved to do it.

Ironically, the ones holding up the process from adding mods are probably ones that do virtually zero verifications.

Out of curiosity I just ran the numbers of who verified runs in the last month on the any% leaderboard (searched for the word "days" on the leaderboard, then checked who verified it)... it looked just about like how I'd expect - with the exception of that I knew goofychocobo was doing work, but I didn't know quite how awesome he was doing. You're awesome goofy =)

1st Place - 20 verifications - goofychocobo 2nd Place - 11 verifications - roopert83 3rd Place - 2 verifications - AD2 3rd Place - 2 verifications - SuperSonic71087 5th Place - 0 verifications - mav6771 5th Place - 0 verifications - Kosmic 5th Place - 0 verifications - i_o_l No verifications - darbian No verifications - nickj109 No verifications - Bismuth No verifications - somewes No verifications - andrewg

I put mav, Kosmic and i_o_l as 5th because I've seen them do verifications of new players before... just not in this calendar month.

As far as I'm concerned, the other mods are worthless to the community (as mods).

It may LOOK like we have 12 mods here, but we really only have 4, and of those 4... two of them are doing the vast majority of the work. The other 8 literally have done nothing this month.

I'll just say that I did verify runs this month in category extensions and lost levels, but we want to have the same mods on 1/ce/tll/ann. I also used to do most verifications and other work back when this leaderboard was new and even before by compiling the best runs on other sites. I was almost the dictator and added mods and made up rules and categories as I saw fit. Obviously this is not the ideal situation so I added other top runners like darbian, Kosmic and somewes because I believe their input should be valued and it's not just 1 guy and the guys he added arbitrarily running the show. Putting nickj as worthless is unfair. He did a lot of verifications and other work some time ago. I don't know how it looks recently though. Well over the last few years my interest has waned a lot and I don't even know all the top runners or other important community members anymore. I thought about removing my mod status but it's not like that would speed things up. And I don't see other mods who don't verify much as a problem either besides that the long list might give a false impression. On getting more mods: As I said back then I would have just added some arbitrarily and then kept them or removed them depending on their performance, but it's a group decision now. Actually I was not involved in the last addition of mods besides the vote. The problem with the removed mods was that they got added by 1 super mod without any notice, which we thought we should undo out of principle, and that one of them verified a cheated run immediately, although I don't believe that should block someone from being mod forever (I've verified at least 2 cheated runs myself. ?). Well since as I said my interest waned a lot I'm not really the ideal person to suggest which mods to add anymore. The last 3 added mods got randomly messaged and asked if they want to be mods, so I wouldn't be so hard on them for lack of motivation. I think there should be some way to apply so we know who is even interested and so we can add enough people to actually get the verifications done quickly without 2 people doing the majority of the work.

As has been stated by myself, roopert and i_o_l - it's a fixable problem - that could be fixed soon.

All you need to do is add 1-3 more people at the quality of goofychocobo, and BAM - problem fixed.

There's plenty of candidates that I think could be great. I don't want to "out" any of them by name though, but I can specifically think of 4 people that have specifically voiced that they would be willing to be mods, and (at least in my mind) would be great. It's probably safe to assume that the two that were once mods would still be interested (although I'm not positive) - and like you said... one of them verified a cheated run, but it seems like that just means that you unverify it, and then speak with the mod that verified it and explain the problem... and if it becomes a pattern then you unmod that person.

I'd be happy to help with verification, I have plenty of spare time, and I know the any% category pretty well, and am very meticulous about details. I have been very critical of half of the voting mod base, so I don't see that happening... but all you have to do is add two mods that have the motivation and ability to verify runs... then this problem that doesn't have to be a problem won't be a problem.

Then we won't have this discussion every two months with runs that are taking weeks to be verified.

It doesn't matter who it is, as long as they're good at verifying and they have the motivation and spare time to regularly devote time to it.

Everybody wins... I literally don't see a downside. ABSOLUTE worst case scenario you mod three new people, and one of them is bad... then you unmod that person, undo the runs that they verified, and keep the other two. Problem still solved.

I don't disagree with you on the last post @Darpey.

I do disagree about some of the other mods being worthless. While you don't see verified runs from some of them, that doesn't mean that they don't contribute. We work collaboratively in Discord looking at runs that seem off or we want extra sets of eyes on. It comes up more often than you might think. While they might not do as much work, I feel that it's unfair to say that they don't do anything at all and should be shown the door because their contributions are behind the scenes and not reflected in numbers.

I suppose if you wanted accurate numbers for the number of verifications done, you'd need to make API calls to include SMB1/SMB1CE/SMB2J/SMBANN, accepted runs, rejected runs and obsolete runs that were either accepted or rejected.

I was being unnecessarily hyperbolic with the word "worthless" (which I have now removed). I also generalized the word based on 1 month of verifications from one category of one game.

I'm probably using language that is too inflammatory in my criticism on these posts in general, and for that I apologize. Fair enough.

What a forum thread

That is a necro. Locking thread as I feel this discussion has concluded with no responses in almost a month.