I did a write-up regarding today's changes: https://blog.zacharytalis.com/2021/10/14/

Markdown version: https://blog.zacharytalis.com/2021/10/14/documents/src-update-concerns.md

@MetaMeta how do today's profile page changes fit within the SRC Privacy Policy? Am I correct in asserting that the policy's "Service logs" section is the applicable bit of text?

I just edited one of my runs, in a game I don’t moderate. It left my profile and went to pending actions, however, on the page for the run itself there is no indication that it’s awaiting verification. I’m not sure what it looks like on the mod’s end, but it could potentially confuse them as well.

It's cool to see a lot of the stats on the new profile page, but yeah, it shows way more than it necessary. Total runs, run time, number of runs per game, etc? Cool! But people don't need to see how many times I've visited a page or how many likes I've given/received on comments.

I simply wish the game boards are reverted back to the way they were, they were much better in the old way, I don’t see how people like the new game board change. Also, next time you update something try asking us to vote on it first.

wouldnt be opposed to reverting everything that happened today either lol

Also, why isn’t this thread stickied?

Why was everything about this update removed except for the part I hated? I didn’t want the other features to go away, look I know this is harsh and I’m sorry, but please notify us first and let us vote.

Might as well drop my thoughts

Profiles:
- Let people turn the stats off, either individually or as a whole. I know that entire section just exists to cram another ad-per-page in but I do not want my entire activity on this site publicly logged and easily accessible. Especially stats like "runs reviewed" or "last visit." I'd rather just another large banner ad that takes up the entire space those boxes fill, because at least I can prevent the banner ads from stalking me.
-- Stats like "runs reviewed"/"last visit" would be good info for a Super Mod to have on Mods (in the extent of their specific board), but not something that should be public unless a person chooses to make them public.

Boards:
- The Game News tab should not be below the Game Stats tab and it certainly shouldn't be below a fucking autoplaying video ad. Yes, this site is already unusable without adblock so its basically required anyway, but still.
-- Moderators should at least be able to change the order of these boxes, even if you stick the awful autoplaying video ad in the same spot.
- Zoom everything in on the boards pages like, 10%. There's no legitimate reason everything has to be that small.
- The info tab in the Edit Game menu looks good, tho there's still a lot of superfluous information in there (why are the Game Type checkboxes still there and grayed out? why not have a platform dropdown?). Every other tab remains mostly unchanged or looks bad, but is functionally fine which is all I care about for mod settings.

Run Comments:
- People need to be able to turn off run comments at least, if not have them be something you opt into. As with any comment section, it's basically open for all kinds of exploitation
- There need to be moderator-run filters available for comments and a way to review comments before they go up. Let people regex out the slur spellings or community-specific shit.
-- Extend this out to individual users too, to block unwanted comments from being seen by anyone but maybe moderators of the board.

In general tho, while I appreciate at least listening to the criticisms that "nothing has been done for the average user while Elo's continuing to find new ways to monetize the site" in the wake of the Severed Steel criticism, this seriously feels like it needed one or two people to stop on by with a critical eye and point out the issues present. Be it the beta tester idea thrown around here or something else.

Stop trying to be a Social Media. Just be a leaderboard. Just gives more unneeded work for the overworked game moderation teams.

Next time please do a beta run or preview of features to collect feedback -before- rolling out huge swathing changes like this. Because now it really feels like "yep we changed things, and you're going to have to raise hell to get us to revert anything."

I have noticed a few issues, and some things I personally don’t like. The biggest thing however is the comments. I would personally like to disable all comments on my runs, or at the very least have complete control of my comment section. Banning users, notifications when people comment, etc. My other main gripe is fixing things that are not broken. The leaderboard layout was fine before, and shortening names of categories, and the arrow for games with too many categories were changes for the worse. I also would like to have control over what is displayed on my profile. I don’t see why anyone needs to know how many times I visisted a page, and when the last time I visited a page was.

Some positive feedback, thank you for adding run comments. We've been asking for that for four years! (Or at least I have)

https://www.speedrun.com/post/6cz8i

You rock, ELO team. Thank you for keeping the site moving forward. You don't know how good it feels to have frequent updates instead of waiting months and months for a tiny change!

Summing up my thoughts on the new layout for categories, after giving it more thought. Hope site staff and other concerned users will give it a read.

##New category layout changes

• If a "top level" category for a leaderboard has more than 4 categories, any extra categories are hidden behind a "scroll right" button.
(In this context, a "top level" category is any category you can edit via Edit Game -> Categories).
This means you will need to keep pressing the scroll button as many as 5 or 6 times for Category Extension leaderboard with a lot of "top level" categories.

• Any subcategory below the top level categories (any category that you can edit via Edit Game -> Variables) will always be hidden behind a dropdown menu if there are more than about 4 subcategories.
* This is inconsistent with how excessive top level categories are handled, it seems weird that at least the first 4 subcategories are not shown in a row on the leaderboard, and that they are all hidden behind a dropdown.

## Why the current category layout is bad

I think the thing that irks me with the new category dropdown/ scroll right button is it comes off as very condescending and bureaucratic for the sake of being bureaucratic
Game mods could already hide extra categories under miscellaneous categories if they wanted before; clearly if they didn’t do that they had a good reason to. For instance, maybe the game mods figured it is better a leaderboard look a little messy aesthetically, than it being hard to find all the categories. Either way, it should be left to the community/ moderators of each game, and not handled by a central bureaucracy.

The category layout change comes off as Elo thinking they know better than the individual game mods of how to format leaderboards and taking it into their own hands.

## Possible Solutions

• Ideally, we can just revert the category layout to how it is before, giving game moderators full creative control on how they would like to structure their leaderboard categories. Again, I am baffled by this change, and misc. categories are effectively obsolete in leaderboards with many categories now. The freedom for which categories to hide and how is out of game moderator's hands now.

Alternate Solutions, if reverting the changes altogether is not possible or desired by Elo
• Note that "4 categories" is a rough heuristic here, the maximum amount of categories per row seems to also be affected by the number of words in each category name.
• For top level categories (see first picture above), please put excessive categories beyond the first 4 in a dropdown menu (similar to how misc. categories worked before). I'd much rather use a dropdown menu to access additional categories, than use a scroll right button, which could take ages on some leaderboards.
• For subcategories (see second picture above), please format at least the first 4 subcategories in a row on the leaderboard, before putting any further categories into a dropdown menu. As it is, it doesn't seem logical that if you have 4 subcategories all will be shown on the leaderboard, but 5 or 6 categories will result in only one being shown, and the rest in a dropdown. Let's have some consistency here between top level category and subcategory layout.

Thanks for reading if you got to the end.

Quote

For top level categories (see first picture above), please put excessive categories beyond the first 4 in a dropdown menu (similar to how misc. categories worked before). I'd much rather use a dropdown menu to access additional categories, than use a scroll right button, which could take ages on some leaderboards.

literally just remove the arrow altogether lol, it just hides tabs and it's unanimously horrible for games with lots of categories. put it back the way it was before, where all tabs are actually visible and the community can choose how to organize them any way they want to.

@OxkniferOxknifer your thanks have been in vain, if you have not paid attention, Elo soon removed both the stats and the run comments and kept the only aggravating thing about this update, was this done out of anger? And why has any part of the site open their mouths yet? Remember, it’s not you we’re mad at so don’t be afraid to speak to us.

@Secrert_WonkySecrert_Wonky I still have access to both the stats boxes and run comments. I’m on mobile. Are they gone on desktop now?

Feedback: I don’t like that deleting my own run comment (on my own run) just leaves a blank “this comment was deleted” box. I see no reason I shouldn’t be able to actually delete it.

I’m on mobile too @PearPear but I just realized the stats and comments don’t work on my device.

But I know you are following Super Mario Odyssey Category Extensions hehe

Small complaint. Why is the "Community Website" name field removed? All we have now is just an icon of the site, but it doesn't allow us to describe WHAT the site is until users click it (if they even decide to). I'm seriously wondering what's up with this.

So things i personally bothered me once i clicked through the new site:

My leaderboards are broke, not really but my fine tuned layout went to shit:
- Categories and Subcategories should be all shown like before, people are able to put them in Misc. to add a dropdown. I used this frequently.
- there is less space for variables, in paradox speedrunning we additionally sort by ingame date where we use variables to show it because the ingame date measures years. Please make it larger again, i see there is space even without removing space for precios ads.
- Custom named timing/sorting methods would alternatively be great
- Website Names should be a thing again, we used it for a shared subreddit to post WR and runs to for the whole series.
- Now that it is shown like with profiles you might as well add all social media options.

To my profiles i could complain about everything but i just list a alternative:
Instead of showing followed games, moderated games, run games. Just add featured games people can opt into.
You should be able to opt into statistics maybe: none - anonymised (just show total) - featured
Also Bio should at least understand "Enter" you can get a second line with enough characters but i like minimal formating,
and a bio doesnt replace a flair, give us like 40 characters to put in the forum where pronouns are currently.
Also thinking about bio, a bio or describtion for games would be great!

And Comments... Yeah Comments.
I hope you have a basic filter in place because I wont bother to moderate that mess.
Or the option to opt out even if i like comments in theory, but generally runs are uploaded to youtube there is also a comment section.
Restict comments to people with verified runs (like guides) thats at least minimal effort probably.
Runners should be able to remove all comments besided moderator ones. And opt out on it personally.
Leave comments at least for the runner and moderators.

In games that have some categories using times without loads, and other categories using time with loads, the new "Recent run" box shows the time of runs without time without load as "none".