Today is a major milestone for us, both in our efforts to deliver on long-held promises to the community, and to enable major new updates due later this year and beyond.

In this post we're going to cover what's new with today's launch, the recent history of the site, detail some work left to do, and preview what's coming later this year.

# Major changes

We had two main objectives with the new site:

1. Better serve the communities and users on Speedrun
2. Make it easier and faster for us to continue delivering on goal 1.

In order to meet these objectives, we rebuilt the whole site, back-end and front. Our release date was "when it's ready", which... just so happens to be today!

There's too much change to go into everything, but here are some of the highlights:

- **Fresh look and feel.** You may have noticed, but things look a bit different. We tried to keep the original spirit of Speedrun, but update it to look and feel like a website should in 2023. It's faster, prettier, and more reliable. Give it a try, we think you'll like it.
- **Game pages and leaderboards.** [Leaderboards](/only_up) are now wider, faster, and have a variety of new features. You can easily see the world record history, filter by more details (including verification status), and more! Check out a game page to see it in action.
- **Individual level support.** Level navigation is now built into the main leaderboard, and game pages now have a new separate [Levels tab](/pizza_tower/levels) where you can see an interactive summary of level record holders. This view can be filtered in the same way as the main leaderboard, including by subcategory!
- **Game management.** Game management has been completely overhauled. Speedrun is a complicated platform with a lot of configuration options for game moderators. We rebuilt it all with the primary goal of making sure that moderators felt confident when making changes. The site now explains every single option, warns about dangerous changes, and exposes new options to customize your communities.
- **Moderation tools.** We released the Moderator Hub feature almost 2 years ago to mixed reactions. We've been listening and taking notes, and are happy to say that we've rebuilt it from the ground up to address major points of feedback. The pending run list is now more dense, it's easy to search, you can assign runs to moderators, and the run review interface has been much improved.
- **Search.** Search is now faster, more accurate, and finds more content across the site. There's a new dedicated search results page where you can filter results. You can also easily bring up the search box with your keyboard, just press **/**. 
- **Game Discovery.** We've improved the [Games page](/games) to show popular new games and help you discover new games on different platforms and decades. We also standardized game cover image sizes (you may need to update them for the games you moderate.)
- **User pages.** [User pages](/users/Meta) got a fresh look and new features, including the ability to embed your Twitch stream when live, and improved access to various types of content like threads, comments, followers, and pending actions.
- **User following.** You can now follow users (in addition to games), and their runs will show up in your feed on the home page. User pages have Followers and Following tabs to help you discover new friends. We hope this will help you keep tabs on old friends and discover new game communities.
- **Group messaging.** We've overhauled [direct messaging](/messages) so you can make plans with the whole squad.
- **Guides and Resources.** We've given guides and resources a minor facelift, with more improvements planned in the future. You'll be happy to know that you can now drag and drop images and videos to upload them directly into guides, resources, news posts, etc.
- **New text editor.** The old Speedrun supported a weird markdown-ish text format, but didn't have an easy way to use it. We now have a new text editor with multiple modes (rich text, markdown, preview), which should make it a bit more pleasant to contribute guides, resources, news posts, or just express yourself when submitting a run or comment.
- **Internationalization.** Accessibility is important, and there's nothing more inaccessible than a webpage that you can't read. Speedrun is now fully translated into 17 different languages. The current translations are machine-generated, and their quality can best be described as "usable". Despite this, we see this as an important step forward for speedrunners who don't speak English, and we plan to make improvements.
- **Single sign-on and verified social connections.** You can now sign in with Discord, Google, or Twitch. Additionally you can [verify your Discord and Twitch](/settings/socials) accounts, giving your visitors confidence that they're talking to the real you.
- **... and lots more!**

It really should simply be *"more, better, faster"*.

We tried to make sure that all major existing functionality of the old site has been preserved or accounted for, but please let us know if we missed anything. The best place to do so is either in [The Site](/forums/the_site) forums, or by creating a [Bug Report](/support/tickets).

# History and lessons learned

Elo (the company that owns and operates Speedrun) acquired and began operating the site in 2020. Back then the site was struggling just to stay online. You may or not remember the famous **"Under Pressure"** error message that used to appear on nearly 40% of page loads.

After we took over, the first task was stabilizing the site and solving some of the most obvious problems. Then we went and started adding features - some went over well, others most certainly did not (sorry). Through it all we experienced a lot of growth (site traffic more than doubled in a year), and learned some important lessons.

The biggest thing we learned? We needed to slow down, communicate thoughtfully, and deliver on the promise and potential of the site.

# Making big improvements

In mid-2022 we recognized that it was simply too hard to make progress on the features that users cared the most about, and we struggled to resolve complex bugs. Under the covers, Speedrun is actually an incredibly complex platform (you wouldn't believe the nuance involved in determining the place of a run!), but the software wasn't scaling in the way it needed to. The old site (PHP) was really showing its, and making improvements was both difficult and dangerous - not a good combination.

***... we had to rebuild it ...***

Rebuilding a complex piece of software is a last resort. It's especially difficult and complex when you need to do it at the same time as you keep the existing site up and running. Still, we think it was a necessary step to making the major improvements the site needed. It took a while, but we're happy with the result! Even more importantly, we now have the ability to iterate on the site (introduce features, fix bugs) much faster and more thoughtfully than before.

For the curious: the old site was written in PHP, and the new site is Go (backend) and TypeScript (frontend) - just over 300,000 lines of code. We store data in MySQL and Redis.

# We're not done yet

As with any big migration, there are bound to be limitations and loose threads. The biggest limitation with the new release is that we were not able to make any changes to the mappings between categories, levels, and variables. The reason is simple: so long as the old site was involved, it'd be nearly impossible to correctly introduce new mapping logic. We did manage to make some improvements in this area, but it's far from our true goal of arbitrary custom mapping. So, this remains on our todo list - we hope to accomplish it later this year.

Another area for improvement is internationalization. As described above, it works, but the translations are not very good. We plan to improve them in the coming weeks and months.

# Looking toward the future

We're incredibly excited to launch the new Speedrun, and are already hard at work on making more improvements. Once the dust settles, we're confident you'll enjoy using the site.

Additionally, we have a few areas of focus that we'll be working on this year:

- **Make it easier to improve your PB.** We plan to introduce new features that will help you understand your runs, learn from other runners in the community, and improve your times. It's going to get *fast* in here!
- **Discover new communities and friends.** The Speedrun community is social by nature, but it can be hard to find new activities. We plan to make it easier to stay connected with existing friends, meet new ones, and improve all of our game communities.
- **Encourage the spirit of competition.** Speedrunning is competitive by nature, but it's far from organized. We think we can help bring some excitement and order to the chaos. Buckle up!

Big updates aside, you can expect a fairly steady stream of minor improvements over the coming months.

# Closing thoughts

We hope that you're pleased with today's update. It's been a long time coming!

I'd like to offer a special **THANK YOU** to our [Speedrun Supporter](/supporter) subscribers. For those who aren't aware, Supporter helps you contribute directly to the development and growth of Speedrun. It offers a variety of features to improve your experience on the site, including making the site faster and more enjoyable to use by removing all advertisements.

For those who aren't subscribed to Supporter but like what you see here, please consider it! Your support means a lot to us, and it really does provide us with the resources needed to continue making major improvements.

Now, where was I in [Tears of the Kingdom](/totk)...

We're excited to launch the new Speedrun website! Read on to learn more about what's new, how we got here, and what's coming next.

Welcome to the new Speedrun

We're all going to have to stop saying SRC and now only SR 💀💀💀

Also if you hold break while you're flying you go faster not sure if you knew

If you do the tilt jump method everyone else does it should be easier, but GG anyway

what are you on about? glitches are usually allowed, but they usually make a new leaderboard for glitchless runs

still good to have a record in case something does get discovered imo.  some leaderboards have like 50 way ties lol

anything ending in 8 is so cringe, unless the first number is a multiple of 3, apart from 3 itself.  for me it was to be 5/4 because it's wacky

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO i am so sorry about that, genuinely.  i hope you didn't watch the whole video.  wow I'm so dumb

Remember to click browse levels so that you don't have to scroll all the way back down every time you quit to the menu.

Was there an earthquake at the time of recording?

HOW DID YOU DO 2-9 IL WTF GG ZORA YOU'RE CRAZY

Happy Wheels

Happy Wheels Category Extensions

Boxel Rebound

Toxic 2

Hi! A few things have been decided, so I thought a post here was neccesary. First of all, a clarification on the rule we set in July of last year to deal with pause buffering. 

Pausing during runs *IS* grounds for your run to be rejected, however that doesn't mean a pause = rejection. If the pause is deemed to not grant an unfair advantage or to not have effected your run, it may be verified. Try to avoid pausing during WR runs as much as possible though, to avoid having a chance of your run being rejected.  This is only for IL speedruns, not for full game categories. 

Incase any of you don't know, the 1.70 version of the game which can be found in the "resources" gives you a slight advantage in the levels it does include, over the 1.87 version (latest flash version) or the current TJF version. Times ending in xx.x7 in newer versions, get rounded up to xx.x6 in 1.70, so if you're grinding a level that's also included in 1.70 it might be worth looking into that and playing in that instead, as that difference *IS* counted in the speedrun.com leaderboards. 

Character set runs on iOS with advertisments will now have -8 seconds removed per ad (due to there being an 8 second long pause on iOS for every ad whenever you have data turned off). There's still an unfair disadvantage to iOS players for these runs tho, due to the slow-mo that's activated near the end of every level. For that reason, we made a sub category for iOS runs and android runs to be seperated in character set runs as well. 

In less significant news, 2 new roles have been added to the discord server! One is "Runner", given to anyone running the game (come by the server if you'd like it! https://discord.gg/bUpVgtqzgT ) and "WR Holder" given to anyone holding a WR of any kind (iOS, android and pc, IL and Full Game) excluding Apple Shooter , Rap Battle 3 and The Secret Code due to all 3 being low-effort tied WRs. 

That's all! Let me know your thoughts!

Pausing during runs rule clarification and more

Important time save advantage you should be aware of

yoooooo

Level 30 glitch

Where is level 1

defqon_Jan

aggeL

Eiim

Holm

Ivory

KilleDragon

KeepYourHornsOn

WaitlistedJay

ooga_chaga

Chrepuhon

Daemond

YUMmy_Bacon5

6lp4vpzw

Gaming_64

RafHW

Zanum

eqp8wpk5

flashhh

DannielYT

MasterSystemMarceau

killersi12345

jackzfiml

Galaxxys

grnts8

MaxyMemes

Parzim

F5Gabe

waddlingducks

SuperGamer64

Brogoo07

clumsyfelix

Stardew Valley

Red Ball 4 (Mobile)

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Super Mario Odyssey

Pudding Monsters

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

Tears of the Kingdom: Category Extensions

The leaderboard is under an embargo period for 2 weeks after release. This is to allow players to enjoy the full experience of the game casually without feeling like they have to rush into developing the speedrun right away. Please take your time and enjoy the game!