Hi folks. This is a bittersweet post for me to make, but I'm also bringing you some big and exciting news that's going to benefit the entire speedrunning community.

Back in 2013 when I first started making this site, I ran it as a hobby, and I never expected it to take off as much as it has. As it grew and grew, so did the requirement for new features and development, which eventually became more than I alone could keep up with, even with the part-time help from SgtKabukiman, Lighnat0r, Volvagia, and Kirkq. After seven years the responsibility and stress started to burn me out, and even though I loved being a part of helping this community grow, I knew that it had become something larger than one person could run.

Now I've had various offers for the site over the years, but most didn't give the impression the site would be in good hands. However late last year I was approached by a company called Elo, who run other gaming record-keeping websites like Dotabuff, Overbuff, and Valorbuff. They not only seemed competent in the industry, but they also seemed to care about the community aspect. After hearing their ideas and plans, and about all of the resources they would be able to pump into the site, I was convinced that this was the way to go, and that these were the right people for the site.

Elo and I talked for months and eventually we reached an agreement for acquisition in August. Since then we worked together to make this a smooth transition over to them, and today we're finally ready to make the announcement public. They have already begun making some developments, such as upgrading the server (you may have noticed you've seen the error page far less lately). They have also taken on dedicated developers for the site, and a product manager who will make sure you're heard.

Your leaderboards will remain unchanged, and Elo’s first priority is to facilitate community growth and preserve the community aspect as much as possible. I’m excited for them to be better able to meet the community's needs for upgrades and new features, and I feel comfortable knowing you're in capable hands. If you want to learn more specifics about the transition and their road map, they will be introducing themselves below and letting you know about their exciting plans for the site.

As for me, I'm going to take some time away from online life and social media, and move on to other personal goals in life. I might still catch a livestream here and there though. I want to thank everybody who made this site grow over the years, all of the moderators who helped out, and all of the friends I made through speedrunning, be it in streams or at events. I'll always wish the best for you.

Hi folks!

Our licensing period with GWR has expired and we don't have any plans on renewing it. The page in the navbar menu is no longer active, and the two GWR categories in Minecraft and God of War are now regular Misc categories (as long as the moderators want to keep them).

Hope everyone's well and staying safe.

There's a new field in Edit Game and Edit Series where you can enter a name for the community website, which will appear on the link on the game/series sidebar.

Hope this is of some use to moderators.

In co-operation with Guinness World Records, we are launching some GWR-made categories. The WR holder in these categories can apply for an official GWR title, and will receive a GWR trophy in their speedrun.com profile.

Currently they are running three categories on the site:

• Fastest time to beat all six boss rematches in Super Mario Odyssey • Fastest time to complete all Muspelheim Impossible Trials in God of War 2018 with Common level equipment • Fastest time to collect all six enchanted apples on the 10 years of Minecraft map

And there may be more in the future. A game with GWR categories will have a GWR dropdown on its leaderboard (like the Misc dropdown), and you can find a list of games with GWR categories along with more info on the GWR page (accessible from More > GWR).

The moderators of these games are co-operating with this campaign, and all runs will be verified by them. Be sure to check the category rules, and the main GWR rules.

Good luck to all competitors!

Threw this together real quick. As well as reading all global Twitch emotes, the site will now read and utilize some FrankerFaceZ emotes of our choosing on the forums and in private messages.

Examples: Pog WoweeW

They're being read directly from this FFZ channel, so any added here will be available on the site: https://www.frankerfacez.com/channel/speedruncom_ffz

I donated to get the expanded 50 slots, and there are a lot of slots left so we'd like to let you all suggest more emotes to be added. Just reply to this thread with the link to the emote on frankerfacez.com and we just might add it (max of two per person, please).

Note: As we add emotes to the FFZ channel, they may take some time to become available on the site. Our cache is updated every 50 minutes past the hour.

Minor aesthetic update: sidebars (on games, profiles, marathons etc) now highlight the tab you're currently viewing:

If you notice any places where a tab should be highlighted but isn't, do let me know :y:

I made a promise a while ago that private messages would be ready by the end of 2019, and here they are with a few hours to spare (sorry Australia). You can send a message by going to someone's profile and clicking "Send message". Your ongoing conversations will be listed in the Messages dropdown on the navbar. If you want to try it out, feel free to send me a message and say hi (EDIT: I've received some lovely messages so far, thanks everybody 😄).

Please note this is not a chat system, so messages won't appear instantly. They're loaded with every page.

Group conversations are working, however, they're not ready for release yet because we've run into a slight problem that we want to get your feedback on. Currently, there's nothing stopping anybody from inviting anybody else into a group conversation, this could potentially end up in spam groups involving hundreds of thousands of people. So how do we decide who can invite whom into a group conversation? Discord has a friend system but I'm not sure if a friend system is right for this site. I'd love to hear your ideas for how we should go about it, because we'd love to launch group conversations asap.

Security measures already in place are that an account must be 7 days old to send a message, you can report distasteful messages (to be handled by our full mods), and you can block specific people from messaging you.

Future plans for this system include e-mail notifications (including figuring out a way to handle it if hundreds of messages are sent in a short time, because we don't want to bombard people with e-mails), and perhaps reacting to messages (a thumbs up or maybe something like Discord's emote react thingy), and a load button to load more than the most recent 256 messages.

Feel free to leave any feedback or bug reports (I'm sure there will be many).

Happy New Year folks! 🎆

Another quick update:

• Notifications in the menu are now separated by a border. • Unread notifications are highlighted in a different colour. • Key info (such as the game name) is now highlighted in bold. • There's a link to a new page to view all of your notifications (as far back as 1 month ago). • When multiple people like your forum post and you get notifications, the same notification will be updated rather than you getting multiple ones. • There's better formatting for showing multiple usernames (20 people -> Batman, Gandalf and 18 others).

I did consider adding the user avatar of the person you got the notification from, but it seems unnecessary.

Hello speedfriends, this was a long time coming so thanks for your patience.

• WR history charts are now back and optimised for the new layout. • Clicking on a run in the chart will now open that run. • The Statistics page is back. • A new filter option has been added to leaderboards to allow you to view the leaderboard as of any date in the past.

The Games / Series pages have had a big overhaul. They're now cleaner and a lot faster than before. To improve efficiency, some options like being able to search by Publisher have been removed, but I hope not too many people will miss those.

In addition, games that have ROM hacks and Category Extensions now have those linked to in their sidebars.

Hello speedfriends.

In light of repeated attempts at account takeovers and leaderboard vandalism (you can read more in this very detailed and helpful post by DerekMK) we've introduced a new security measure:

E-mail authentication

This is mandatory (and already enabled) for all verifiers and moderators (of games, series, marathons, teams, and future modules), translators, and site staff. It is optional for everyone else, however if you ever want to be added as a moderator you'll need to enable it first. It can be toggled in Settings.

I realise that this may be an inconvenience to some of you, but I hope you can understand why it's necessary.

Oh, and anybody having trouble receiving e-mails should contact support@speedrun.com or message me on Discord (don't forget to mention your username and account e-mail address).

Cheers 🍻

Hello speedfriends. Continuing on again from the other thread (which I'll now be locking so the discussion can continue here). I've just finished making the second round of amendments to the new layout, and I hope you'll be happy to hear about some of the updates.

• Theme customisation has pretty much been fully implemented into the new layout. This not only includes backgrounds and logos, but also foregrounds, icons, fitting options, positioning options, repeating options, scrolling options, panel colouring, and opacity. • Old themes have been ported over, and in some cases may be merged with the new primary colour. You may want to review your themes to check they look okay on the new setup. • For full transparency, I want to list the colour options that were not brought back, and why: 　　　　◦ Panel border colour: Borders around panels have been removed in general 　　　　◦ Row border colour: This is now generated from the panel colour 　　　　◦ Text colour: This is now generated from the panel colour 　　　　◦ Heading 1 colour: This is now always white, since it's been given styling separate from the rest of the text 　　　　◦ Heading 2 colour: This is now always white, since it's been given styling separate from the rest of the text 　　　　◦ Link colour: This now uses the primary colour 　　　　◦ Navbar link colour: This now uses the primary colour • The default green is now darker on Day Mode. • The default green is now lighter on Night Mode. • Username colours now load on Day Mode, but have their brightness restricted so they don't clash with the white. • The background of an inactive leaderboard category tab now has a proper background. • The site-browsing theme system has been brought back. With this you can choose a theme with which to browse the site. Old favourites like Dreamhack and Milk (time-dependent) are also back. 　　　　◦ With this, I believe it's now fair that custom themes on profiles is once again made a donator-only feature as it was for accounts created since 2017. However the threshold has been increased to make them remain available for any accounts already created as of the time of this post. • The old default theme is now available to use as a site theme (it's called Old). • When on the Settings page, your site-browsing theme will be loaded (rather than your profile theme) so you can see which theme you're selecting. • Setting opacity below 100% will no longer make the main content show behind the semi-transparent navbar as you scroll down the page. Instead you will only be able to see the background behind the navbar, which should blend in with the rest of the page. • On a coloured navbar (i.e. on a theme where "navbar colour" is set to "same as primary colour"), username colours are muted so they don't clash. • Series pages now show their themes correctly. • Panel opacity is now limited between 70% to 100%. • For all previous visitors to the site, Night Mode is loaded by default. • When editing a theme, pressing Save now reloads the same page so you can continuously preview your theme. • The old caching glitch has been fixed. Now when you upload a new theme image, it will update automatically and you won't have to hard refresh to see it. • As always, you can hide custom themes in Settings.

With this update, a few glitches have also been fixed:

• Hovering over a search bar result now shows the pointer cursor instead of the text cursor. • The marathon donation tracker info message's styling has been fixed. • The region selection glitch on runs has been fixed. • The delete tag glitch has been fixed.

I expect there'll still be some tweaks to get this just right so please keep the feedback coming :)

Hi again folks. I've read through the other thread (which I'll now be locking so the discussion can continue here) and I've taken on your feedback. The main issues that people appear to have with the new layout are as follows:

1. Theme customisation was severely cut back.
2. Users who signed up since February 2017 had to donate to create a theme on their profile (I locked it in for users who had access to it before then, though).
3. Day Mode is default instead of Night Mode
4. Themes don't load on Day Mode.
5. Username colours don't load on Day Mode.
6. The default green colour is not popular with a lot of you.

This morning I've made some changes that I hope you'll be happy about, so allow me to address all of the points:

1. Theme backgrounds, logos, and icons have been added to the new layout (you need to set the theme colour to activate it). I'm not finished yet though, I want to add options to allow the dark grey to be dark navy or other colours to match the themes better, and transparency options. Do people also want the background positioning / scrolling / foreground options back?
2. All users can now change the theme colour for their profile and for browsing the site. Anybody who donated just to unlock this can message me on Discord and I'll be happy to refund it to you.
3. I haven't decided what to do about this yet, because I want to give equal weight to them. I welcome suggestions.
4. Unfortunately, I can't do much about this. I've tried everything to get themes using light colours (like pink / yellow) to look good on Day Mode, but it just doesn't work. Again, I welcome suggestions for solutions to this problem.
5. I'm currently working on an algorithm to constrict name colours so that lighter colours like yellows and pinks will be darkened to be legible on Day Mode.
6. Someone suggested 66CC66 for Night Mode. Again, suggestions welcome. I hope point 2 should make this matter less, anyway.

There were other issues mentioned too, which I haven't mentioned, but I'm still taking them on board.

I'd also like to take a moment to apologise for offending anyone with my comment that most themes on the old layout looked bad. I was referring to minor games with bright red backgrounds and green text, of which there were many, but it was still insensitive of me to phrase it the way I did. I do appreciate that a lot of you worked very hard on making leaderboards look great and unique, and I hope we can reach a level of customisation where you can continue to do so.

I still have a lot left to do with this (and the site in general) so please bear with me while I work to get the site to a state where everyone is happy.

PS: Private Messages coming 2019.

EDIT: Please see the new thread for amendments to the layout.

I've spent the past few months completely re-doing the site's front-end, and it's finally ready. There are too many changes to mention, but the big differences are better-designed UIs (for things like managing games and submitting runs), day/night mode, and a new theme system.

Please let me know of any feedback here. I may have missed a couple pages or forgotten to update some parts of the site to the new layout, so please post any bug reports here too.

Hope you guys like it :)

　 EDIT: Okay guys I've heard you. I'll see tomorrow about possibly bringing back some of the customisation options.

So, something that's been on my mind lately is high scores. As you all know, there's no go-to / universal site for high scores on the internet. And for a while now, people have been asking me to add high scores to speedrun.com, however I don't particularly want to do this because high scores are not what the name "speedrun dot com" implies.

So I started looking at the alternatives. There are existing sites rivalling Twin Galaxies, such as Cyberscore and highscore.com, and while some have significant databases of records, none of them are quite what I think is needed right now, and that is a centralised high score website, where records wouldn't be verified by a higher team of moderators, but rather by moderators of game, pretty much the same way it works here on speedrun.com. This site would ideally collaborate / pool data from the existing alternatives to Twin Galaxies, and I believe if it's done right, it could become the most reputable high score site, and could even incur a surge in popularity of high score attempts, and streaming them on Twitch.

I would be willing to build such a site, or at least, if we could get a team together, collaborate and direct its development.

One issue however, is the name. Of all of the existing sites, one that really caught my eye is highscore.com. What a perfect domain name that is. I actually reached out to the owner in January and said all of the above, and offered to buy his domain name for a certain amount of money. He declined, adding that he's not currently interested in selling it (and that if he were, that amount doesn't come close to what the domain is worth), adding however, that he would be willing to consider collaboration / cross-promotion. We chatted a little back and forth throwing some ideas around, but nothing has yet been decided.

However, I'm not sure if I'm personally up for that, or if it would even work out. I feel like in order to see this through fully, then I need full control / ownership of it.

Last week, I was chatting to one of the head admins of Cyberscore, and mentioned all of the above. We had an informal chat, and basically, they would be very up for helping out / pooling / sharing data if this were to happen, which is good to know.

So, I'm now left with 4 options:

1. Add high scores to speedrun.com.
2. Work with the owner of highscore.com to try to improve the existing site.
3. Try again to buy highscore.com (offering more money), make a completely new website in its place, while trying to salvage as much of the existing data as possible.
4. Make a completely new high scores website under a different name / domain name.

Personally I would like to try option 3, but I'd like to get all of your opinions on what you think should be done, so please leave a comment with any thoughts or ideas you have.

Note: We wouldn't necessarily be expecting the same people to moderate on both potential sites, and a speedrun.com implementation would need discussion.

Hey folks.

Bounties are an idea that has been brought up in the past, and while it's not something that's at the top of the priority list (coughprivatemessagescough), it's something I'd like to get an idea of how to pull off before I consider implementing it.

For those who don't know what a bounty is, it's basically where a certain goal would have a price on its head; a person (or persons) would choose to put a monetary reward out for a record to be broken or a skip to be found, and the one to do it would receive the monetary reward. The idea is to give people an extra incentive to make certain achievements in speedrunning.

However, there's a problem: potential cheating. People have cheated in speedrunning before, for the glory of getting a world record, and that's a problem that's relatively under control. However, someone might be more likely to cheat if there's a monetary reward.

As one solution to this problem, we could require that the goal be achieved live on stream, but what if the user precorded a video of a cheated run and just played it back on stream? It's never been an issue before (unless you count this, which only shows that it is possible, and doesn't count as foulplay), but again, it could be exploited in this case.

So I'd like to ask you guys if you can suggest any solutions to this problem?

So with Gyoo and ROMaster2 leaving, we're gonna do a little staff reorganising, and we'd like to invite anyone who's interested in being a Content Moderator or Full Moderator to put through an application :)

You can find the form here: www.speedrun.com/staffapplication

Thanks folks.

www.speedrun.com/podcasts (Accessible from the More menu)

I felt it was time to have a centralised list of podcasts, and so they could get more exposure. If there are any more that should be added, just ask me or one of the staff.