Moderation & Discord Server

Luco seems to be at least recently invested in the game, but the same does not seem to be the case for Ghost_vui from what I can gather. This is fine! It's alright to dabble in a run and move on. This scenario also presents issues in changing moderation because the speedrun doesn't really have a community: hard to pick out people who would be better suited to head the boards when there's nobody to pick out at all. Luco may have been one such person, I dunno when they were modded!

Regardless, the moderation here is inadequate in a couple ways. I'm not talking about slow verification, that's not a big deal and I don't really care about it. To preface a little more, the reason I'm bringing this up is mostly as an argument for adding myself and/or redeadvoid as mods, not demanding that present mods must do stuff.

1. It means that the board is underdeveloped. I had to learn through submitting a run that macros were not allowed in this incredibly textbox-heavy game. This should have been written in the game's rules much earlier, or at the very least added afterwards. There are ILs now, but not for any of the secret dreams, and the IL rules state an incompatible timing condition for the Ethereal Crux, a level that does not have a dream shard. Luco's IL of that level is pretty much the same as redeadvoid's, but they both use different timing methods so his seems slower than hers.
2. It means that interfacing with the game is overly obtuse. This is tied in with the lack of a community for the game, namely a Discord server, where people may actually be notified of activity. Even with so few people running a game like this, it's worth creating that kind of space so that people can accumulate over time. It's easier to form a niche community of 5 active runners if a few scattered people can gradually coalesce inside of a Discord server, than the occasional person seeing how dormant these boards are and going "oh, I guess there's nothing else." Instead of having to submit an IL using lag manipulation 5 days after I made a forum post about it to prompt any response at all, I could just post about it in Discord and be comfortable in the knowledge that if anyone was ever going to see it and care, they assuredly will due to the notification. With SRC forum posts I have no idea how visible they are, so I can't be certain anyone will see them. Routing discoveries, whether new tricks or not, thus have to go out of their way to coax attention from others instead of simply being announced and seen. New categories like All Achievements have to be routed in spite of the lack of community, and need more effort to be validated as a category on the leaderboard than should probably be the case.
3. Even basic coordinated stuff like "hey, wanna race All Achievements lol" are impossible without absurd delay and no guarantee that it'll go anywhere. redeadvoid and I did one such race only after I'd been in their stream's Discord server - which I never really wanted to have to join to discuss a speedrun! - for several days. Even for people who aren't actively invested in running the game, doing something like that on a whim can spark further interest and routing efforts, or at the very least an opportunity to goof around for a couple hours one night! I think that kind of thing is valuable.

I have to cut this off here because there's an invisible character limit for these posts, so just look below for the rest of the post

So this is a very unfortunate exploit for the game to have, but using printscreen to lag the game on suitably low-end hardware gives bigger jumps. (maybe it works on higher end systems? I'm doubtful.) See here for an example:

Yo! Noid 2 has a similar bug, so when I happened to get a bigger jump due to a lag spike in School World I was primed to recognize the cause immediately. That game also has categories for allowing and disallowing lag manip, and I'd encourage the same here if the trick even matters in any runs and the game is run enough to warrant it. I suppose that's up to existing runners, though.

Anyway. I just figured I should bring attention to this, I don't believe it's known!