I want to emphasize that I don't believe any of this to be a failing per se, it's just an unfortunate set of circumstances. One of the mods (maybe both?) has moved on, and almost nobody runs the game besides. I'm coming at this from an angle of "Ghost_vui probably doesn't want to be a mod and I want to alleviate that slight(?) burden by handing it over to those who are actually currently invested in this game's speedrun." I may be wrongly assuming their relationship to the game and board, but I get the impression that it's a liability for them and they'd be happy to not be bothered with it anymore.

Also this doesn't really fit anywhere else in this post, so... I made a Discord server for the speedrun! ^v^;

I can understand if there's a hesitance to make me in particular a moderator given my history of two rejected runs (even if I submitted them as a means to find out if they broke rules, rather than breaking written rules and submitting anyway), but clearly something should change. redeadvoid would likely be down to take that role just as I am. Even if I'm not a mod, I can and have still contributed through stuff like my:

Autosplitter

I made an autosplitter over the course of a couple days which automatically splits and removes loads. It's not possible to make it split on ending the run without much deeper knowledge than I have, maybe it's not possible at all, but I think it's more than good enough. The load removal functionality on its own is absolutely vital to fair competition - I lose 20+ seconds to redeadvoid through loads alone! And that's just in any%, for All Dreams or All Achievements it would be much more severe. I submitted it to the LiveSplit database so it's downloadable straight through the 'edit splits' window in LiveSplit. Set the starting time to 5 seconds if you use the autostart feature!

I firmly believe that loadless times should be the main reference for the board, with realtime as a side thingy (this is what the Noid 2 board does). I can even manually retime past runs to get a fairly accurate equivalent.

All Achievements

The aforementioned AA race between me and redeadvoid was surprisingly fun! And it prompted me to start routing the category out proper. I have everything up to Ice World routed, though I got distracted making the autosplitter and haven't yet routed the rest of it out. She's looking to work on it at some point too, and I think it could make for a neat category. Sub 2 hours is readily possible, with an autosplitter demo run I did almost breaching it despite it being quite sloppy. It's like a sillier All Dreams. Not tremendously different, but still somewhat different c:

Well, I think that's everything I wanted to say, so... yeah.

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

It is here and even if it doesn't become standard for the leaderboard, it should be used regardless I think. If the load remover becomes mandatory, I'll manually retime all the existing runs to the best of my ability, which should be accurate within a few seconds of their real loadless times.

I'm gonna try to also make it an autosplitter, but no promises.

Unrelatedly, me and redeadvoid did an all achievements race on a whim two days ago, and it's in the process of being routed properly c: seems a fun category! Even if you have to do Forest World twice,,

Yeah that's sorta where I'm at. If it's possible for everyone there's a real argument in favour of just allowing it, but if it's hardware-dependent then it sucks and shouldn't be allowed at all. I think there are some genuinely cool applications of it, so I think I'm in favour of its existence so long as everyone can do it.

Making a separate category is... sort of an appealing idea, kneecapped by this game's borderline non-existent speedrun community. Maybe if there were even half a dozen active runners it'd make sense. There aren't, though, so... yeah

Okay, so here's a demo run I did of Mist World with an application of lag manipulation. My text mashing is a lot slower than the record, and I also lose at least 1.3 seconds loading just Underwater World(!!), but the real significance is in the jumps I do towards the language learning prism. By using lag manip as you jump off of the red orb platforms, you can make the jump directly to the next one, which... may not save time anyway. (at 0:56)

It can also be used to make this jump, but I couldn't be bothered getting it in a clean full run:

I haven't (yet?) checked other levels to see if it helps elsewhere, but I can imagine it has a few applications elsewhere too. Figured a real example of its use cases would be good to post though.

...I'd probably like to run this game if not for the lack of a load remover. Maybe I'll try it anyway with a macro for text mashing o,o

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!

Hey, good job! It's neat to see the path through the loop utilized. I remember a few years back that was jokingly theorized - didn't think it'd actually happen lol

I'm gonna leave that decision to Detrimental, but I want to say that Shrek is faster than Big and has a smaller jump :^)