This thread will probably be used for the short term. Our site PMs are still some ways away unfortunately. Maybe we should look into making a form for this?

Side note: Twitch PMs still don't send notifications to users that they've received a message. It's not really a reliable medium of communication at the moment. >_>;

EDIT: Unless you opt out of the "Other" folder AND allow e-mails AND check your e-mail. (I don't want to do e-mail notifications.) Also the chance of the user you're PMing having met all of these conditions is not exactly high.

I would like this feature implemented at some point as well.

One of the other admins will have to comment on feasibility in the short-term.

My main concern is that a reasonably sized group of people seem to dislike overly flashy layouts, meme themes, gifs, and images that take to long to load. Not to mention that many of these things eat up mobile data (though the site is not optimized at all for mobile currently).

Having to get an account to mitigate this issue is not at all the ideal solution. The default view of the site for non-users should be the most presentable. I am all for options for users, but non-users/first time visitors are forced with the option chosen.

I think there are many good themes. I think there are many bad themes. I would like to get a solution that allows non-users to not be stuck with bad themes. Possible solutions include tighter moderation on themes in general, manually selecting only certain really good themes to appear by default, or turning off custom themes for non-users.

We can move people to the settings menu on first sign in, if desired.

I think transparency on the board layer often causes readability issues. We tried standardizing the name colors a while back, but it looks really bland. There is probably a way to design it to look better with standardized names showing. I think it just makes more sense to not use transparency, personally.

Bumping this thread for more discussion.

[quote]The "themes off by default, enabled in user settings" solution would help with a lot of issues in my opinion. How do other people feel about that?[/quote]

I would like to get some idea of a relatively general policy regarding themes, and that is dependent on what defaults are given to non-users and what options are available for users.

Left click on the category name in the edit game panel. It's not obvious I agree.

Gyoo's solution is pretty good for now. Down the line, we'll have private messages to facilitate communication between moderators.

Series moderation is more just having extra people who play similar games around to help if needed. If it becomes an issue they can just be shifted to their game(s) or have series moderators not affect certain games.

A lot of people use amarectv to do this. Maybe someone has a guide out there to set it up, because it's not exactly easy. Amarectv can record lossless .avi with the lagarith codec which you can process after the fact.

You don't even need a timer on the screen. The actual time of the video is the real time value, not the value you got by manually starting and stopping your splits (which could be late or early).

The moderator's job is basically to try to best represent the game the way the general community is playing the game and wants times represented.

Moderators aren't required to "verify beyond all doubt no cheating" before approving. At a minimum I'd recommend "Does this time look reasonable, does the video look legit at a glance." (I dislike the word verified, I prefer "approved") Correctness is definitely something that should be judged (if even after the fact), but the role of the moderator is to represent what the community thinks should be correct, not to be the one making all the decisions.

Examples: 1: Whether a glitch should be allowed in a category is decided by the community. 2: Obviously cheated stuff should be removed by the moderator. 3: Really uncertain cheating should generally be decided by the community.

We want to have a flagging system eventually. The idea is that people will bring up illegitimate times and they'll be handled accordingly. If you approve your own run and it is obviously cheated, and someone brings it up, you probably won't be moderating much longer, so I don't really see an issue with approving your own runs. If it is felt that we need to add moderator self-approval enforcement options at some point it's certainly possible, but I feel that given there are other solutions to the problem (contact a mod for now), it's not a high priority.

If illegitimate runs get added, and it is brought up, they can be handled. Moderators won't get removed for mistakenly approving a run due to non-thorough review unless they're doing an exceptionally poor job in general.

I don't intend for these posts to be dissected word for word. I'm just trying to give you an idea of the thought process.

To clarify Pelador's question.

Communities tend to prefer people who actively or previous ran the game moderating the boards, so we've generally been giving them higher priority. (From our admin perspective this generally boils down to us at least checking if you have a run on the board.)

In the absence of active moderators who run the game, it is fine for people to moderate games they haven't run. In general it is expected that you have a reasonable knowledge of the game/categories. If we don't have enough active people approving runs, we can look to add people, but we don't greatly need to add more unless we don't have active people.

Regarding series, playing one or two games and being active is reasonable. We've been removing series moderators for the really large series, as the communities tend to be really spread out and series moderation isn't really necessary, but for the smaller series it seems to be helpful to have extra people around.

Moderating multiple games is certainly allowed.

Nothing wrong with asking of course.

Category without runs makes sense so users know what they can easily submit to. I like the idea of denoting 0 runs specifically, maybe with an asterisk or something for the short term. Number of runs itself isn't so important I think.

I'll add you as super moderator. You can add the others as moderators/super moderators. t3tsuya's a cool dude though, I met him at AGDQ. He said he runs both games, just hasn't uploaded his PBs anywhere.

Moderator is more synonymous with maintainer in some cases, but ideally we'd have the game's community members doing the maintaining if they're available. :)

(I edited this post from what I originally wrote.)

Which game was it?

Also you might check Full Game Leaderboard vs Level Leaderboard, they both have associated categories.

The moderators job is simply to maintain the board. It isn't intended to imply they actively run the game, though ideally they should be people knowledgeable about the game. If the community feels the need to elect or switch over moderators, we can work to accommodate that.

As long as they are doing a reasonable job moderating/updating the board and they have reasonable connection to the community, there isn't really a need to change things.

Sorry this didn't get an update sooner. Admins don't really monitor the "Talk" forum threads much. We've been pretty good about keeping up with "The Site" forums recently. As far as who you should talk to regarding these things in the future, the "About" page linked at the bottom of the site lists moderators and admins. We're pretty active on "The Site" forums.

In general it's not good precedent to compete with pausing of timers.

It's generally going to come down to community decision, and when there are numerous serious runners, the communities are going to tend towards not allowing pause breaks. (You can pause but the time counts.)

There are very real advantages to be gained by pausing, such as practicing a hard trick on another setup or waiting for a more favorable RNG pattern.

You guys should try to be more careful stating opinions as opinions. There is no formal site policy on pausing at this time, but in general the more established communities don't allow pausing, so I feel that the first couple responses in this thread are very misrepresentative of the state of things.

I confirmed that another admin made the moderator change intentionally

[quote]u have no authority to steal my page of me without permission.[/quote]

It's not your page; it's a community page run by community moderators. I don't know what exactly happened prior to the moderator change, but your attitude in this thread doesn't really suit what we're looking for from potential moderators.

(Also note that during the week of major site updates, runs submitted could've possibly been broken.)

It's a known issue for all users. The team is continually working to optimize the code, but during heavy load it still struggles. We may have to upgrade the server eventually, but code/server optimizations may be sufficient for now.

I've wanted to generalize the category organization as well. It's a pretty large change though.

I'm not sure how sub-sections would work out. I definitely want at least the ability to create an unspecified amount of custom named "Full game Leaderboard" sections and "Level Leaderboards" sections

Generalizing subsections on top of that is probably desirable, but quite difficult.

Pac meant that he fixed your game, not the parsing issue.

If you add special characters again it will break again. So the simple answer for now is don't do that.

I removed the old moderator and added Invisio as a super moderator. :)