I wanted to take a few minutes and speak about this debacle that has happened over the last several days and maybe a few other things thrown in. Fair warning, this might be long winded.

First and foremost, posting tirades isn't really beneficial to anyone. It doesn't help you, it doesn't help us and it doesn't help anyone else. It's good at increasing toxicity and drama in the community. That's about it. I have plenty of other sources of undesirable drama in my real life. I do not like seeing it here. To be honest, sometimes having to deal with it here makes me wonder if all of this is even worth it for me to stick around.

We don't need performance reports, spreadsheets, screenshots and finger pointing. Especially with incomplete and inaccurate data. We're not employees and we're not sports players. We volunteer our free time for this. We're not paid. We aren't given any proverbial cookies. It's mostly a thankless job and there will never be a situation of where everyone is happy with the decisions that we make. I think some people have a misconception of what this position is and what it entails. To be straight honest with you, in my opinion, I find being a mod kind of a pain in the ass. From the outside, this seems like it seems like verifying runs should be an easy task with minimal time invested. I mean it could be that way. We could just glance at the runs to make sure it exists and just accept it. The queue could be knocked down real quick if we did it that way. However, since we value the integrity of the leaderboards, we do our best to uphold that integrity. Yes, it does take longer to do that. Verifying a 5 minute run takes longer than a 6 or 7 minute run due to the extra work that has to be put into verifying those. Frame counts, Bowser patterns, looking for cheating indicators very closely, asking the other mods to take a second look, etc.

I would like to remind everyone about a fact that we may forget about sometimes. This is a hobby. Nothing more. Nothing less. Everyone uses their leisure time to participate. Whether you're a moderator, runner or even just a viewer, this is a hobby. Nobody is losing money or going hungry or experiencing some major life crisis if their run isn't verified on their timeframe. In the grand scheme of life, it's not really THAT important. I'm trying to not declare bankruptcy or lose my home and vehicle because of a really bad event that happened almost 3 years ago. That's why I've disappeared, I've been working 80 hour weeks to get my life in order. So to me, there's a lot more important things to worry about of actual significance than "when is my run going to get verified?"

That being said, we do understand that many of you don't find the wait times acceptable, we hear you. We have reached out to three people in the community to join the moderation team. All three of them have confirmed interest and have all passed the testing process that we administer to verify competence and verification skills. If they accept, they will be added very soon.

When we reach out to people when we add new mods, we take more into consideration than just an ability to time runs. Maturity, involvement in the community, and your general character all matter. We like people who we believe make good ambassadors to the community and have the skillset to time runs as well. We have enough drama as it is. Someone can be great at timing runs, but if they are generally a jacksass and troll around on the Internet may not be a good fit.

Also, it seems like some people think we're a group of "good ol' boys" who hold our heads high up in the clouds and don't care about the rest of the community. I'm sorry if you feel this way, but I don't really think that's the case. I'll go into lesser known streams, people just starting out and offer support and tips if they desire them. Of course that's when I have time to do so when I have it. I just ask you who think that to take some time and really think about it instead of acting on your own or someone else's knee-jerk reaction.

That's the main part that I want to talk about but I'll touch on a few other subjects.

As you all saw, Pellsson was banned from the Mario Discord server for some comments that he made in the chat. First of all, I feel that we are all grateful for his contributions to creating a practice ROM for the community. I don't think anyone feels any differently on that front. When I found out he was banned, I was a little skeptical myself, I'll be honest about that. Then I saw what was posted, and I understand why now. While there's some debate on whether or not he should have been banned, here's my thoughts. It was the correct decision. Does it suck? Yes it does. However, the rules were very much broken. They did not show any favoritism. I find it a bit hypocritical that people complain that the Mario communities show favoritism, but when favoritism is not shown (in this case) and the correct action was taken, people are complaining that he shouldn't have been banned because he's a big contributor. That's favoritism. You can't have it both ways that suits what you like. I am also a person who tries to avoid favoritism. I like to follow the rules as defined and I don't really care if you're "X popular player."

Pellsson has also deleted his SRC account and deleted his posts according to the audit logs (yes we have those) if you all are wondering about that. Maybe he will come back around at some point, and maybe he won't.

I also want to remind you all that the Mario Discord is ran by the SMB3 folks. Well I am a moderator for the SMB3 board, so I'm like the one lone person sort of in the middle. None of the SMB1 moderators have mod privileges in that Discord, including myself. If anyone has an issue with how things are handled there, you need to take it up with them. We cannot help you.

Adding more categories to the CE (meme) board. We currently have 41 categories on the CE board. I feel that is sufficient. Heck, I personally feel it's too many. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't remove some of the categories, but I don't know how many more good categories could be added. I'm not sure how getting bored with the game and it's stale is an issue with this many categories alongside the main game categories. If you're that bored with it with that many to choose from, it might be time to start working on a new game. Some folks are doing their own unofficial leaderboards for other categories and that's perfectly fine. Y'all do your thing.

I have also noticed some rumblings about people getting their runs verified immediately or at least ahead of others. Now I can't speak with 100% accuracy on this as I don't micromanage things like that, but here's an explanation why. We do go to various people streams and watch them live. If they get a PB and we're already there and know that it's real and already know the time, we can just go ahead and verify the run. We already have the information we need. We may have already timed it. Once it shows up in the queue, there's not really much we need to do about it besides accept it. I have done this as well although I'm not lucky enough to catch people PB that often. Aside from that, when I verify runs, I pick the oldest and go down the line typically. I feel this is how it generally is for the rest of the mod team, but like I said I don't monitor that.

I think that's about all I had on my mind at this time and I'll say one last thing to wrap this up. If you have issues or concerns on how things are done, you can ask us privately or if you bring it up in the forums, try to do so in a calm and thought out manner. We're not some evil government that rules with an iron fist that is waiting to be overthrown by the people with flaming arrows and pitchforks. We aren't perfect and we make mistakes just like anyone else. Just try to be civil and chill out a bit.

This might be cliche, but, "it's just a video game."

nice essay

Well said. The only sad thing about it is that some people still can't understand it.

1). Yeah I am disappointed of what our community has done the past few months. :(

2). And no offense, but I am getting tired of looking through my notifications just to see a fourm thread about people's runs not being verified quick enough. It's getting old.

3). And I agree that there are a few unnecessary categories for the meme page. For example: 11x Any%, 10 Walljumps, Softlock, 500 Coins deathless (why is there even a DEATHLESS category? that doesnt even make sense, thats like having 'any% deathless' on the meme or main leaderboard), 1000 coins deathless, 10 walljumps, and the 2 10 lives categories.

^ That's a list right there, and those are all the categories on the meme page that I think don't belong as categories.

4). And I wish Pellsson came back, I love his SMB1 practice rom.

5). And most people look at mods as people who only verify, nothing else matters. But that's not true. Sure it's their most important role, but there's easily more to being a mod than just verifying runs, that's why SRC has 'verifiers' with a gold sword. Super Mods (I heard this can go with regular mods too but I doubt it), edit the category names, and rules. They can add the discord link and the wiki link. And trust me, I'm a SM of 5 games.

6). And to add onto 5, people think that mods can verify a run easily in 5 - 10 mins, which may be true. But there are A LOT of people who submit runs. Be patient, there are 12 mods, 786+ of us. They can't all magically verify our runs with the correct information in just seconds. Also, SRC staff say that the maximum amount of time a run should wait in the que is a month. Not a week like most people expect. And people go nearly psychotic over it.

I've got nothing else to say. I'm all out of fuel.

EDIT: Wow, that took me 18 minutes to write. Kreygasm

*8-4 That's actually a useful category for the meme leaderboards.

No, but I didn't say we needed it. I only said *8-4 Any% was a good category.

One issue I still have with instant verification is that even if you watch a top level runner complete a run live, know the time, you still need to take the regular amount of time to verify that the run isn't spliced, tassed, or cheated in some other way. What if there was a top runner that has been cheating runs for years now, and is getting away with it all this time because of the instant verification? I doubt this is true, it's still not right to spend an hour or so verifying 4:57's and verifying reputable peoples' 4:56's in such short amounts of time - you guys at least need to "look for cheating indicators very closely" in these top runs as well, even if you watched it live on twitch.

@KOSmIcD15, It's highly unlikely for that to happen since at some point in those years, at least one person would look at their top runs and notice some sort of discrepancy. This has happened before in other categories. Though, if someone manages to mask all the signs of a cheated/spliced run (sharp fluctuations in audio, in-game inaccuracies, L+R movement, etc.), then who knows? There could be an alarming number of cheated runs on the leaderboards not just for SMB1, but for ALL speedrun categories, and we just don't know it. Which is kind of sad to think about...

The verification process isn't skipped, it is completed before the run enters the queue.

I don't think there's a verification problem in the normal page, but meme leaderboard is really slow verificated. Any% or warpless are taken seriously but not memes. I think we only need more mods in CE, no big verification needed, almost only retime. I can understand why you don't want to add mods in SMB1 but please add CE mods. It's not hard to retime and this page is not taken seriously except for 3-4 categories.

Yes, the main categories do typically take priority over the meme board. I mean it's just that, a meme board. It's not intended to be super serious. We also have to framecount most of the CE submissions because a lot of the categories are really short.

Please read the original post of this thread. Thank you.

Don't necro the forums. Nobody interested at it anymore ^_^

*This is a joke.

A 2 month old thread about a different issue. I hope the civil thread that was killed at least sparked discussion in the mod discord.