ZSR IRC Meetup/talk - Summary

[GlitchesAndStuff]

We had a meetup in #Zelda today [2015/02/08]. In the meetup we discussed a lot of things with the site, forums, marathon, and irc. I'll post a summary of what we decided here. Please post replies in this thread if you want to discuss something further or talk about anything below!

ZSR Forums

• The forums have been very inactive over the past couple of years, however with a few fixes to the forums, it's hopeful that they will be busy again
• The forums are the best place to document and discuss community things, so people should be encouraged to use them as much as possible!
• The main point about forums is that the forums software needs to be updated and the site needs to be redone
• Fix email notifications and perhaps add some sort of notification through twitter system in which direct replies to your posts or in threads notify you on twitter? Either way, a setup that allows for notifying when certain posts are made
• Password reset/account recovery should be added
• A way to link accounts with main site accounts would be great
• Fix the new account creation - main priority - system is sending out emails again
• Occasionally there is a session timeout error? patched
• There should be an IRC bot to announce new important thread creations and potentially replies in some topics

ZSR Twitter account/Announcements

• Site mods and admins should be encouraged to use the ZSR twitter account more to tweet about relevant news and info regarding the site and speedruns in general. Stuff like new glitches/routes/community decisions/events
• The feeling is that the ZSR twitter account is annoying at the moment and doesn't serve much purpose. Tweeting out verified runs is pretty much all it does and people tend to dislike that it spams their twitter accounts
• The agreed on solution was to only tweet publicly for people who get a time which puts them in the top 10 for each category (or x number of pbs), for times below 10th place, the account would tweet directly at the runner so that it wouldn't show up on most people's feeds.
• When tweeting for submitted runs, tweet with the rank no. of the speedrun including "No. 1" instead of "World Record"

ZSR main site

• In order to vastly improve the functionality, we've decided to move to a wiki style for game pages on ZSR. This would let us edit things a lot easier and allow for a much more up-to-date and smoother experience both as an editor and user
• Instead of having specific game editors, users would instead just need a ZSR account in order to edit pages on the site. This should allow more people to edit the site and not be put off by trying to find an admin and prove themselves worthy
• In order to overcome vandalism or bad data, ZSR would keep track of version history of each page which would allow us to restore older versions of pages
• Also it was decided that we have some basic spambot detection in place for account creation on the main site
• Mods and admins should be notified whenever a page is edited and there should be a big page of recent edits to help keep the site clean and ensure the edits being made are beneficial to the site
• If need be, certain pages would be locked so that only mods and admins can edit them
• Certain accounts would be able to be blocked from all page editing and have all their edits reverted
• The front page should show all games

#Zelda IRC

• The overall feel is that before the new Ocarina of Time glitch was found, #Zelda IRC has been very quiet and inactive. It was decided that finding more glitches is one of the best ways to make it more active
• In general, use of the IRC server wasn't talked about much, perhaps there should be more talk about why #mm and #sweden talk are not done in #zelda etc.
• There should be an IRC bot to announce both forum stuff and main site stuff (like edits+page creation)

ZSR Mumble

• The ZSR mumble channel should be discussed more and should be advertised more so that people actually know about it
• The server for the last ZSR mumble actually ran out recently so TR is considering getting another one/renewing
• Hopefully more info soon? http://forums.zeldaspeedruns.com/index.php?topic=1388.0

ZSR Marathon(s)

• ZSRM 2015 would likely on site rather than online like the last one
• Location in penn, two possible places, for potentially more updates see: http://forums.zeldaspeedruns.com/index.php?topic=1699.0
• The date would be July 10-13th

Leaderboards

• The leaderboards are pretty much the best thing we have on ZSR, we're reluctant of changing the layout of them too much and we're not going to move to speedrun.com but we'll be considering some changes/
• There isn't very much point in having verification for the majority of times, the slower speedruns tend to either never get verified or get verified without anyone even looking at them anyway
• It's important to know which top times are legitimate and considered ZSR legal though, as these are the ones that people are most likely going to be looking at
• We want to be as accurate as possible in showing good and valid speedruns but we also want to encourage the newer players, it seems to be slightly unfair on the players with higher times if their runs never get verified but the top times do
• We want to move from a verification system to a system where you would instead flag a submission for cheating or bad timing or other stuff like that. The idea is that every run above a certain rank gets put up on the leaderboards automatically and anyone can flag the runs for deletion and leave a comment for a moderator if something bad is spotted in them.
• For the top speedruns, verification by a mod or admin would still be required. This way we can preserve the quality of the top times on the leaderboards while being kinder to the new speedrunners with the higher times.
• Of course, a top player who is also a mod or admin should not be able to verify their own time
• We are unsure as of now whether to show or hide those top unverified times
• Notifications to moderators when new runs are posted that are waiting for verification would help this along
• For OoT, there was talk about multi-tiered leaderboards but the opinion on these were very split. More info here: http://forums.zeldaspeedruns.com/index.php?topic=1786.0
• “Unregistered user submissions are still broken” - this was a point made but we didn't really discuss it much
• Moderators should be able to edit game rules (mods can already edit game rules but not category rules)
• A ZSR leaderboards data API is a must-have at this point really
• Potentially new ways of sorting which categories show in which order, by number of runs submitted per week for example

ZSR Admins/Editors/Management teams

• With the new site format, site editors are no longer needed to make new pages. The other role site editors had was to verify runs, which is also something that will be changing soon
• It was very hard choosing editors before and there was no good system. With the new site layout this problem is gone but we will still need some moderators
• Moderators would be responsible for viewing main site page edits and potentially reverting them, as well as locking user accounts on the site/leaderboards. They would also be responsible for verifying the top times in the zelda games.
• There should be quite a few moderators but not too many like we currently have with site editors otherwise things get messy. Moderators would get appointed by admins, probably though trust and volunteering. The community of course can have a say in who they think should be a mod!
• We basically need to make a list of all the roles of a moderator and write a forum post about it or something
• Admins on the other hand would be a group of individuals who should be often in contact with eachother and who oversee the site. They would have full site access, be able to ban accounts, post news on the front page of ZSR and more
• Admins would be added through the process of the ZSR owner (Maxx) proposing a new member with their consent, and the community has a vote to determine whether to accept or reject them candidate.
• Suggested (potential) admins: Maxx, TestRunner, GlitchesAndStuff, ZFG1, mzxrules, Tompa
• It would be absolutely required that the admins can and do communicate with each other on a frequent basis so that changes can be made efficiently, the site can run better, and everyone will just know what's going on a whole lot better in general.
• There should be some kind of public list or page of all the moderators and admins with links to their pages and/or contact details
• It's important that many different people are able to contribute to the code of ZSR so that it can be actively worked on and improved instead of just maxx being burdened with doing everything himself
• We talked about it being a good idea to move the site code onto a private github
• Things were discussed for people working on ZSR site, a small group of ZSR developers who can all access the site or potentially only maxx having access to the site but accepting any submits for code contributions. Ideally we'd want to encourage as many people who want to do good work on ZSR as possible and make it easy for them to contribute.

Misc.

• With updates going on for both the main site and the forums, we wanted to get the forums accounts linked up with the main site accounts but we're really not sure how easy or possible that is going to be
• We should maybe do more big talks like this every so often!

[Tompa]

I'll be there! *Except that I completely forgot about it and didn't show anyway  *

[Zelkys]

I'll be there!

Same

[thiefbug]

I'm gonna be there - but I doubt that any of these affect me

[GlitchesAndStuff]

We had the talk today, I updated the first post in the topic to include a summary of what we discussed. Post any questions or points you want to make below this message!

[mzxrules]

Not to say that I don't understand the technical issues that would have to be solved, but I would really like a wiki with the editing power that MediaWiki has.

The actual implementation is up to maxx though.

Another thing: I hope we can get more than just maxx working on the site, or at least have more than one person around that can fix things.

[Apasher]

For the LBs:

If we end up switching to the flagging system, I still feel like runs with no video should be hidden by default (and give an option to show them). And maybe same with runs on emu for games that originally didn't verify runs played on them.

[lackattack24]

I volunteer to head up the NES Legend of Zelda leaderboard. I came to this site but really didn't find much information about how to actually speedrun the game, as it's more focused on redcandle.us. I would be willing to verify times and create technique articles to post similar to LTTP or other games. Let me know if I can help.
-Lack

[scaramanga]

About the discussion itself:
It was a really interesting chat, and it was more disciplined, than I had expected.

But for the next time it would be great, if we could start a bit earlier. I know it might be a bit early for the west coast, but here in Europe, the discussion did not finis before 3am. I don't know how many others are affected by this, so it might be better to stick with that time.

[GlitchesAndStuff]

About the discussion itself:
It was a really interesting chat, and it was more disciplined, than I had expected.

But for the next time it would be great, if we could start a bit earlier. I know it might be a bit early for the west coast, but here in Europe, the discussion did not finis before 3am. I don't know how many others are affected by this, so it might be better to stick with that time.

It was late for me too (I'm in England) but the main problem was that maxx needed to be there and he is more west. We'll try to consider more options next time I guess.

[Otaku]

ZSR Mumble

• The ZSR mumble channel should be discussed more and should be advertised more so that people actually know about it
• The server for the last ZSR mumble actually ran out recently so TR is considering getting another one/renewing
• Hopefully more info soon? http://forums.zeldaspeedruns.com/index.php?topic=1388.0

I use a VPS that I'd be happy to put the server on for no cost if need be, the uptime is pretty strong however it'd be great if I could offer a donation page for the server, the hosting is like $13 a month but it piles up fast as an expense ($156 a year for trivial stuff, with no profit / donations). If it doesn't get met every month it's no big deal, because I pay for it anyways.

ZSR Marathon(s)

• ZSRM 2015 would likely on site rather than online like the last one
• Location in penn, two possible places, for potentially more updates see: http://forums.zeldaspeedruns.com/index.php?topic=1699.0
• The date would be July 10-13th

I live in Eastern PA and if it's in like at least a two hour radius I'd definitely be there for most of it if game submissions weren't too hard to get in since I'm guessing the schedule will be fairly small as it is? Sounds like a lot of fun though. It'd just be great to see many different categories and just like destroying OOT and MM among the other games multiple within the marathon as that's not usually done and it could extend the marathon quite a bit, so hopefully submissions aren't just restricted to like any% and 100% per game (or any other two categories for that matter), and that multiple categories for the same game could be run. Maybe I'm a bit biased but I wouldn't mind a giant OOT block. But yeah, just basically something along those lines would be cool and hopefully the submission process isn't as tight as GDQ marathon submissions (although understandable, because the amount of all games > the amount of all zelda games), just as long as the runner like isn't a complete mess at their category. The more the merrier, basically.

[Jbop]

I volunteer to head up the NES Legend of Zelda leaderboard. I came to this site but really didn't find much information about how to actually speedrun the game, as it's more focused on redcandle.us. I would be willing to verify times and create technique articles to post similar to LTTP or other games. Let me know if I can help.
-Lack

For now ask mzxrules to make you an editor in the Editors thread if you haven't already.