Posts for adelikat

adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Everyone who hasn't logged in, has had to do this already by now. If you are someone who logged in but never updated your password, you still should do this :) But I am removing this as an announcement since a vast majority of users have been updated.
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
When I originally designed the "post since last visit", I had the cookie timeout set to 1 hour. Which made it work pretty good for this feature. Then people wanted the cookie to be a lot longer. The downside is this behavior. What's holding up the improvement of this is a performant way to track everything you are doing so that I know the last time you "visited" is. This was a feature that could really bog down the old site. My question is that if the definition of "last visit" were more accurate, does the "post since last visit" feature work? Or are there other issues with that page? Follow up question is if the "recent posts" page had the same UI as "post since last visit" would that be better or at least acceptable?
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Currently our movie rating consists of two parts: Entertainment Rating and Technical Rating. Let's talk about technical ratings. Many (most?) people have used this rating value incorrectly historically. They use it as a measure of how close to optimal they think the movie is. When used this way, it is a way inflated, and mostly meaningless value. Most movies get a 7 or higher. Simpler movies tend to get high marks because it seems clear they would be hard to improve. I rated many movies this way, and it was clear to me, this rating has almost no value. At some point, I changed the way I rate to the original intent, which is to rate it based on how many "techniques" are demonstrated in the movie. Things such as obvious luck manipulation, route planning, use of glitches, etc. This seems like a more useful value, at first. But after rating a number of movies I found something obvious. Movies that had more aspects to it like this, I tended to like more, for obvious reasons. TASes that have a variety of TAS techniques are generally more entertaining. Go figure. So technical rating, in this context, seems to have no value either. It is just a value strongly correlated with entertainment value. Let's talk about the cons. 1) It adds complexity and confusion to the user, making it less likely for them to participate. Participation in movie ratings is what we want most as it drives engagement and gives us values we can't do interesting things with. 2) Site complexity. We have the technical burden of maintaining the data and the code surrounding the receiving, displaying, and calculating of this value. Not to mention the performance costs of having to calculate this value frequently, and further code complexities of caching that calculation to mitigate that cost. Given the cons and limited value of this value, it has been my conclusion for awhile now that this value should be removed, and leaving a single value that represents the overall impression by the user.
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Alyosha wrote:
https://tasvideos.org/1116M screenshot broken on this one.
Fixed
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Sand wrote:
There are a number of wiki pages and forum posts that load images from media.tasvideos.org, many of which are now broken. For example, at Wiki: TextFormattingRules#ReferencesLinks:
[https://media.tasvideos.org/guidelines/entertain.gif|right]
https://media.tasvideos.org/guidelines/entertain.gif is now 302 → 404 Not Found. What it used to look like: https://web.archive.org/web/20210421212329/https://tasvideos.org/TextFormattingRules.html#ReferencesLinks. There are more examples at /Search?SearchTerms=media.tasvideos.org. For example, Wiki: GameResources/DOS/Jetpack#NamingConventions has many missing images in a table, like https://media.tasvideos.org/jetpack/guy.png. However, Post #184070 shows that some media.tasvideos.org images still work, like https://media.tasvideos.org/lsamson1091.png.
media links have mostly been moved to files. All wiki pages should be updated accordingly, and forum posts (that had non-broken images before go-live
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Reminder that if you currently have an account on the site and have not logged in since the start of the new year, to please do so. All legacy passwords from before the rewrite will be reset on January 23rd at approximately 4PM UTC. You will need to perform a password reset to login after that point.
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Interesting opinion from someone extremely active on Discord, and I can't remember the last time I saw you post something on IRC.
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Post subject: Everyone Needs To Log In
adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
When moving to the new code base, we were able to copy over user passwords. However, the old password storage was not secure. If you log in to the new system, it will upgrade that storage to something safer. The idea was to allow a seamless upgrade as users could log in right away. However, I do not want to keep insecurely stored password for any longer than necessary. On January 23rd, I will remove old style passwords. - If you log in before this date, your password will automatically "upgrade" (It is still recommended you also update your password) - If you fail to log in before this date, you will need to use the forgot password workflow in order to be able to log in again (which will include setting your password)
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Flip wrote:
I would like to see the ability to change the date system from MM/DD/YYYY to the more sensible DD/MM/YYYY please, as I can't seem to locate such a function currently.
Currently it is using your browser to determine this
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
EZGames69 wrote:
I've just verified sync by the way.
Then can you please catalog it with the Game and Rom Hash you synced with? :)
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
One hundred wrote:
Lurker here. I still use torrents and find them valuable. I have a mid internet that can't stream ultra HD video - For the best video quality, I need to torrent. Torrents are not piracy, and I don't know why you should value the opinions of people who make that conflation. It would be like pandering to the TAS = Cheated Video crowd. There's no compelling reason to base your decisions on misinformation. As somebody else pointed out, especially because this site depends on ROMs, which are also incorrectly conflated with illegal activities. I don't think TASvideos will shake stigma around piracy so long as they make movies using ROMs and emulators (which will be Forever). I understand TASvideos isn't here to change the world or anything lol, but I think there's power in asserting that torrents are legal and a normal thing to partake in. It's just a good thing to do. I also strongly dislike the idea of depending almost entirely on YouTube. The browser feature of resuming problem downloads is hugely unreliable in my experience. It works sometimes but its an inconsistent strat. Torrents can be reliably resumed later. However, I don't have an answer to the data storage problem. If seeding a huge amount of data is too taxing, and you need to cut torrents for that reason, I understand.
Thank you for your feedback! It is important to here that someone was using this feature. I will be removing this feature in the upcoming days. It's not a simple decision, I know some users will be impacted, but a large majority will be unaffected. Given the technical difficulties torrents give, I don't think we have enough users to justify it. As for "normalizing" torrents as a non-piracy tool, I think that battle is lost. It never started that way (in 2004 it started precisely to solve a need such as what TASVideos had), but I don't even know of a single site other than TASVideos that uses them in a legal way. We can try to stand up and battle against this "negative PR", but it isn't a hill I think we have to die on.
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
We definitely want CoolKirby maintaining our game's list! I think this is a permission we could assign to editors, what does everyone think?
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Wow, yeah, that is really bad. It just straight up claims you can get free games on this site. This is very much why we need to de-associate with torrents. Before streaming sites, it was a technology that solved a site problem, now it just associates us with things we do not want to be associated with.
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Let's play a word association game, say the first word that comes to your mind when I say: "torrent". Now that you have that word, think if it is something you want this site to be associated with. I sure don't. Now let's talk about the technical/user burden of torrents. We have to set up a tracker and maintain it. We have lots of code for the site to manage and display torrents. And then we have to store all the torrents which are approaching 1 gig these days. And publishers have to create them, and maintain them. And users should be seeding them. SO now let's talk about the value they add. You can get a high quality encode. Well, the YouTube encode quality is INSANE compared to any other YouTube video I've ever seen. And if you don't like that, and even higher quality one is available as a direct download from archive.org. So maybe you are getting the benefit of faster downloads? Except you haven't been, 99% of all seeding is done from archive.org anyway where you were 1 click away from getting it. Maybe the ability to resume a download if you have an unreliable connection? Browsers have that built in now. The effort vs value isn't there and I don't want this site associated with what torrents have become synonymous with. We have discussed this before: https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/22931 but this is a different discussion. I'm removing them, unless a compelling reason is given otherwise. I'll give this discussion a week at most. Please discuss :)
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
A quick update, users with a space in their name can log in now. And given the old site was http, I think it is best to be paranoid and assume that password was sniffed on the internet somewhere, so yes, please update your password. Also, at some point, anyone who hasn't logged in to the site will be losing their password and have to go through the forgot password workflow. So best to do this now while it is easy :)
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Shoutouts to our newest Senior Judge, Samsara! Samsara has done amazing work not just as a judge, but as a leader. Not to mention rewriting our entire judging rules. I look forward to the good things to come with them in this role
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
It’s because people are testing, in preparation of go-live on the 1st
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Radiant wrote:
On the https://staging.tasvideos.org/Publications/Filter page, please sort alphabetically the various listboxes (e.g. flags, groups).
Fixed
I note that the Platform listbox uses abbreviations for everything, which doesn't seem necessary (e.g. gc when it would be clearer to spell out "GameCube"). Likewise, flags uses "improve" for "Major Improvement".
Flags are fixed, System won't be so easy, will take some work. Plus they are pretty standard abbreviations throughout the site, and the world, so I'm not thinking that is a super high priority yet.
It doesn't seem possible to filter on genre, why not?
The why not is just that I didn't think about it. I added this feature request here: https://github.com/TASVideos/tasvideos/issues/661
How about filtering by the TASer who created it?
Maybe author filtering can be added at some point, that is a lot less trivial. I'm sure we will get to that eventually: https://github.com/TASVideos/tasvideos/issues/662
This whole page takes up only the top 25% or so of my browser window, meaning all listboxes can be much taller.
Yeah, I don't know why it is doing that. There is no css that is specifying any size in particular, and I'm not sure how to force it to be taller without some shenanigans.
In the groups listbox, "Pokemon" is rendered as "PokACmon".
That's actually a really good catch, that was a encoding problem with importing the production data. It's fixed, though you won't see it reflected on staging, until another import which likely won't happen before go-live on the 1st
Browsing from https://staging.tasvideos.org/Movies , the search tab should probably lead to the aforementioned filter page, but currently gives an error.
That's not an error, it is just saying we don't have the wiki module, which we don't because we don't want it. Once we go live we can replace the tab with the content we want. This isn't something we can handle during a data import or fix before go-live since it would affect the current site.
The movies by category tab should be alphabetized. Likewise, on https://staging.tasvideos.org/Subs-List the pulldown for system should be alphabetized.
Fixed
The header for boxes "statuses" and "status filter" should be clearer. What is meant is respectively "statuses not shown below" and "statuses shown below". I'm unclear why statuses uses those left/right arrow buttons, whereas the years selector instead uses shift-click to multiselect, and the systems selector is a pulldown only allowing one option, and the user selector is a text field. Consistency is more user-friendly.
I don't have much to say about any of this. Maybe someone interested will want to clean it up a bit
Browsing to (e.g.) https://staging.tasvideos.org/GameResources/DS should have the list of subpages expanded; currently it looks like the page is empty except for "see also" links.
Good catch. It used to be open by default but some fairly recent refactoring broke this functionality. It is now fixed.
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
I would have preferred if you wait for the verdict. Even if rejected, this submission could help improve our rules documentation and set a precedent.
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Post subject: BizHawk 2.7 Released!
adelikat
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Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
BizHawk 2.7 has been released! New Core, melonDS! Also, lua support for linux! Other core updates as well. See full changelog: http://tasvideos.org/Bizhawk/ReleaseHistory.html#Bizhawk#27 Grab Windows and Linux binaries here: https://github.com/TASVideos/BizHawk/releases/tag/2.7
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Well, I can't tell you whether or not it was a lie by Nach. But just happened to have a program(?), and taking the time to run it against said YT posts (?), and said program actually showing a definitive result (?), sound tenuous at best. Lie or not, it isn't acceptable behavior from a site admin for a situation like this. I'm sorry you were treated that way. Two members of the community should have been taken more seriously, and the situation should have been mediated back then. Better late than never that this is coming out and everyone is trying to remedy the situation with honest intentions. But again, apologies for my neglect on the matter.
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Wow, I had no idea spike was being harassed like that. And I am sorry for how you were treated by the TASVideos administration over it. So I would like to apologize for my lack of proper handling of this situation. I'm guilty of negligence here. Not just for this, but also for not stepping in when I saw whole situation was being handled so poorly. I expect more from myself, and us as staff, for situations like this going forward (hopefully there are NOT situations like this, with harassment, vote manipulation, and alt account battles, sheeeesh)
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adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
I support the idea of dropping rules that are otherwise covered by the triviality clause, if you feel they are truly redundant
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Post subject: Dropping baidu support
adelikat
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Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Posting here to say that I have removed baidu support from the video tag since: 1) It was not actually in used 2) It does not work in any modern browser that I tested (I even tried IE, eww) 3) baidu has been on the decline anyway One less moving piece to worry about on the server.
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Post subject: An Update to Site Administration
adelikat
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Emulator Coder, Published Author, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player (3602)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
As of today, Nach will no longer be in the role of Site Admin. While this was not an easy decision, the staff and I agree that we have various irreconcilable differences with Nach in how we intend to operate the site in the future, and Nach's position as site administrator made it impossible to proceed with development in the site the way we want to. Under Nach's lead, progress on a lot of important aspects of the site is stalled in various ways. For example, HTTPS support has been an ongoing issue for many years, but it is Nach's insistence to take charge and arrange support with the current site code base, and that is one of the reasons why this is still an ongoing process after six years. This is just one of various examples where Nach's role in site administration conflicts with the rest of staff. The "GB movies in GBC mode" thread is an example where Nach came in conflict with various staff members over site rules. He attempted to override and revert rules that were set by staff multiple years prior, declaring them not legitimate just because he wasn't personally involved. This both demonstrated lack of awareness of what went on with staff and site rules, as well as demonstrated lack of faith in staff members. Added together, this creates a frustrating work environment in which it is hard to get work effectively done. There are other examples that led to this decision, but we do not want to take away from the overall message of this announcement. If there are any questions as to why we’ve made this decision, we are happy to answer them. Moving forward, I will continue to take charge as Site Admin. Working with the staff, our goal is to push the site forward with improvements to site technology, and expanding movie rules to be more inclusive to cool TAS projects that don't necessarily fit into our current framework.
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