Site reform plans
I've been thinking of various ways to reform the nesvideos site.
This message describes some of my thoughts in unsorted order.
Current problems
- There's no easy way to know which authors have contributed most or to search by author
- More and more movies are going to have various different versions, and there is no single good way to say which movie is the right one to represent the game
- Listing all same-game submissions under the same entry makes the entry long and hard to read
- Creating a new entry for each movie of the same game clutters the list
- There's no easy way to download all the new movies since your last visit
- Updates to the site depend too much on one webmaster
- Handling of the submissions depend too much on one webmaster
- There is no mechanism to include long explanations for movies, yet people would be interested in seeing detailed explanations of tricks used
Things to note
- Not all submissions can be accepted - having the top quality is a requirement for the site to stay interesting
- Bandwidth is a very concrete factor for users and for the server - it must not explode.
Ideas
- Turning the site into a Wiki - anyone could edit any content, all changes would be archived so things could be swiftly restored in case a vandal shows up
- Categories - for different types of movies, for different games
- Search / grouping facilities: list movies by authors, list movies by games, "show all movies of Castlevania 3"
- History: "Show all past versions of Solstice movies"
- Voting system for various aspects of movies
- Sort by name
- Sort by rank (from voting system)
- Public submission queues
This kind of ideas are running in my head. Not all are necessarily worth implementing.
Joined: 3/13/2004
Posts: 1118
Location: Kansai, JAPAN
Now that my classes are over I'll be happy to help in any way. I don't have sufficient hardware to create movies, but maybe I can help out with general maintenance or something?
Yeah, seems nice. Something I would like to see is some kind of profile for each movie creator. Where you can see the runs he's done among other things.
Maybe a system where a group of members can post news and artícles, so that Bisqwit don't have to do all the updating.
Also, there should be some way that you can submit a fmv. And it is put in this large archive, where you can rate and vote for which videos to be captured to .avi
If there is any way I can help too, I would gladly help if I have the time.
I like the Wiki idea. Each game and author (and even movie, for detailed explanations and comments) can have separate pages, and you can still have a browsing format like the current style using transclusion.
Also, some searchable interface or some way to break the current layout into separate chunks (to save the miniscule amount of bandwidth it takes for each of those 3~10k screenshots to load) would be nice.
someone is out there who will like you. take off your mask so they can find you faster.
I support the new Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun.
- Turning the site into a Wiki - anyone could edit any content, all changes would be archived so things could be swiftly restored in case a vandal shows up
As cool as it would be, I can already imagine all the people that will come and change everything to "THESE WERE CHEATD!!! THESE PEOPLE HAVE SO SKILLS" all the time
Bisqwit wrote:
- Categories - for different types of movies, for different games
This would be good
Bisqwit wrote:
- Search / grouping facilities: list movies by authors, list movies by games, "show all movies of Castlevania 3"
Movies by author would be good, but I don't believe there are enough of any movie to have to search for all the versions
Bisqwit wrote:
- History: "Show all past versions of Solstice movies"
Just the fmv i am supposing?
Bisqwit wrote:
- Voting system for various aspects of movies
Maybe. Not sure how this would help though. Its pretty easy to tell whats wrong with your movie just by looking at it.
All the changes mentioned by Bisqwit would made the site look really professional but i agree with Bob that the open editing as good as it could be it also could turn into constant flaming or something worst.
I specially like the idea of sorting the movies by some categories for easier search, also, if you finally implement a voting system, a ranking would also be nice.
There could always be a limited implementation of Wiki that only allows editing by registered users or only allows edits to be psoted after review. Not exactly in line with Wiki's intent but it would work.
someone is out there who will like you. take off your mask so they can find you faster.
I support the new Nekketsu Kouha Kunio-kun.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Possibly just allow players and certain trusted individuals to work on the content?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Here's a solution to a few of the problems. Make a new section called something like player indexes, which will list all the players and link to the movie collection of each player. Each person who makes speed runs will register with the site, and will get his own page in the player indexes. Each person will be able to edit only his own page, and will be able to upload his new fmvs or delete fmvs from his page, and also will be able to type a discription of each fmv. On the player indexes main page, there will be some kind of calendar where the players announce their new fmvs that they want to be published (though they don't have to announce them). Bisqwit can then look at the calendar and decide which ones to be published. In addition to a player index, there should also be a game index. When a player uploads an fmv to his movie collection, he should also be able to add it (along with the description of the fmv that he typed) to a collection of movies for that game, and also be able to delete only his own movies from the game index. For each game on the nesvideos page, there should be a link to the game's movie collection in the game index.
Now I'll reply to some of the things Bisqwit said:
There's no easy way to know which authors have contributed most or to search by author
The previous paragraph solves this. All you have to do is put a number next to each player in the player index that says how many fmvs are in his movie collection.
More and more movies are going to have various different versions, and there is no single good way to say which movie is the right one to represent the game
Except for a few exceptions, the representative movie should usually be the fastest one (if there's a warp version, a non-warp version, and a tricks version, the non-warp version and the tricks version should just be in the games movie collection in the game index, and also should not be announced on the calendar). In the case when it's hard to say which movie is best, the video displayed on the nesvideos page should be the one with the highest rating (which would be an average of all the ratings people give the movie) among the movies that have been announced on the calendar. Movies in the game index should be sortable by rating, player, or length.
Listing all same-game submissions under the same entry makes the entry long and hard to read
Creating a new entry for each movie of the same game clutters the list
I already solved these two problems.
There's no easy way to download all the new movies since your last visit
You could put links to the fmvs in the latest updates section at the top of the nexvideos page. New movies could be a different color than old movies.
Updates to the site depend too much on one webmaster
Handling of the submissions depend too much on one webmaster
With my new system a lot of the work would be done by the players. All you would have to do is check the calendar for new fmv announcements and encode movies, though maybe other people could volunteer to help encode some of the movies.
There is no mechanism to include long explanations for movies, yet people would be interested in seeing detailed explanations of tricks used
In the game index there could also be links at the bottom of the page to articles that players write about all the details of the movies.
Not all submissions can be accepted - having the top quality is a requirement for the site to stay interesting
The nesvideos page would only have top quality movies, but the game index could have any movie that a player chooses to put in it.
Bandwidth is a very concrete factor for users and for the server - it must not explode.
I thought BitTorrent solved the bandwidth problem.
Turning the site into a Wiki - anyone could edit any content, all changes would be archived so things could be swiftly restored in case a vandal shows up
This is a bad idea because of the emu speed run haters. People should only be able to edit their own movie collection in the player index and their own movies and descriptions of their movies in the game index.
Categories - for different types of movies, for different games
Ok, I suppose you could make genre one of the methods of sorting the movies on the nesvideos page.
Search / grouping facilities: list movies by authors, list movies by games, "show all movies of Castlevania 3"
Being able to sort movies in different ways as well as being able to search in different ways is a good idea. You could show all Castevania 3 movies by opening it's movie collection in the game index.
History: "Show all past versions of Solstice movies"
I don't think this is necessary, though a player could choose to keep all his versions of a movie in the game index if he wants to. However, it might be a better idea for each player to only keep his latest version in the game index and all his versions in the player's movie collection. However, players should not be required to keep all his versions of a movie in his movie collection.
Voting system for various aspects of movies
People being able to rate the movies is a good idea, but I haven't decided yet if they should be able to rate the different aspects of the movies yet, such as speed, surprisingness, and coolness. I'll have to think more about this.
Sort by name
Sort by rank (from voting system)
Sorting by name is a good idea on both the nesvideos page and the game index. However, sorting by rating should not be used on the nesvideos page to compare movies of different games, but it could be a sorting option in the game index.
Public submission queues
I'm not sure what you mean by this.
Edit: Wow, I think that might have been my longest post on a forum ever.
Joined: 4/25/2004
Posts: 615
Location: The Netherlands
wiki thing might not be a great idea looking at the type of audience the page attracts, unless you're there constantly keeping an eye on it, getting ready to press that revert button...
and registered users only kinda defies the whole wiki idea, but might not be a bad idea if you can implement it (it means having a hack in phpbb that connects you to your wiki, which is not easy to do)
Thanks for all this feedback.
What I'm most concerned with is what kind of interface would be the best for anonymous casual users, while keeping both the number of clicks and the size of pages to minimal.
Michael Fried wrote:
> Bandwidth is a very concrete factor for users and for the server - it must not explode.
I thought BitTorrent solved the bandwidth problem.
Webpages are not loaded with BitTorrent.
The nesvideos main page is currently about 100 kB in size. Some user-agents support compressing (only 20 kB to download + images), some don't.
It's loaded about 20 times per minute. This means average 8 kB/s of outgoing traffic all the time. At spike times it might be three times more, and at quiet times (weekends, middays) it's three times less.
Having multiple subpages of frequent access means that there will be more traffic; more page loadings.
This is what I meant.
Joined: 4/25/2004
Posts: 615
Location: The Netherlands
you can just get rid of the pictures and make it plain text, the forum i mean. i dont think anyone will care much
let the avatars be loaded from a different location (or are they already?)
etc
you can just get rid of the pictures and make it plain text, the forum i mean. i dont think anyone will care much
let the avatars be loaded from a different location (or are they already?)
etc
Avatars are on each user's own servers.
And the style of the forum layout is not that easily editable. Many things will break if images are removed, as already seen a couple of times. Plus, I don't really want to. :)
But I wasn't talking about the forum.
Having multiple subpages of frequent access means that there will be more traffic; more page loadings.
If there can only be one page then most of your problems can't be solved. However, with my plan, I think that the pages other than the nesvideos page would be loaded much less frequently than the nesvideos page.
What I'm most concerned with is what kind of interface would be the best for anonymous casual users, while keeping both the number of clicks and the size of pages to minimal.
If you want to improve the interface, maybe you could start out by changing the background color. White sometimes gets kind of annoying. I don't think increasing the number of clicks would make the interface for a casual user worse. Putting some stuff on other pages would make the nesvideos page smaller and easier to navigate. Also, a lot of people wouldn't even be interested in going to the other pages (such as player index, game index, and calendar) anyway, and would just watch the videos on the nesvideos page.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I think having the regulars being able to log in and get personalized stuff would rock.
Show me which movies I haven't downloaded yet (unless I chose to ignore some).
Ability to monitor certain games which I like would be cool too.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 5/4/2004
Posts: 90
Location: New Brunswick, Canada
Some kind of rating system for each 'trait' (flawlessness, speed, coolness, innovation) would be neat to have, although that may hurt some videos where it doesn't apply, and if it was open to public voting you'd get all the 'omg NOT REAL' people voting '0', like the idiots on Newgrounds.com.
It'd be very tricky to have anything open to the general public in that department ;)
Any way to have a forum thread whenever a new video is posted where people could comment on or make suggestions? Then again, that would probably be overkill since that already happens well BEFORE the .avi is released, hehe.
you can make a link to see a pic of the game, instead of displaying all pics by default.
Also, as for the "main" page URL I think moving to a text-only would save the bandwidth.
With the increasing number of games being housed on your (potentially overloaded) servers, a text-only introduction would be good. The running tally of page updates and the current "main" page can be moved to a link from the new main page. On this new main page there can be the most recently addedgames/items. Thisidea I have seen utilized in PHP on several other sites, but it requires you to re-engineer the means for publishing content on your site.
As far as open-editing... a bad idea considering the controversial (at best) nature this page apparently attracts. That is, unless there is an easier means of "pressing revert" as mentioned before. Also, all the suggestions mentioned thus far seem to anticipate Bisqwit being helped in the administration of this site. Now, I applaud that,but since when were you planning on giving up some creative power?? Solution: if the site is made more modular with a more typical "news" setup, I forsee greater ability for simultaneous publishing my both movie makers, movie cappers (thanks in part to blip and Bisqwit's new hacking of Famtasia for BOUNDLESS video capturing), players, site admins. However, this paradigm changes what I consider to be the homey feel of this site.
Umm, that's all I can <rant> about for now... In short, change is good, as long as quality doesn'e become affected. Right now, the bottleneck for efficiency seems to be the sheer NUMBER and variety of submissions Bisqwit has to wade through.
How about in addition to being able to vote a number from 1 to 10, there's also an option of voting "that video was cheated, it sucks", and all of those votes wouldn't count. It wouldn't make sense to not allow votes under 3 because some of the videos really are bad and deserve low ratings.
Would the movies be looked at before they are put up, like they are now? No, right? If so, my idea won't work. Right now, I don't thibk any video deserves a 2/10
Bisqwit, do you know when you're going to start reforming the site? You definitely need to do something about the main page because I don't think 56k people want to have to wait for *insert number that I don't know how to count to* pictures to load. Maybe what you could do is have no pictures on the main page and just have a list of all the games, the video length, the player, and the genre of the game, and maybe also a short description of the game. Then each game would link to another page with the picture of the game and a description of the speed run.
Edit: By the way, I think there's a way you could solve the bandwidth problem. There's a site called free.fr that offers free webhosting, 100 MB of space, and unlimited bandwidth. The only problem is that the site is French so if you're like me who doesn't know French then you might have trouble figuring out how to sign up.
