Helping

I want to help! What can I do?

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Editing the site

A Wiki site (or "Wiki Wiki Web") is a site where everyone can collaborate on the content.

An example is Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki

The most important aspects stressed at this site are:

  • Editing must be simple but not too limited (thus we have custom markup instead of HTML).
  • Almost anyone can become an editor upon request.

You can become an editor. To do so, contact Bisqwit.
Editors can edit the pages of this site and create new pages. Game and movie related articles would be especially welcome.

Submitting movies

You are more than welcome to try!

But please refer to our Rules and Guidelines before you begin.

Rating movies

If you have logged in, you can rate movies at the rating page. Rating movies helps improving the quality of the current ratings.

Voting for submissions

Registered users at the forums can become a test audience and vote on submissions, based on whether they liked it or not.

It helps the judges in deciding whether the submission should be published to become part of the site's material, or rejected because it does not have enough entertainment and/or perfection in it.

Note: Voting does not become available immediately. One needs to spend some effort in getting known by fellow posters before the voting becomes available.

Seeding

Seed is a client who has a full copy of the file.
When BitTorrent says "Download complete", you are a seed. Seeds are very helpful and in fact urgently needed, because without them, .avi downloading doesn't work. Even a small 5 kb/s is welcome.

To become a seed, just start downloading a movie and when it asks where to save it, select your existing fully downloaded movie. This makes you a seed, which only uploads.
Without uploaders, nobody can download!

It is possible to seed multiple files simultaneously. Bisqwit has written a script called btfriend.py which automatically juggles the torrent files so that the files which most urgently need seeding are being shared.

If you're a Windows user, see the how to run Btfriend in Windows page.

Urgent seed requests

Here's an automatically generated list of files that most urgently need seeding right now (updated every 5 minutes):


How to read the priority: Priorities over 10000 are when the file has no seeds at all. This is most important. Without seeds, it's likely that people can not complete their download at all.
Priorities over 0.5 are when the file has a suboptimal number of seeds when compared to the number of downloaders. The higher the priority, the bigger the number of downloaders compared to the number of seeds.

Mirroring files on the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a free digital library which aims to preserve Internet sites and other cultural artifacts. As of late 2003, Nolan Pflug, the curator of the Speed Demos Archive, had his request for a special speedrun category on the video section of the Archive granted. As such, any speedrun videos (and many other type of game movies, including machinima) may be uploaded freely to the Archive which provides unlimited hosting for the files.

If you want to help out the site, you may want to provide HTTP or FTP mirrors via the Internet Archive. The easiest way to do this is via FTP upload:

  1. Go to the Internet Archive's create item page. Make sure that you have an account and are logged in.
  2. Create a new item. Make sure that the identifier adheres to this format: (gametitle)-tas(version)-(author). E.g. rockman-tasv6-bisqwit. Keep in mind that if you're uploading the first version of a speedrun, there's no need to include a version number. E.g. superdemoworld_tlc-tas-jxq. Also, if there are special identifiers present for a movie, you must include them. E.g. supermario64-tas-16stars-spezzafer.
  3. Once the Archive has verified that the identifier is unused, it will set up an FTP directory for you. Using the login information shown on the creation page, you're able to upload files to the directory using any FTP program you like.
  4. After uploading your files, open the CLICK_HERE_WHEN_FINISHED.htm file. This will activate the identifier, allowing people to view its metadata and download its files.

A known issue with this method is that it's not possible to put the identifier in the speed_runs category. As long as no valid solution to this is found, you might need to ask Radix, the curator of that Archive category, to manually move the files to the right category. He is usually online in the IRC channel #qdq @ irc.quakenet.org.

When the movie is obsoleted, remember to edit the description on the mirror site to indicate that a newer, improved version is available. This also applies to movies that are made available at Google Videos, Youtube and other online viewing sites.

FractalFusion: How come BitTorrent gives me this error message:
"megamanx3-tas-fractalfusion.avi" : Not starting torrent as it already meets the current settings for when to stop seeding and refuses to let me upload, even when seeds are requested?

  • Bisqwit: Your bittorrent client has a policy configured, of how much you should upload and how much you need to upload. In this case, your bittorrent client thinks that according to the policy, you have already done enough so it does not start seeding. You should be able to adjust that policy to your own choosings.

Get Firefox!Helping last edited by FractalFusion on 2007-09-04 06:56:35
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