Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
I'm going to go ahead and say that everything we would need to do to account for HK TASing in its current state is far beyond what we should be accounting for. Just reading through the list of things we need to change or keep in mind makes me think that the process is likely to fail at any given point, and strictly speaking as an Admin and the head of judging, I can't imagine putting staff through this with every new submission. It may have to wait until libTAS is better able to support Unity games or HK itself so we don't have to worry about the nondeterminism.
As for the philosophical side of the arguments, I totally understand the concerns there. The movie rules and submission instructions were atrociously elitist for a very long time, and even after the massive amounts of overhauling I and others have done over the past few years to fix all of that, there's still a lot more work that needs to be done for everything on the site to accurately reflect our current policies. My ideal for TASVideos is for it to be an expansive archive and repository for TAS information, with the community focusing more on collaboration and support rather than trying to be the absolute best at everything. This thread in particular isn't meant to be us trying to force other communities to adhere to our standards, it's meant to be us trying to support everything we possibly can within reason in order for us to be a more complete source of information, but given our past I don't blame anyone for thinking otherwise and still getting bad vibes from us. If there's anything I can do to correct that, I'm absolutely willing to do it.
I'll put it this way: Even if it's too much for us to support HK TASes on a technical level right now, I still want to and would love to put in the effort to supporting the community in any other possible way we can.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Team 1 will henceforth be called This Cannot Continue, which will be incredibly ironic if the final run doesn't end up being a 1CC.
Logo will be coming as soon as I finish shamelessly tracing drawing it.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
We've now hit two of these progress report posts, that means it's officially a recurring feature! There's actually a lot to talk about, so let's get right into it.
In this post:
openMSX 19.1 released!
Site submission record broken for the second year in a row!!
New staff role: Senior Moderator!!!
Dream Team Contest 11!!!!
TASVideos' 20th anniversary!!!!!
Addressing the recent username changes!!!!!! Yay!!!!!!
We normally announce emulator releases in separate news posts, but given that there are so many other things to talk about, I felt that having two news posts coming one after another would split the attention too much between them.
openMSX 19.1 has been released! This is a further bug fix release coming hot off the heels of openMSX 19.0, which was also a large bug fix release, but it was also one that we kinda sorta forgot to announce. Haha, oops, whoops, sorry! Furthermore, the site has been updated to account for changes made to the OMR input file format in recent versions.
openMSX site: https://openmsx.org
19.1 download: https://github.com/openMSX/openMSX/releases/tag/RELEASE_19_1
Let's start with the fun and exciting site stuff, of which there is plenty!
On November 20th, 2022, TASVideos officially broke its almost 19 year old record for most submissions received in a year, surpassing the 540 submissions we received in 2004, when submissions first opened. We went on to receive almost 100 more submissions over the rest of 2022, bringing the new record to 639 going into 2023. I'm proud to announce that we have broken the submission record for the second year in a row by receiving our 640th submission! There's a bit of a twist to this, though: Technically, two runs broke the record!
We've started getting into the habit of deleting duplicate submissions, and with this year having had an unprecedented submission volume, that means there were more chances for things to go weird with accidental duplicates. 10 submissions were deleted this way, meaning that there is both a technical record breaker that counts these deleted submissions and an on-paper record breaker that doesn't. I think it's fair to showcase both!
Counting the 10 deleted submissions toward the total, the record breaker is:
#8562: EZGames69 & Randomno's Flash SHIFT in 02:45.92
Not counting the 10 deleted submissions, the record breaker according to the submissions list is:
#8572: LoganTheTASer's NES The Void in 04:00.17
What makes this even more impressive is that we're still only in August. There's a very good chance we'll hit 900 submissions by the end of the year, which is absolutely insane given that we generally averaged around 300-400 most years. We literally couldn't have done this without you all. That... That's kinda how a user submission system works. Would be hard to break a user submission record without users. I'm being flippant as a bit, this really is amazing and I'm so proud of this community for contributing so much this year. Thank you all!
We've expanded our Senior Staff team with a new role and a person to fill said new role!
Prior to today, overseeing moderation has fallen entirely on the administration team, which has had mixed results depending on which admin is overseeing it. Let's just say certain Samsaras aren't particularly great at it. As the site grows, our need for moderation grows as well, both in terms of actual moderator activity and actual moderator... having. Actually having moderators. With the Admins having so many other duties, it made sense to provide a new role that serves as the official head of moderation.
moozooh has been with the site almost since the beginning and has served wonderfully as a Moderator since he was brought on. His active, balanced and level-headed approach to moderation combined with his seniority made him the perfect choice to fill the new Senior Moderator role! Congratulations, moozooh, and welcome to the administrative side!
Show your love to moozooh by being fine and upstanding members of the community. The best way to appreciate a Moderator is to not make them work.
Like a bolt from the blue, it's time for Dream Team Contest 11! I've never been good at rhymes.
For those of you who are unaware, the Dream Team Contest is a group TASing competition held whenever people feel like hosting one. Teams of TASers sign up and tackle a mystery game, aiming to make the best TAS of it within a certain time period. The contest is open to everyone, regardless of skill level, so if you've been wanting to get into TASing but felt overwhelmed doing it on your own, I'd highly recommend signing up, joining a team, and learning live!
Signups close on September 16th, 2023, at 23:59 UTC, so you still have a little under two weeks to join!
Finally, the craziest news of all in my opinion: It's Sonic's 30th anniversary TASVideos' 20th anniversary... very soon! The site was founded in December 2003, and we want to celebrate 20 years of providing the best in tool-assisted speedruns and also Short Order. We've got a couple ideas in mind, but we'd love to hear what you think we should do as well! Fun events, site history things, re-adding spaces to usernames, there's a lot of things we could do for this.
Apologies for this section being so short. I'll give further updates once we actually start having some set, public plans.
Alright, moving from fun and exciting news into one last thing that is less fun and exciting: We've removed spaces from everyone's usernames. Those who were affected by this change were informed through site PM, but there wasn't a formal site announcement until now, so I wanted to bring attention to it, explain why it happened, and most importantly apologize for the sudden nature of it.
To put it simply, supporting spaces in usernames severely complicates the site code. The main complication is that we identify users in URLs with their usernames, a holdover from the old site that needed to be kept when making the new site so data could be migrated over properly. This presented a lot of problems, both visible and invisible. The most visible complication is simply how URLs are parsed: If you're linking to a user's profile or Homepage on Discord, for example, the link just breaks if the username has a space in it. If this doesn't sound so bad... Well, by itself, it isn't horrible, admittedly. Annoying as hell, but something that could reasonably be dealt with. The real problem comes from the maintenance and all of the less visible and much worse issues that needed to be found and fixed as soon as possible. One notable issue involved having a space at the end of a username. Such a profile was extremely difficult to get to from the site if there was a matching username without the space, as you would always be sent to that profile instead of the profile with the space. In other words, you could've not only impersonated a user, but explicitly pinned horrible behavior on them because your spaced profile would have led to their real profile. This particular bug also would've made ban evasion easier, as you could just drop a space down after any username and made it more cumbersome to access your actual profile. This actually did nearly let a ban evader go free, which is how the bug was caught in the first place. Thankfully, because of the changes, this is no longer possible.
To put it even more simply, the laissez-faire attitude of the old site made feature parity and maintenance on the new site a hell of a lot more stressful, so if you had a spaced username and are lamenting its loss, blame the old site for not caring whether or not it was possible in the first place.
Removing support for spaces was something we had intended to do for a while, though I will fully admit we dropped the ball on announcing it ahead of time, and we apologize for that. For anyone who was affected by the spaces-to-underscores replacement and would like to change their username to account for it, send me a PM on the site with the name you want and I'll get it done.
Also, I'd like to state that it's not impossible for us to re-implement support in the future. Maintaining what we had was messy enough as it was and made dev work harder, and dropping support means cleaner code and more efficiency right now, but that doesn't mean we don't support the idea at all. That being said, a cleaner implementation is not something the current dev team will be focusing on any time soon. At the risk of unintentionally sounding like I'm saying "hey jerkweeds, if you're gonna complain, do it yourself", remember that TASVideos is open source now. We're open to contributions and definitely open to expanding the dev team, so feel free to jump in!
Quick and minor final note: The login system shouldn't technically be affected by the space-to-underscore replacement, i.e affected users should still be able to log in with the space version of their username, though of course it won't work anywhere outside of that.
Well, that was a lot of news! I'll try not to let things pile up so much for the next site progress report, it just so happened to be that a lot of little-but-newsworthy things happened all around the same time. Tune in next time for more news, including things I don't know about yet because I can't predict the future!
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Alright, here's my attempt to explain the situation in a way that minimizes private information as much as possible. I put this here just so anyone reading can immediately see the context for my previous post. Discussion of this situation is not prohibited, though ideally this explanation should answer any questions anyone had about why this all happened. If not, I'll be happy to answer remaining questions as long as it doesn't derail any submission/publication thread, i.e just ask me on Discord or in a PM. I'm not as scary as my last post made me sound, I promise ._.
Advance warning that this is complicated, mostly because all of it happened in staff DMs so context needs to be actively provided. Hell, the impersonation part wasn't even staff knowledge until the ban went into effect.
Quick context: Back in March, OtakuTAS reached out to the admins, warning us that his ex-girlfriend was trying to stalk him on-site. We looked up the account in question and went ahead with banning her, as it was a serious allegation and we saw behavior from the account in line with what Otaku was saying. While the situation was quickly dealt with, all of the site staff were involved in the discussion and knew of the situation.
The real story begins a couple days after the ex's site account was banned. She reached out to us herself with screenshots of an email conversation between her and someone who claimed to know who she was and what she was banned for, offering to "help her":
https://i.imgur.com/go9jJ4y.jpg
I've elected to redact the names/avatars of both the ex and the anon account to minimize the chances of either being contacted. For consistency, the anon is redacted in black and the ex is redacted in white. I've also cropped larger screenshots like the above down to only the relevant information and chose not to embed them for readability purposes: Uncropped versions can be provided for proof that no relevant information was left out. Also, sorry, I censored a few swears in light blue. I have to start making up for my previous lack of professionalism somehow.
At first, this was only known to feos, adelikat, and Memory (i.e, the two Admins at the time and the Site Owner), but it spread to the Senior staff as well and turned into a full group DM. We were treating this completely seriously at first because, one, we had no real reason to believe it was fake from the outset, and two, the fact that it was an email conversation referencing staff-only knowledge meant that we needed to investigate internally and come up with a course of action in case it actually was a high-level staff member going rogue.
The anon kept information extremely vague at first, not outright mentioning anything about being staff but mentioning at one point early on that there was a "private discord where people discuss this sorta stuff", which we had figured was either a server set up for discussing TASVideos drama or a vague way of mentioning our internal staff chat:
https://i.imgur.com/Vc1Y2Zv.jpg
We proceeded to spend a couple hours discussing this. I won't be sharing much of the staff conversation since nearly all of it is private, internal information, but I can give a couple general things:
In regards to a full list of every account who can view user emails:
Note the usages of "a lot" and not "all": With the knowledge we had at this time, we couldn't completely rule everyone out.
The anon became active again while we were discussing things. This time, OtakuTAS himself sent a screenshot coming from a text conversation he was having with the ex:
https://i.imgur.com/jLiWUso.jpg
This prompted the question of why Otaku was openly communicating with someone that he had warned us was stalking him. That question never got answered and never will.
The increasingly strange and creepy nature of the anon's comments here, combined with the ex's reaction, had us fairly convinced that the anon wasn't a staff member at all, though the possibility still remained. It could still have been someone outside the site with contact to a staff member who had email access, for example. Around this time, we started discussing the possibility that this could be faked:
I wasn't completely convinced that it could be faked since this is a lot of work to go through for reasons that I thought had been swiftly and neatly dealt with, but my mind started changing less than 10 minutes later:
This was the first real moment where we thought that there was an ulterior motive at play from Otaku. Given what happens later, the most plausible theory is that he took a shot in the dark to join staff and gather information to make his impersonation attempt look way more legitimate. Still, we ended up treating this as an incredible coincidence:
We got another discord screenshot from the ex:
https://i.imgur.com/NrnO4pp.jpg
This removed all suspicion from staff completely, because none of us would have had anything remotely close to a "long story" regarding a member who had joined the site in January. Still, it could have been an outside actor who knew a staff member, but even that seemed far more unlikely.
OtakuTAS was DMing adelikat throughout all of this:
Take note of adelikat saying "spike doesn't have access": The fact that it started at emails, which lower-level staff don't have access to, had already eliminated Spike as a suspect. Even on top of that, though, we had a lot of other reasons to not suspect Spike. On top of THAT, the rest of what Otaku was saying didn't exactly go over well with us:
Mentioned this in the ban announcement post, but to reiterate: There was quite a lot of beef between Otaku and Spike over this submission and the publication of the submission that it was meant to improve, among a few other things. Given that the beef was over ShesChardcore's run being published, the random inclusion of her as a suspect (and the later mention of the incident itself) made it feel so much more like Otaku was masterminding this whole thing as a way of punishing a couple people he felt wronged him.
As I said in the screenshots, I was actually surprised I wasn't mentioned given I was the one who actually made the decision to publish Chardcore's run in the first place, but I guess he was okay with me then since I'd tried helping him with a previous submission of his, or something. Pure speculation on my part.
All speculation aside, we finally got the evidence we needed in the next screenshot we were sent:
https://i.imgur.com/RaIdxM1.jpg
Now, I've been careful not to reveal how exactly how staff operates so there's less of a chance of someone successfully impersonating staff in the future, but for context I have to say one thing: "Screen share checks" are something we have never done and will never do. There's a followup screenshot that goes into detail about it, but it's such a bizarre concept that I didn't feel it necessary to include. Either way, bringing up something we don't do by itself would have been completely concrete proof that a staff member was not involved in this situation at all, but the most damning evidence is that the anon claimed to be Spike. I already mentioned that Spike was literally one of the first people we ruled out, so that reveal was the real smoking gun. Even if we hadn't ruled Spike out at that point, the anon's behavior and motivations didn't match Spike in any way, shape or form. Even if the acting was better, Spike was asleep the entire time the anon was active. Even if Spike was awake, they were openly in support of preventing the ex from contacting Otaku by opening up that Github issue. Even if that were a deflection, Spike had no way of accessing the ex's email address. Even if they tried asking someone with email access, that someone would have reported it to the seniors and we would have taken action long before any of this got out of hand.
The investigation was over at this point. We knew just from that last screenshot alone that it had to be either Otaku or the ex herself faking this. It wasn't anyone on staff, it wasn't anyone who was friendly with staff, it strictly had to be one or the other. Otaku, seemingly, attempted to deflect suspicion from himself in his conversation with adelikat, or at least that's how I choose to read it in hindsight. No screenshot for this one, only a partial text log, though I believe a screenshot can be provided if this isn't solid enough proof by itself:
OtakuTAS — Today at 8:11 PM
idk if im buying it
adelikat — Today at 8:11 PM
buying what?
OtakuTAS — Today at 8:12 PM
if that is who she is talking to
seems very obvious and he was quick to say so
adelikat — Today at 8:12 PM
so you don't think it was spike?
OtakuTAS — Today at 8:12 PM
i have no idea at this point
im running out of questions to feed them with
Conversation immediately following the above:
It didn't matter, though. We sorta stopped caring at this point after 3+ hours of worrying about staff conduct only to find out that the whole thing was 100% faked. Memory sent Otaku a PM essentially saying "Hey, we know this is fake. We don't know if it's you or your ex faking it, but we know for a fact it's fake. Do something like this again and you're gone." Otaku's response to this PM was to leave the site. Screenshot of a text log this time, it includes the last DMs Otaku had sent to adelikat prior to him claiming to leave so I've boxed the relevant section:
We decided not to do anything from here because we figured the situation was too insane for him to ever come back from. We weren't ever going to trust him again, so it would've been smart for him to never show his face around here. Unfortunately, that lack of trust should have applied to him leaving as well because he came back a few months later like nothing happened and immediately started pulling some more stupid crap with edit and post spamming, publicly campaigning for a site award, forcing his way into a ton of submissions, and finally all of the drama in this thread culminating in him pulling out years old posts from staff as an attempt to defame them to try and win an argument that he repeatedly claimed he didn't care about at all. That, combined with calling the community "hostile and cold" despite being the one actively starting drama with people, led me to believe that a permaban was necessary here, and it had to happen sooner rather than later.
Two final notes: One, "pulling out years old posts from staff" is his favorite move, apparently. You can see in this thread that he did it with EZGames, he recently tried it with me and feos on a now-deleted Github issue after the ban, and it is extremely likely he did it with Spikestuff as well prior to the impersonation effort, due to Spikestuff having apologized for using alt accounts in the past. As far as I'm concerned, this is the fifth or sixth final nail in the coffin. There's no plausible deniability here, everything he did at the time and everything he continues to do just incriminates him further.
Two, I personally believe the ex-girlfriend is a real person. There's no evidence suggesting otherwise, not even anything circumstantial. Whether or not she's actually a crazy stalker who was harassed and manipulated by Otaku into pulling off his defamation scheme or if her backstory was a lie and she was a willing accomplice from the start is up for debate, though I could see either option being true.
So, I have some final thoughts, and they're the most important part of this post.
I won't say I acted professionally in how I handled it, because I very clearly didn't. I apologize for my poor behavior. A lot of the problem there was in moderation and potential escalation: The knowledge of the impersonation was senior staff only for a while, and we only told the mods after the fact without even going too deep into it. General staff wasn't even aware of this until the ban took place (although they knew about Otaku's ex), and obviously none of this was public information until now. I made an admittedly rash and biased decision to ban first and explain later, given how much stress Otaku had put me and the rest of the senior staff under throughout this whole ordeal and feeling that the argument in that submission would have only gotten worse and worse with the way he was attacking both the staff and the community. That, combined with the fact that I was specifically approached to moderate the situation, made it feel far more like it was something that needed to be handled ASAP, especially given it wasn't the first time I had stepped in to moderate Otaku in that thread, let alone the several other times Otaku's behavior warranted moderation in the past.
I'll fully admit that I acted hostile and cold, here, without a single shred of snark or irony attached, but at the same time I'm absolutely not going to tolerate anyone saying that the rest of the community is the same way. I absolutely have my poor moments, that's something I've been working on for a while now and I'm not close to where I want to be yet, but I've seen nothing but warmth and respect from the rest of the community in all other cases. Someone like Otaku who comes in, wastes staff time and energy, starts drama, and then plays victim after all of that isn't allowed here. If that sounds too harsh... Well, there's a reason I don't usually like to moderate, and it's because I'm scary as hell when I feel like I need to.
Moderation's tricky sometimes, especially on TASVideos where we've had an extremely long history of lax moderation that only ended a couple years back, and clearly we're still not where we'd like ourselves to be. I believe Memory already stated this on Discord, but I highly recommend that people immediately contact the moderation team any time they see something that could escalate into a fight, especially if it's on the forums as those tend to flare up pretty harsh. I would also recommend not contacting the admins about moderation aspects in general, as that gives off the implication that something drastic is necessary. Of course, definitely contact the admins if something drastic IS in fact necessary. If you'd like to report something privately, you can group PM moderators and/or admins on site. We're discussing and will soon be implementing a way of doing that on Discord as well.
All that being said, I hope this didn't affect peoples' opinions of me too negatively. Let's just say that only someone like Otaku, some relative newcomer who spends most of his time making my life harder and refuses to take any accountability for it, can get that level of sudden, unprofessional reaction out of me these days. I'm open to talking things over with people and hashing things out. I'm a site admin, now, so the last thing I want is for people to be scared of me. I have valid reasons behind my behavior, but I'm not gonna use them to make excuses. I still need to try harder.
Hopefully this explains the situation and my logic behind the ban. For the record, staff are in full support of the ban itself, and it will not be reversed. We've also banned him on other platforms we have control over as he's already started retaliation efforts, and we're on the lookout for alt accounts given that he is clearly not above using them.
PM me on the site or ping me on Discord if you have any further questions. Aside from that, let's just try and move past this as soon as possible.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
I've been quietly watching this submission (and the previous cancelled one) so I'll add my thoughts.
Putting aside the issues related to the savestate usage and all of the fallout related to that, the main thing I've been focusing on is the level of optimization, which I don't quite thing is up to snuff. From what I've gathered both from this thread and from talking to nymx, the TAS was made using RTA controller input and moderate slowdown, and the TAS only took about an hour to make with a few sections that "could have been done better". While I will say that this is extremely impressive RTA work, it is still RTA work, and thus I hypothesize it's possible to save time all throughout the course of the run.
Link to videoUser movie #638288223576444179
I put this together while the first submission was still on the workbench and only just now got around to tightening it up a bit and uploading. It was done from power-on without reference to either submission, so all the tutorial messages are there and the routing could likely be improved, but in pure gameplay it's 3 seconds of IGT faster across the first three levels.
The thing is with TASing is that you have all the time in the world to make a TAS, and all the time in the world to perfect it. The thought of "I could've done this better" shouldn't be crossing your mind for something that, by your own admission, is not taking you very long to make at all. You can always just go back and do it better right then and there. While a TAS doesn't have to be strictly perfect, the idea is that someone shouldn't be able to come along and easily save time. You clearly know a lot about this game, likely much more so than anyone else on the site combined, so it seems reasonable to me that if you sat down for a couple days or even weeks and really polished up this run, it would be light years ahead of anything even the veterans here could produce.
I'll have to study the run in full to see whether or not my hypothesis is actually accurate, and in the meantime the staff can keep discussing the savestate usage and/or explore the given solution, just without the co-authorship demand. Hopefully this shouldn't take too long, though I will admit my focuses have been elsewhere lately, so I apologize if it does end up taking a bit more time.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
OtakuTAS wrote:
Not trying to be a dick but this is the most hostile and cold community I've ever been a part of.
Cool, thanks, much appreciated. Given you dug into a staff member's post history to call them out, I'll just go off of the assumption that your idea of not being hostile and cold is to do the same thing to you. Remember that time we published a run and you got pissy because you had an improvement on the workbench? Certainly that's not hostile or cold either. Follow-up question, do you remember when you tried to impersonate Spikestuff and harass your ex-girlfriend while claiming to be them? Remember when you didn't know how staff operated so you applied to be a Judge in the middle of harassing your ex so you could presumably "prove yourself" by posting staff chat to her?
This is all above board to talk about, right? Digging into old drama isn't "hostile or cold", right? I'm sure if you actually had access to private information you'd be using it on the same level I am, right? Because it's all kosher?
Cool, again. I knew you'd understand. Anyway, feel free to grift your way into another community while I spend the next day explaining to "the most hostile and cold community" why you are now permanently banned. I'm sure that'll warm us up considerably.
I'd give you my usual "goodnight, sweet prince" but for all I know you're just impersonating one.
Yes, I'm actually going to explain this in full, given the suddenness and severity of it. Give me some time, this all happened in staff channels and a lot of context needs to be explained.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
"Emulated well" doesn't mean "completely free of any and all emulation errors", it literally just means "emulated well enough to look like standard gameplay at a glance". Really, the rule is meant to prevent taking huge advantage of emulation inaccuracy more than anything. Something minor like this shouldn't be factored into judgement - Worst case scenario here is that Ruffle fixes it in a future version and a new, more accurate run would obsolete this one even if it's slower.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
EZ, though a tad bit too provoking for my liking, has a point here. Honestly, Otaku, if you're going to try and suggest sweeping changes to site policy regarding deprecation of emulators, the best thing you could do is actually give us proper evidence for why it should be done and not literally say things like "Hey guys, I've never used this emulator and I never will, and I don't care enough about it, but y'all should really implement some sort of precedent to remove it from the site entirely" while simultaneously keeping up long PM chains with site staff over it, wasting time that should be dedicated to the 73 runs on the workbench at the time of this post. You can also stop the condescending attitude, the double and triple posting in every single forum conversation you participate in, and the consistenteditspamming if you want to actually help out the site.
This warning should've come a lot earlier, to be honest.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
Full draft and discussion: Wiki: HomePages/Samsara/Drafts
If you'd like to weigh in on anything there and you're not an Editor, let me know and I can give you the role. This is a pure draft, anything on that page is subject to change and nothing there should be considered finalized or in-progress.
Current plans: Wiki: HomePages/Samsara/Proposals
Anything here is what I am actively planning on working on. As such, they should be prioritized in discussions as they will likely be finalized and acted upon within a week or two.
Note that as of making this post, it has been updated with a new set of current plans.
I'll be adding this info to the OP as well.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Boy howdy, I'm so much more glad we have a top-level page dedicated to three emulators we haven't thought about since the late 2000s, then.
I honestly forgot we had that Potential Emulators page. Thanks both for reminding me of it and giving everyone a valid, live reason for why this restructure project is necessary!
I've gone ahead and done the less intensive part of updating Wiki: ListOfIdeas, i.e adding everything but the contents of the wishlist threads. I'll deal with the subpages in the near future (which will probably just be a lot of deletion). The Bounties and SDARunsWithoutAPublishedTAS pages will be deleted soon.
At the moment, I'm cleaning up my full draft of the restructuring project. I'll post it when it's presentable, but in the meantime, Wiki: HomePages/Samsara/Proposals is still there holding what the next plans are.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
As part of the site's recent push to restructure the Hell out of this wiki, I moved the Bounties page onto a revamped version of Wiki: ListOfIdeas. Several of the bounties were removed in the transfer due to inactivity, though because this thread exists as an archive they can easily be added back should the creators return and express interest in keeping the bounties active.
That being said, I'd also like to suggest that, going forward, bounties be free of extraneous conditions. It's not something I can enforce unless TASVideos decides to officially endorse bounties (which will almost certainly never happen), but I think it's reasonable to not add subjective or outside criteria to your request that only makes it harder for the person trying to fulfill it to get paid. Imagine spending countless hours selflessly working on a run for someone else, only to be told at the end that they didn't find it quite entertaining enough to pay you. Please be kind to TASers.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
feos wrote:
OtherEmulators moved to EmulatorResources/Other
This might incentivize people to fill in potential emulators that we don't currently support.
I'm not quite convinced we need to have docs on emulators that have little to no chance (or reason) to be added proper TAS tools and site parser.
This would be specifically for emulators we may support in the future: PCSX2, Ryujinx, Yuzu, stuff that's still actively being worked on and either already have or could implement TAS tools. We don't need to keep the Nintendulator info at all, but I do think we should have a defined place for emulators we don't but could support.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
TASVideos will be celebrating its 20th birthday soon, and like most 20 year olds it has seen its fair share of weird oddities and changes over those two decades. Unlike a living 20 year old, however, those oddities haven't actually gone away in that time, and as a result we've sort of just kept a bunch of them archived on the site wiki ready to confuse anyone who looks at them. I'm proud to announce, admittedly far later than it should've been but still better than not at all, that we're working on changing that with a full wiki restructure project! Old information will be updated, misplaced information will be moved to the correct places, weird old pages with nothing on them will be removed, and by the end of this hopefully the wiki will be less confusing and contradictory towards itself!
Progress and discussion will mostly be happening in this thread, and everyone is encouraged to take a poke around the wiki and offer feedback on what changes should be made to provide a more accessible and easily understood site wiki. Feel free to bring up anything that stands out to you as strange or out-of-place: Chances are, it actually is strange or out of place, and those are precisely the things we want to fix most.
Please note that this process will break offsite links to TASVideos if they link to any page that gets moved, renamed, or deleted, so be careful about linking to specific TASVideos pages offsite until the end of the restructuring is announced. We are accounting for and correcting onsite links and referrals as they come up during the restructuring process, so no need to worry there. Hopefully this won't happen too often, and it shouldn't be happening at all on the high traffic pages. There isn't much that can be done to prevent this at the moment, but if you're a developer and you're interested in helping us mitigate the damage, there is currently an open pull request for a redirect system that could use a lot more attention, even if it's just something like "hey this ain't it chief, let's draft a better one". Help is always appreciated, especially help that comes in the form of giving us very shiny and very useful things we can use to make the site better!
Once we have a more concrete draft of the exact changes we want to make, it will be posted for everyone to see and discuss. I'm expecting this entire process to take a good couple months to allow for proper discussion time, further revision, preparation, and finally implementation. Some minor changes have already been made, mainly page deletions of pages that nobody even knew existed, and more of these minor changes will continue to happen in the background while bigger changes are being drafted and discussed.
All in all, here's to things not going terribly wrong! Even if they do, those results are probably still better than having a donation page that only read "We are not accepting donations" for 11 straight years and only realizing just now in 2023 that there's no reason to keep it around.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
Experienced Forum User, Published Author, Senior Judge, Site Admin, Expert player
(2121)
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2793
Location: Northern California
I've got a huge refactor draft in progress that I'll open up to more public discussion once I get more of it worked out, but I made a separate page for some restructuring I'd like to do sooner rather than later.
This is all the stuff I'd like to start doing tonight. If anyone has any objections to these changes being made, you have about two hours from the time of this post to make your case before I start working.
EDIT: Aw hell, it's started. I'll finish the rest of the stuff on the Proposals page tomorrow and post my draft as well once I clean it up a bit.
TASvideos Admin and acting Senior Judge 💙 | CohostwarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
In regards to a full list of every account who can view user emails:
Note the usages of "a lot" and not "all": With the knowledge we had at this time, we couldn't completely rule everyone out.
The anon became active again while we were discussing things. This time, OtakuTAS himself sent a screenshot coming from a text conversation he was having with the ex:
https://i.imgur.com/jLiWUso.jpg
This prompted the question of why Otaku was openly communicating with someone that he had warned us was stalking him. That question never got answered and never will.
The increasingly strange and creepy nature of the anon's comments here, combined with the ex's reaction, had us fairly convinced that the anon wasn't a staff member at all, though the possibility still remained. It could still have been someone outside the site with contact to a staff member who had email access, for example. Around this time, we started discussing the possibility that this could be faked:
I wasn't completely convinced that it could be faked since this is a lot of work to go through for reasons that I thought had been swiftly and neatly dealt with, but my mind started changing less than 10 minutes later:
This was the first real moment where we thought that there was an ulterior motive at play from Otaku. Given what happens later, the most plausible theory is that he took a shot in the dark to join staff and gather information to make his impersonation attempt look way more legitimate. Still, we ended up treating this as an incredible coincidence:
We got another discord screenshot from the ex:
https://i.imgur.com/NrnO4pp.jpg
This removed all suspicion from staff completely, because none of us would have had anything remotely close to a "long story" regarding a member who had joined the site in January. Still, it could have been an outside actor who knew a staff member, but even that seemed far more unlikely.
OtakuTAS was DMing adelikat throughout all of this:
Take note of adelikat saying "spike doesn't have access": The fact that it started at emails, which lower-level staff don't have access to, had already eliminated Spike as a suspect. Even on top of that, though, we had a lot of other reasons to not suspect Spike. On top of THAT, the rest of what Otaku was saying didn't exactly go over well with us:
Mentioned this in the ban announcement post, but to reiterate: There was quite a lot of beef between Otaku and Spike over this submission and the publication of the submission that it was meant to improve, among a few other things. Given that the beef was over ShesChardcore's run being published, the random inclusion of her as a suspect (and the later mention of the incident itself) made it feel so much more like Otaku was masterminding this whole thing as a way of punishing a couple people he felt wronged him.
As I said in the screenshots, I was actually surprised I wasn't mentioned given I was the one who actually made the decision to publish Chardcore's run in the first place, but I guess he was okay with me then since I'd tried helping him with a previous submission of his, or something. Pure speculation on my part.
All speculation aside, we finally got the evidence we needed in the next screenshot we were sent:
https://i.imgur.com/RaIdxM1.jpg
Now, I've been careful not to reveal how exactly how staff operates so there's less of a chance of someone successfully impersonating staff in the future, but for context I have to say one thing: "Screen share checks" are something we have never done and will never do. There's a followup screenshot that goes into detail about it, but it's such a bizarre concept that I didn't feel it necessary to include. Either way, bringing up something we don't do by itself would have been completely concrete proof that a staff member was not involved in this situation at all, but the most damning evidence is that the anon claimed to be Spike. I already mentioned that Spike was literally one of the first people we ruled out, so that reveal was the real smoking gun. Even if we hadn't ruled Spike out at that point, the anon's behavior and motivations didn't match Spike in any way, shape or form. Even if the acting was better, Spike was asleep the entire time the anon was active. Even if Spike was awake, they were openly in support of preventing the ex from contacting Otaku by opening up that Github issue. Even if that were a deflection, Spike had no way of accessing the ex's email address. Even if they tried asking someone with email access, that someone would have reported it to the seniors and we would have taken action long before any of this got out of hand.
The investigation was over at this point. We knew just from that last screenshot alone that it had to be either Otaku or the ex herself faking this. It wasn't anyone on staff, it wasn't anyone who was friendly with staff, it strictly had to be one or the other. Otaku, seemingly, attempted to deflect suspicion from himself in his conversation with adelikat, or at least that's how I choose to read it in hindsight. No screenshot for this one, only a partial text log, though I believe a screenshot can be provided if this isn't solid enough proof by itself:
It didn't matter, though. We sorta stopped caring at this point after 3+ hours of worrying about staff conduct only to find out that the whole thing was 100% faked. Memory sent Otaku a PM essentially saying "Hey, we know this is fake. We don't know if it's you or your ex faking it, but we know for a fact it's fake. Do something like this again and you're gone." Otaku's response to this PM was to leave the site. Screenshot of a text log this time, it includes the last DMs Otaku had sent to adelikat prior to him claiming to leave so I've boxed the relevant section:
We decided not to do anything from here because we figured the situation was too insane for him to ever come back from. We weren't ever going to trust him again, so it would've been smart for him to never show his face around here. Unfortunately, that lack of trust should have applied to him leaving as well because he came back a few months later like nothing happened and immediately started pulling some more stupid crap with edit and post spamming, publicly campaigning for a site award, forcing his way into a ton of submissions, and finally all of the drama in this thread culminating in him pulling out years old posts from staff as an attempt to defame them to try and win an argument that he repeatedly claimed he didn't care about at all. That, combined with calling the community "hostile and cold" despite being the one actively starting drama with people, led me to believe that a permaban was necessary here, and it had to happen sooner rather than later.
Two final notes: One, "pulling out years old posts from staff" is his favorite move, apparently. You can see in this thread that he did it with EZGames, he recently tried it with me and feos on a now-deleted Github issue after the ban, and it is extremely likely he did it with Spikestuff as well prior to the impersonation effort, due to Spikestuff having apologized for using alt accounts in the past. As far as I'm concerned, this is the fifth or sixth final nail in the coffin. There's no plausible deniability here, everything he did at the time and everything he continues to do just incriminates him further.
Two, I personally believe the ex-girlfriend is a real person. There's no evidence suggesting otherwise, not even anything circumstantial. Whether or not she's actually a crazy stalker who was harassed and manipulated by Otaku into pulling off his defamation scheme or if her backstory was a lie and she was a willing accomplice from the start is up for debate, though I could see either option being true.
