Hi, it's Memory here, one of the three admins of TASVideos. Since joining administration 3 years ago, a lot about TASVideos has changed. We made many rule changes, starting accepting a lot more platforms, and received a massive influx of submissions and publications. Yet, we never really gave a new formal sort of mission statement or anything. I would like to change that.
Our mission is to provide access to and information about TASes and to provide assistance to TASers.
We have no intentions of acting as an authority on TASing. Acting as an authority in the past led us to becoming arrogant and receiving resentment from a lot of TASers. Despite what we thought, we never could control what people TASed. Instead what we did was drive TASers away from us.
Even before I became admin, attitudes were beginning to change. We questioned our rules. Now we're changing them to better serve the community. We are human though so there will be remnants of old attitudes in various pages that we forgot to update, but if you find them and bring them up to us, we can change them.
Now the general attitude is that if you're acting in good faith, we want to see you and your TASes here.
We still have our limitations, but those have become far more flexible. If anything, the biggest limiting factor is on the technical side. Site development is largely handled by a small number of people, so any help there would be largely appreciated. You can contribute to the site code on github.
I would like to openly apologize to any TASers or TASing communities we have ostracized in the past. We at TASVideos want to be better. We can talk if there's any questions or concerns.
The one big thing that is remaining the same and shall always be the same is that we want to emphasize collaboration over competition. We believe in open source principles. We want tases to be accessible to improvement. How the TASes are made and the tricks and glitches used should be public knowledge.
Thank you for reading all this. If people have any concerns or questions, feel free to ask.
EDIT: I really hoped I didn't need to state this, but we still will be banning people if they misbehave. This is not a thread for venting about moderation.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
I agree that the tricks, glitches, strategies and how TASes are made should be public. I do wish more people were still able to submit runs here, like Logan. He submitted runs of games I had never heard of, many of which were published, allowing people to experience games they likely didn't know existed. I'm glad this community is changing for the better, and I hope to help out however I can.
DJ Incendration
Believe in Michael Girard and every speedrunner and TASer!
Note this is not about users who were banned for behavioral problems. Moderation does what moderation must.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Split away derail caused by a known troll. Again, this is for TASers that want to act in good faith.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
I have disagreements towards the savefile and verification movie issues, but in general i also agree the site moved forwards in general, so congrats all staff and judges for that!
There are a handful of games whose speedrun communities use premade savefiles for competing such as:
shadow the hedgehog, mario kart double dash, fzero GX and those verificatino movies would be quite long, i hope someday you can find a solution you guys can live with for these cases that isn't 4 hours or more verification movies.
I have considered collaborating with tasvideos staff helping with some staff activities but i don't feel like i would be able to abide by to your communication standards, as i'm considered too harsh and impolite, so i prefer just sending TAS movies, which is what i really want from the site after all.
I want all good TAS inside TASvideos, it's my motto.
TAS i'm interested:
Megaman series, specially the RPGs! Where is the mmbn1 all chips TAS we deserve? Where is the Command Mission TAS?
i'm slowly moving away from TASing fighting games for speed, maybe it's time to start finding some entertainment value in TASing.
Question 1:
- Quote from this news:
"Instead what we did was drive TASers away from us."
How many years did it took to realize this?
Question 2:
- Quote from TheAnonymousReaper (ALREADY BANNED)
"Whenever things don’t go their way they just ban you. Some bans are justified yes, but they tend to also ban you when things don’t go their way. In fact trying to have a civil discussion with them sometimes just turns into a chaotic mess."
I can only laugh that you banned the user after spitting facts. Question, care to elaborate the ban reason? You permanently banned him because he did something bad to another TASer and now it's over? Would really love to see any high ranking staff member finding themselves in the same situation.
edit: And I don't even start discussing about how pathetic is to 100% disrupt all communication with no chance to parole because the ban hammer fell on. And getting the one sided discussion email about why it's extremely normal to ban someone who doesn't have the same mental illness / f-cked up world view as the staff member.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6583
Location: The land down under.
MESHUGGAH wrote:
I can only laugh that you banned the user after spitting facts.
I'm personally going to ignore the nonsense you wrote to point out that you're agreeing to OtakuTAS.
A user who didn't know how to make a lick of any information at all in any of their statements, and created false narratives, never had any "fact".
A user who decided to create bullshit in areas they've never been apart of, or doesn't know what happened to certain things, cause they never saw certain things.
They were banned justifiably once for impersonation, dedicated to die on their own hill several times afterwards with transphobia in the background you're not aware of.
And well attempted to do another hit piece that was full of drivel that I did have a response back about, but was deleted cause it wasn't really necessary to give them a moment to breathe.
Why would you decide to side with a known con-artist?
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Strong for yourself and also others.
Quote from OtakuTAS
"During the irc days for example Samsara, Spikestuff, and Masterjun used to bully other users.
A somewhat more recent incident is that spikestuff purposefully made a low quality encode of one of Happylee’s tases. Speaking of spikestuff they got booted from staff not even a year ago. They tormented users for many years and only now they got booted.
Did you know samsara got banned once for her nasty attitude towards a staff member. I’m pretty sure I saw the post where that happened. Don’t be fooled by the fact that she’s a site admin, she hasn’t really changed because last I saw her, she banned a user for criticizing the staff, and not for that users actual offensives. In fact she used that to try and justify the ban and she even mocked him as she did it and said “goodnight my sweet prince”
Memory, while I can’t think of any specific examples is from what I’ve heard also a piece of work.
Whenever things don’t go their way they just ban you. Some bans are justified yes, but they tend to also ban you when things don’t go their way. In fact trying to have a civil discussion with them sometimes just turns into a chaotic mess."
I have Memory example as in my case and I'm pretty sure the Spikestuff incident happened as I voted for "no punishment, make him apologize, continue working".
Looking for proofs about how these are not facts (The only case I didn't know is Masterjun bullying).
edit: I rather believe this guy than any of the staff members except feos and Masterjun and adelikat.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6583
Location: The land down under.
MESHUGGAH wrote:
I rather believe this guy than any of the staff members except feos and Masterjun and adelikat.
Good thing I'm not apart of Staff.
So. Again. Answer the question
Why would you decide to side with a known con-artist?
By the way. You cannot spin this back on me. Considering the history you have is worse than mine.
Cause after all I did respond. But the response wasn't really necessary to keep for someone like them.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Strong for yourself and also others.
Because his post writes down experiences I've also had in this community and because he got banned after writing this on a news article about the staff apologizing.
I wouldn't be surprised if the staff is already filled with the same power abuser members I had to communicate with because whatever I wrote was transphobic if it ruins their fantasy world. You can go and check those posts of where I got banned.
The fact that I have to spell these speaks volumes of the state of this community.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Please don't disappoint me like that.
Every moderator action (during the past few years at least) is made upon full consensus of moderators and admins. Before banning we also warn and ask to stop the specific thing that is harmful.
Warning: When making decisions, I try to collect as much data as possible before actually deciding. I try to abstract away and see the principles behind real world events and people's opinions. I try to generalize them and turn into something clear and reusable. I hate depending on unpredictable and having to make lottery guesses. Any problem can be solved by systems thinking and acting.
I need to step in here and say I've always been faithful in what TASVideos has been trying to accomplish (within reason) in the past year: reach out to players and users, encourage them to pick up a hobby of making tool-assisted speedruns of games, and showcase their efforts to the world. And throughout the process, you have lifted restrictions and rejections, and you've helped open up to showcases of games that were once deemed unacceptable; and I praise you for it. Do keep at it with the hard work you (still) put into the site.
At the same time though, I agree that TASVideos still could use some helping out, mainly with the fact that more staff members would be appreciated to help speed up the workflow. Myself, I believe that technical information about games and tricks could be filled out; and more players could be invited here to tackle some existing movies, try to beat them.
I absolutely agree with the golden rule being presented here, which is keeping a calm attitude and not being disruptive while showcasing your work. We want to help each other out, help them overcome their difficulties, and communicate; cooperate. We need to be willing to let them help as well without entirely taking over the project.
Of course, it's not possible for everyone to make it through with behavioral issues. At least once, we've all had our moments where we misbehaved, accident or not; there were several over the years that have had malicious intentions, whether it's through submissions or through forum posts (including, coincidentally, TheAnonymousReaper). Understandably though, it's often their problem and not ours for when they're acting up.
However, I do not have any complaints about moderation; it's fair and just, and I know it will always stay this way: fair for the user, and fair for the staff (obviously as long as it has nothing to do with anything offensive or overly threatening).
Not an expert take; just my personal opinions weighing in on the matter.
Parts of the world (not counting TASVideos, thankfully) are being constantly endangered as we speak. Take care of yourself and everyone else out there, will ya?
Still very busy, so I apologize if there's any lack of activity.
Yeah ok so the intention of this thread was to address those pushed away by entertainment standards and various other barriers that kept runs from getting published. They were rightfully pissed off at us. This isn't supposed to be the "I was banned therefore moderation sucks" thread.
I appreciate the support I did get here though, was very demotivating to have the thread hijacked when I was occupied by thanksgiving yesterday and work today.
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Communication in this community is broken. I asked two questions and first I got "By the way. You cannot spin this back on me. Considering the history you have is worse than mine.".
"was very demotivating to have the thread hijacked when I was occupied" yeah know that feeling, only difference is I got banned and not just reading a comment from a previously banned TASer on the article about staff made bans. It's 100% clear to me now that the staff thinks my case was absolutely justified, making me lose the faith in this community.
I don't have anything to comment, keep on doing what you want.
PhD in TASing 🎓 speedrun enthusiast ❤🚷🔥 white hat hacker ▓ black box tester ░ censorships and rules...
Joined: 10/12/2011
Posts: 6583
Location: The land down under.
Memory wrote:
We at TASVideos want to be better. We can talk if there's any questions or concerns.
Something that I want to bring up, at least I believe it's in the meaning of the thread, so I apologize if this is a bit of a derailment, but it's something that's been biting me.
15 years ago, you can say this ban was justified around that time due to impersonation in the IRC chats.
But ~13 years after it well around that time I brought up seeing if this user could be reinstated, and I brought it up to Memory and Samsara.
This was something that was worth trying, like we got Samsara back, so this user, after so much time sounds like a good idea to return.
After all she is the co-founder of tcrf. xkeeper, or X.
Unfortunately, around that time her former roommates decided to drag her online about it.
Unfortunately, X didn't have a response at that time, so it was their word against her nothing.
Unfortunately, that book that I reopened ended up being shut right in front of my face.
She did end up eventually responding with evidence, and I just wished that I could just in good faith, before I left Publishing (let's be fair, you can't stop this old cat from having fun encoding) to actually try this request again.
I just froze. There's many things in the lead up to my end of Staff that I wished I brought up, but with this thread, this is something I want to bring forward.
I don't know why I never brought this back up afterwards, nor why I didn't try to fight for this, after all I did fight for a lot of things in the background and one was for the return of Samsara but that was with help.
How I talked about something, how I argued. Both good and bad, but this would've been a real good decision if I just didn't freeze up, cause I just didn't know how to present this forward-- ever.
I feel like, considering how much time has passed, how much this person has changed, I believe xkeeper should be reinstated.
Even if they don't use this site anymore, I believe that they could still be a big hand if they notice, or something.
She means something to a community that she made, and I honestly feel like this is something that should be mended.
Even if she has comments that criticize the site afterwards, I criticize the site on certain points, so please don't use that as something against her.
Again, I feel like this is something that can be mended.
I just don't know how to go about this anymore.
WebNations/Sabih wrote:
+fsvgm777 never censoring anything.
Disables Comments and Ratings for the YouTube account.Strong for yourself and also others.
It's 100% clear to me now that the staff thinks my case was absolutely justified, making me lose the faith in this community.
You broke site rules on hate-speech, then got banned for refusing to co-operate with anyone, then you started to make this thread about yourself.
What, pray tell, do you expect us to do about it?
I agree with Spikestuff about Xkeeper. I don't know as much about her, but I have been subscribed to her on YouTube for years, and she is constantly researching and sharing game info for people to read and benefit from. This aligns with her extensive TASVideos post history, which even in some of her final few posts, added useful info to topics.
As an older user of the site, I remember seeing her posts scattered in threads, usually a page below the current one. Her ban was the first high-profile one I can remember, and the question of whether it's still warranted has surfaced in my mind every couple years. Much has changed in 13 years; what she took issue with, like certain traits of admin behavior, are no longer present on the site, and we are more inclusive as a whole. It may be time to offer her another chance.
On topic, the site's entertainment changes have only made it easier to feel like starting a TAS, first with Vault and now with even more allowed games and categories. I no longer have to restrict myself to any%, or a full completion that may take hours, thanks to several always-acceptable Standard goals like NG+ and glitchless, let alone the freedom of Alternative publications. Perfect optimization is not expected now, so a racing game TAS for example isn't impossible to want to start without committing years to squeezing every last frame out of every turn. This is reflected in the several first publications of racing games this year alone. The definition of a game breaks down even more barriers to entry. It has never been easier to want to TAS on this site. I thank everyone involved in these changes, and hope to see those affected by the previous mindset return and enjoy themselves here. (Hi Flygon!)
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1773
Location: Australia, Victoria
The site and community has become totally alien to me, compared to from the time I left it.
That is a good thing.
A lot of things happened, and I remembered a lot of things when I became aware of this post, and a lot of hurt, and tiredness. I'm glad literally none of that matters now. For my sake, and the sake of the site.
This is good news, and I am glad for it. There's an incredible new community of people that weren't even around for a lot of these scarring events, and I'm glad you've all built something a lot better.
And for a lot of us that are now old, we have matured and become better people. Or so I do hope.
I did consider not writing this post, but I had these thoughts in the moment, and they won't reappear later.
I don't have anything to comment, keep on doing what you want.
(I write this as an individual TASer/user, not as staff member)
As a fan of your TASing work, I wished we could all bury the hatchet and let bygones be bygones.
Many of the bad actors and attitudes of the past are now long gone, and people around here is now overall is wiser and more tolerant nowadays. This very thread is a sign of that: a call to reconcilliation to those who were or felt wronged by site members or policies in the past.
I do understand your frustration and, as a fellow hard-headed passionate guy, at some point I've shared it. But let me tell you, things are much better now if you are willing to give the community (and yourself as a member of it) a new chance.
It's never too late to say "ok, whatever, tabula rasa, let's move on". It doesn't take an apology nor does it require taking back the opinions you already given. It's just a matter of letting the things that happened before be forgotten at last.
I am personally hopeful to keep seeing you work pop up in the site and not let past grievances push you away again from the community.
One thing that I am honored to have done as a staff member was to have a hand in resolving long held issues with the Super Mario 64 TASing community and TASVideos.
Just to provide some context: at the start of 2017, Mupen-rr was Deprecated and this site would no longer accept m64 submissions. There was a couple reasons for this at the time.
One was due to the trouble with publishers having good avi dumping tools, which is the method we use to encode runs by capturing video and audio into an .avi video format. From what I understand (and I could be wrong about this), the internal avi dumper in Mupen either didn't exist or was too broken to be usable (audio especially was busted since it would either not sync with video or have audio pops all over the place). The only alternative at the time was using an external video capture software called kkapure, which I can tell you from experience did not like Mupen-rr very much (It worked much better with emulators like PCSX). So not only was there only a handful of Publishers who were willing to work with this process, but it would also be a major time consumption for them as well.
The other reason was that the BizHawk N64 core was starting to become much more reliable although still not perfect. The mindset of the site at the time was to eventually move people to Bizhawk for more unified tools as well as the understanding that it would be more "accurate" due to using newer emulation that was supposedly regularly updated (tho it ended up stuck in 2013).
It is my opinion that the way this announcement was done was, to put it lightly, ill-advised. For one thing, it was very dismissive to possible concerns the SM64 community would have with this announcement, particularly this part:
In any case, we do have a newer emulator with more accurate emulation and sane rerecording tools - BizHawk. It may be lacking certain features you want, if so, ask their developers to add them. You may be unused to its interface - get used to it. BizHawk also offers some tools that did not exist in Mupen64-rr which you might end up liking.
This is dismissive because it expects the community, who have built the extensive and robust tools that have made TASing SM64 very intricate and informative, to suddenly be able to port EVERYTHING to work in Bizhawk. It's understandable that the community would be upset by this comment considering how long the community has used Mupen and centered their tools around it (plus as I understand, emulation of Super Mario 64 in Mupen was considered close to accurate, just that other games had problems), but also because there was no guarantee that the tools could be ported at all, let alone work the same way. There was no reality where they could "get used to it".
Before I mention my involvement, I have to acknowledge a former staff member in 2020 who decided to troll the SM64 TASing community in a way that not only was unbecoming of what we expect from staff today, but further soured relations with both communities. I won't go into specifics about what happened but I’ll simply say that it made the rest of the site look bad.
Anyways, after I became part of staff, I wanted to understand what the community’s desires were when it came to continuing to use Mupen-rr, especially in the aftermath of what I mentioned above. After having some long conversations with those in the community, what I learned was that there was active development on improving the stability of Mupen-rr (which they called “New Mupen”) so it not only didn't crash easily, but also to address some serious security concerns in older versions of Mupen. I eventually asked these devs about encoding support and if those tools could be improved at all. With the help of the New Mupen devs and our own emulator devs like CasualPokePlayer, we were able to get it to a state where both our publishers as well as the SM64 community was satisfied with the state of the emulator. As of March 2022, Mupen-rr is now acceptable on the site for submission.
There's still some work to do. As mentioned in Memory’s post, there's a lot of un-updated language in some pages on the site that act as if Mupen is still deprecated or something along those lines. kierio04 is active in the SM64 community and is now an Ambassador to our site, and I’m hoping his connections will allow us to be aware of anything the community wants clarification on so that we can correct past mistakes made over the years.
[14:15] <feos> WinDOES what DOSn't
12:33:44 PM <Mothrayas> "I got an oof with my game!"
Mothrayas Today at 12:22: <Colin> thank you for supporting noble causes such as my feet
MemoryTAS Today at 11:55 AM: you wouldn't know beauty if it slapped you in the face with a giant fish
[Today at 4:51 PM] Mothrayas: although if you like your own tweets that's the online equivalent of sniffing your own farts and probably tells a lot about you as a person
MemoryTAS Today at 7:01 PM: But I exert big staff energy honestly lol
Samsara Today at 1:20 PM: wouldn't ACE in a real life TAS just stand for Actually Cease Existing
