djpretzel
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Posts posted by djpretzel
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Thanks everyone for your bug reports & feedback!!
Initial results, while promising, do clearly indicate that there's still some major work to be done. It is with a heavy heart and eyes toward the future that I reluctantly announce the retirement of JUDGANATOR and the immediate reinstatement of the judges panel.
The judges have been... uncanned...
I suppose this makes them uncanny, not unlike the X-Men...
HUGE thanks to JUDGANATOR lead developer & cool guy Wesley Cho, who made this brief foray into automated music critiquing possible!!
We'll be working on JUDGANATOR 2.0 for some future year, and will put the existing beta somewhere you can play with it in the meantime.
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I found a random bug, I'm not sure if it's at all related to the changes.
When I click on any game, select a song, then click back on the game name, (not the orange hyperlink, but the one below it) I get the following error:
"http://ocremix.org:59383
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/ocremix/public_html/includes/config.php:101) in /home/ocremix/public_html/redirect.php on line 36"
Here's a screen shot.
I've tried 4 or 5 different games and songs, same result.
Another excellent & detailed bug report - love you guys!
Should be fixed!
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The answer is obviously a scrolling marquee. Remember those?
But yeah I mean Sir_NutS's mix has origins from like 2007 and it feels like it didn't get much love.. sure it got a facebook and twitter post, and a write-up and all that stuff. I honestly don't know what the answer is to improve visibility or anything.
We do have some ideas to increase exposure for recently posted mixes; we'll be doing SOMETHING with the next minor site update that should help. As Andy says, though, from time to time we like to highlight something different, and "Bubble Dragon" was certainly that. We feel it is to everyone's advantage that we have a certain degree of flexibility and freedom to promote things outside of regular processes.
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Would be great if there was a level of anonymity when songs were posted. Or even if that was a search option for displaying songs. That way listeners just listen to the song for what it is, and not for who wrote it.
I think the real celebrities, from a visitor filtering perspective, are the games
I think far more users ignore anything that isn't Chrono Trigger than anything that isn't zircon, for example. Even though I love me some zircon.
Having a dedicated page that offers randomized tracks, and options to NOT show artist OR game might be kinda cool... but we are getting a little outside the original scope, which was just the functionality/integration being added to the workshop, specifically.
To answer Ab's question, my intent with this discussion is to gather both ideas and concerns and help crystallize what I think the best & most pragmatic initial plan for this should be. Step two would be putting together something more concrete, based on actual technical capabilities TBD, and then letting folks poke holes at it - with the understanding that the INITIAL version of this won't be perfect, and that some things will have to be deferred.
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Here's an example of what I mean from 7:12 pm ET today:
Example A:
Example B:
It looks like it's displaying some of the threads and timestamps correctly, but not all of them. Odd.
Thank you for the very thorough bug report WITH screenshots
Problem should be fixed!
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The right answer is "too long". XD
It definitely is.
We've discussed this a bit internally today and have some ideas. I do want to mention a couple things:
- We keep posting more mixes each year than the previous, so at least we're moving in the right direction in that regard.
- We need to do more themed floods.
- Larry is going to get some help tagging mixes to be posted, as that tends to lag behind and probably has a trickle-down effect.
- We're going to handle DPs a bit differently for more internal transparency which should give me more to work with on writeups.
- We need to get over some humps before we can really dig in. Specifically, we need to close out the FF6 kickstarter once and for all. We also need to make some minor modernizations to the site.
- We keep posting more mixes each year than the previous, so at least we're moving in the right direction in that regard.
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The thread replies on the remix page, show empty avatar boxes for me (I haven't got one), and djp (maybe because it's a custom avatar?) http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02855
Firefox 26.0 on Xubuntu 13.04.
--Eino
Known issue. Yeah, custom avatar not working... I can probably fix that, but we ARE going to move to a new forum and it's likely we'll be doing profile photos instead of avatars, so it's not super-duper high-priority.
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Forums use MyISAM so they were spared the outage.
Site uses InnoDB. Currently having an issue w/ InnoDB, although the main engine is back online. Nobuo Uematsu is still broken.
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Finally! Thank you thank you thank you thank you. And also now the page for Square indeed lists FF7 (formally published by Sony), and…
Oh noes. I just found what can arguably be called a showstopper: the artist page for Uematsu-san (at http://ocremix.org/artist/3/nobuo-uematsu ) reads: "Fatal error: Call to a member function fetch_array() on a non-object in /home/ocremix/public_html/includes/php/classes/lists/GameList.php on line 146"; this is the entirety of the page (Mac OS X 10.7.5, Safari and Firefox).
Confirmed. Not actually an issue with the code, per se - not happening on other artist pages, just Nobuo, because his queries generate the largest tmp tables on the MySQL side. Looking into it, obviously need to fix ASAP.
Album covers for ReMixes that are part of albums don't seem to be showing up anymore. For example, "The Impresario" no longer has the balance and ruin cover art.Checked in Safari and Firefox, OS X 10.9.2.
Should be fixed, thanks for mentioning!
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Why are we rating music that's unfinished?
"We" aren't doing anything other than talking, at the moment
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Pushed out some minor site changes tonight; please report any issues!
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Use of font awesome for icons
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New photo-based icons for game systems e.g.
(still missing a few)
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Slightly redder color for orange link text
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Addressed URL trailing slash inconsistencies described at http://ocremix.org/forums/showthread.php?t=46272 - ReMix links now default to no trailing slash, and will redirect to remove it if present
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(up to) 20 mixes listed on homepage, artist pages, system pages, org pages, etc. (increased from 10)
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Reformatted embedded forum comments on mix pages, album pages to more clearly separate user name, include user avatar, and also process more BBCODE tags (e.g. http://ocremix.org/remix/OCR02833 - see comments)
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Process game developer associations for organizations (previously just publisher) - this field still needs to be added to game detail pages, but we now have developer associations in place. This means that for a game like Mega Man 6, which has a US publisher of "Nintendo", it'll ALSO show up (as will mixes assigned to it) under the much more intuitive developer - Capcom. Another good example of this in action is the page for Rare, which now lists mixes for all the games published by Nintendo but developed by Rare.
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Announcement threads (like this one) on homepage now link to THREAD, not latest reply.
There are a couple geekier under-the-hood changes, but that SHOULD be all of the meaningful forward-facing modifications. So, nothing major, but some hopefully some nice stuff that makes people happy. Should be the tip of the iceberg as we role out more incremental changes. V6 of the site is still on the agenda for 2014, but it's just going to be much easier to roll certain things out one-by-one and make sure they are thoroughly tested.
Feedback welcome, and also any reports of issues/problems! If you're reporting a problem, the more info you can provide - timestamp, browser type/ver, OS, screenshot, etc. - the better!
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Use of font awesome for icons
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In contrast, another rating might be "how much did you enjoy this product?" I can find a technically low quality product very enjoyable (e.g. the Snakes on a Plane movie) or a technically high quality product unenjoyable (e.g. Transformers 2). This is a purely preference-driven rating, but also worth knowing. Multiple rating systems may be in order. Just figure out what should and shouldn't be mandatory, because people like me who know nothing about music may want to avoid evaluating on the technical stuff.
I hear what you're saying, BUT... this is where ideals tend to collide with human psychology. It's often tough enough just to GET ratings/feedback at all, and while I hate to sound pessimistic about human nature here, generally speaking the more involved you make a feedback process, the less likely folks are to participate in it.
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All I ever wanted, all I ever needed is here, in your code-typing arms: an EXP and leveling up system within the OCR site. You gain EXP for posting, maybe a little more for posting WIPs, for reviewing posted mixes, maybe a whole bunch of other things you can do to get EXP.
And when you level up, you get some neat perk. Like you can change the color of your name or something. I dunno I haven't thought of the perks I just like to grind
Maybe a bunch of quirky achievements too
Ultimately, while fun, stuff like this is lower priority than simply getting a functional & improved system in place. Once we get our shit in order and the dust settles, I'm not opposed to adding some incentives & achievements/reputation systems that track different activities, but it needs to be secondary to getting the basics working, and working well.
Maybe the forum for posting finished remixes and posting WIPs should be separated into 2 separate subforums, one with rating, and one without.
We want to keep things as simple as possible, for artists AND visitors; I'd prefer to handle this in a single, filterable interface, but we'll see.
D'oh, that was my bad reading.'Certified' is probably too close to 'Official', I'd guess. 'Showcased'?
You could always use DJP'd. Then the judges really would djp.
"Showcased" isn't bad.
One OTHER idea we had was to refer to approved mixes as "OC ReMixes" and everything else as "Workshop Mixes" but we felt that could get confusing, too.
Just had some thoughts on how compos could be integrated into this system.In general, there should be a system for tagging mixes with various attributes, but with compos, you could do it like this:
Participants upload their entries but mark them as private, and PM the compo organizer with the link. The organizer would have the ability to un-hide the mixes and flag them with the compo name, round, bracket, season, etc.
Another use of tags would be that producers of official albums could tag remixes as belonging to an album. Or this privilege could be reserved for the OCR team and applied only when an album is released.
Speaking of albums and compos, another consideration is versioning. Sometimes the album version or compo version of a mix aren't the ones that get posted. Having multiple versions is handy to see the progress of WIPs, too. This could be as complex as a full VCS-like system, or as simple as a tag saying "Other versions of this remix: A B C"
At least initially, we want to keep things as simple as we possibly can while people just learn the new system and transition from the status quo. Eventually, I agree the benefit to compos & projects should be considerable, ALTHOUGH, other improvements at the forum level might actually better address some of the stuff you're describing.
I believe it would be "bonafide"Also, question. Would these changes have any effect on #ocrwip?
Nope. I guess it'd be nice if they had the effect of increasing activity, but nothing beyond that... did you have ideas?
that's completely clear dude. and again, i think it's necessary to make it work as intended. my point was you either need none of the two (likes&rating) or BOTH.i guess i could live with the featured mixes having likes, they're featured after all so exposure is already there.
a little idea that i expect to not be very popular with you, but i'll post it anyway:
one thing that was fun about Overlooked Remix was the personal top 11 every user could make to feature his most beloved mixes.
the fact that it was an ordered list isn't important at all;
if you view it as a way for everyone to do a little feature list of especially noteworthy mixes of a limited number, in no particular order, i could see it being a nice enhancement. it might even be a valid alternative to extending the 'likes' system to featured mixes.
think of it as a mixtape that every user can compile in his profile, and you can click on it and stream through his picks like an actual album.
note how i went to great lengths to not use the word "favorite" lol
We'd actually already internally discussed PERSONAL top ten lists, or other types of playlists, as being fine. We'll also have blogs, which would provide a less structured way of doing the same thing. The key thing is that we wouldn't aggregate everyone's top ten into an OVERALL top ten. The idea has merit and could increase exposure without devolving into a popularity contest, so we've been considering it and will continue to, but it's also lower priority relative to just getting the workshop off the ground in a more automated/integrated fashion.
Not a fan of likes for "featured" mixes. Not a fan of popularity contest systems. I never thought I'd see the day something like that would be added
The only way I could see it working is if it added the mix to the user's list of liked mixes rather than being a part of public data.
I think # of likes and who liked would be visible/public in some form when looking at the specific mix, but NOT when listing ALL mixes... it's a compromise. We need a balance between the community providing feedback on mixes and enhancing exposure through that feedback, and, as you say, avoiding popularity contests.
I thought about this system:- WIP Workshop subforum (VGM)
- WIP Workshop subforum (originals)
- Showcase (Finished VGM)
- Showcase (Finished originals)
Once again, the problem of the quality would appear, because people have different opinions on what is finished or not. But it'd be simple to avoid this. For instance, posting in a SHOWCASE subforum will engage your own responsability about the quality of your products.
Not a bad idea. Ultimately, if versioning the mix in place is too complicated, we could do something like this. But wouldn't it be duplicate data entry if you had a WIP and then wanted to mark it as finished to have to post it again? Wouldn't that annoy people?
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I almost wonder if adding five-star ratings would cause less useful feedback to be provided. "I gave a rating, that's sufficient."
In terms of 'Featured' terminology substitutions, perhaps something like 'Promising', 'On the Rise', etc. would be more appropriate? Terms that imply that there is interest in the item, but not that the item is in any way a part of the official OCR library.
Nah, perhaps I wasn't clear: FEATURED will be the actual, judged, canonized mixes - like what we have now. WORKSHOP will be everything else, including WIPs, Finished, Submitted, etc.
So the replacement term for FEATURED wouldn't be "promising" it would be BADASS
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I think this is my only concern. On the surface, it sounds like a great idea, so long as you keep the OCR-level stuff separate from the WIP-level stuff...
On the other hand, I think it's vitally important to keep the two databases as clearly defined and separate as possible, because if they start to run into each other, some of the impetus to strive for track perfection and bettering oneself as an artist gets lost. I'd fear that some people would take the attitude of "I got lots of likes in the Workshop and it's in OCR's database somewhere, that's close enough for me."
Well, people already do this... with YouTube. i.e. "I got tons of views on YT, screw OCR!" - just because there's a barrier to entry doesn't necessarily guarantee people will strive to meet it & refine their work. Some will, some won't. However, I completely agree that a major challenge will be clearly & cleanly delineating "featured" (i.e. judged) mixes from "workshop" (wip, finished, submitted). I'd love to use the word "official" instead of "featured" for the judged mixes, but we run into major problems with copyright owners when we refer to fan arrangements as being "official" in any way, shape, or form.
If people have ideas about a better word to use ("certified" has the same problem as "official") than "featured" - I'm all ears!
I feel like this would betray both the workshop and OCR's long-standing rule of not adding a rating system for posted remixes. Granted, these would not be "posted remixes" as far as being on the front page of the site, but rating would be just as damaging to them as it would to a front page mix.That remains to be seen; generally speaking, we've felt that ratings would cause drama and deter people from checking out mixes from lesser-known games, in lesser-known genres. For workshop mixes, though, it could actually INCREASE attention above the current baseline such that the overall level of traffic/interest was higher on average, even for mixes of obscure games, with fewer reviews. As for drama - making ratings optional on a per-mix basis I think would really help address this.
How about instead of ratings, make it a thumbs up or thumbs down system that only a workshop moderator can add to a workshop mix? This would denote whether they think the mix is ready for prime time or not. Changing the system in the way described would make workshop moderators obsolete when it is their opinions that matter in the workshop. Excuse my french but I don't give a darn what XxssjGoku69xX thinks of my mix, whether he rates it a 2 or a 10. If I'm posting a mix in the workshop, I'm posting it there to get help, and feedback from someone who is at least on par with myself musically such as a workshop mod. I've personally seen horrible advice going out over the workshop and it's really discouraging, and I feel that is a more important thing to address than adding ratings which would more or less be akin to making the situation worse. I don't think OCR has to have VGMIX functionality, OCR was always better than VGMIX, and it was better for a reason.Well, first off, thanks. However, I think you might be underselling the community a bit - while I'm sure there will be those who abuse such a system, I feel like the overall reaction would be positive and supportive. Making ratings optional again is a key component here. As for likes/dislikes - I don't want dislikes or thumbs down on the site, period. I kinda feel like they're more insulting and less helpful than even a 1-star review.
Besides, I think OCR should support vgmix right now, not go into competition with it. Beyond how much that would hurt OCR's systems, it wouldn't be particularly kind to vgmix.This is a weird sentiment; if there's one thing you can count on, it's that I'll do what I think is best for the site & community, regardless of whoever else is doing whatever else. There have been several non-OCR attempts at making something like this work, now, and I think we should give it a shot ourselves and see what we can do. And as a side note, we've been considering something like this far before the resuscitation and re-resuscitation of vgmix/vgremix. It's not unkind for us to make long-term plans for the future of OCR and eventually act on them, and in my mind we're primarily in competition with ourselves first, and YouTube/SoundCloud/BandCamp second, as we have to make a cogent argument as to the value-added that we bring to the table.
If this is something you really need to add then I will support that, and might even use it, depending on how it works out. But like I said, if all I get are reviews and ratings from XxssjGoku69xX then I'd be less likely to ever use the workshop. IMO the more important functionality change would be to emphasize workshop moderators and their input on that forum. Have their responses highlighted or something. Maybe change responses from people who aren't posted remixers to be greyed out and only visible if you click it. In the interest of receiving quality information rather than quantity information.Highlighting staff reviews and potentially also reviews from featured artists (composer or mixers) is an excellent idea. Agreed that it has tremendous value.
Stop picking on XxssjGoku69xX, I love that kid
Lastly I would not want works in progress on my artist profile. I do not currently have a lot of threads in the workshop because I am against releasing incomplete material. This new system sounds like it'd be a way to highlight unfinished works and I'm not cool with that as an artist.
Hmmm. Well, I'm going to consider that a feature request for an opt-out artist profile flag "List Works-in-Progress on Artist Page" - but I'm not sure how many others feel that way, and it somewhat defeats the purpose, so it might not end up as a high-priority feature request.
I'm going to second this for obvious reasons.and this. I wouldn't want people to say "Oh yeah! I got posted on OCR! I'm official now!" if they've literally just posted something in the Workshop forums and it actually wasn't judged/dped or approved at all. Getting a mixpost is an honor, and you know, just posting something that wasn't evaluated isn't really an honor. You'd just liked what you'd done and had wanted to share it, but that'd be about it.
I know WE think of it as an honor - and it should be - but I think a good cross-section of the public are completely unaware one way or another. I'm hoping that by differentiating between "featured" mixes and "featured" artists vs. workshop mixes and forum members, we can still emphasize this difference, and it will still be meaningful. This is indeed a risk, but I think it seems like more of a risk to those of us "inside the fishbowl" looking at OCR with a great deal of familiarity and/or baggage.
and this. Except I would agree with Argle that "Likes" would be more friendly than star ratings. I'd add that perhaps we could just have Likes, but no Dislikes. Then it'd be just the number of Likes you have, rather than the ratio of Likes/Dislikes you have. It would at least make me feel better if I were a beginner than in a star rating system or something like that.As mentioned to Brandon, I'm pretty strongly against dislikes. What I'm currently thinking is this:
- Likes (only - no dislikes) enabled for ALL workshop mixes, period
- 5-star ratings optional on a per-mix basis
I'm still unsure how best to handle versions. Some have proposed that only mixes marked as "Finished" should allow ratings, but that does make things a bit more complicated, especially if artists can toggle a mix BACK from being finished into WIP state...
Emotionally, I'm leaning towards that as well (as i said, ratings can be useful but are evil)....but the disadvantages of having just a purely "Likes" based system have to be considered:It'd be way more prone to hype of individual mixes (and individual games). Once a mix reaches a critical amount of likes it'll just keep on generating more exponentially cause of improved exposure. So popularity gaps are increased.
Having a separate, more informative measure for voicing (dis)approval lends itself better to people discovering hidden gems that only have few likes, reviews and ratings, though very enthusiastic ones.
I believe the best possible system requires the inclusion of this controversial feature, the challenge is making it neutral enough, minimizing the negative impact on the community. Compromises are in order.
Well, again, this is JUST for the workshop. Featured mixes will continue to work in their normal fashion, although likes may be enabled for them as well (without ratings).
Another thought: i think it might be best if the (still optional) ratings were coupled with a mandatory review. Nothing too detailed necessarily, but with a moderately low word minimum.Just to pull back on the newgrounds "blam this piece of crap!" factor, yknow.
I think that should be doable; it's definitely a decision point to be considered.
Cool, sounding pretty good! I was actually thinking some of those would be direct "nah". Promising.I already link youtube videos to the wip posts. Can the system keep track if other people have posted the same source and offer that? Or will OCR end up in court for that?
You're so demanding
In a perfect world, association at the song level would bring back existing YT previews of the source tune. Initially, manual entry might be much cleaner & more flexible.Being able to enter the source link in some separate manner than in the message might be good. It'll highlight to posters that it is good to include the source, at least. And people who give feedback might find the link to the source in a standardized place.Agreed.
One additional thing that came to mind regarding this synergy is making changes to a submitted mix. I do this since I am still poor at determining if a piece is good/finished/etc.It'd be cool if I could make changes to a submitted track that isn't in panel yet, at the cost of bumping the track back to the end of the queue, which I would find reasonable. The thing is if I try to send in an update in an "unofficial" manner (sorry Larry) I worry which version will end up in the panel/etc. I suppose the same goes for approved pieces too - the system would support an update and there would be some appropriate evaluation process (I would find complete re-evaluation reasonable actually - serves me right
but the staff would know what would be reasonable for them).Very fancy. Sounds like a "Phase 2" sort of thing, but I get what you're saying.
Okay, final->submit satisfies in-site submitting and the opt-out satisfies seeing if the artist is aiming for an OCR submission. The latter would be useful when you give feedback, since if they do aim for OCR, one can try to give feedback that would help them fulfill the submission standards. If they don't, you can keep the feedback more general. I quite often wonder about this when I give feedback. To fulfill that role though, the opt-out should be considered when the thread is created (of course the artist is free to change their mind about that any time).Welllllll... at ANY time? If a couple judges have already weighed in, we won't want to interrupt that process, as it'll introduce chaos and redundant work. Needs to be considered - there's really a workflow/lifecycle here, with business rules that need to be fleshed out.
I do think marking the piece as finished should be clearly separate from submitting, the latter should be a process clearly in itself so that the user knows it's important (this might be obvious but it's not clear from the above). So the opt-out above shouldn't control if the mix ends up in the panel queue, it should just be informational.Right now workshop has three categories for ReMixes: Work-in-progress, Finished, Mod Review. I could imagine using: Work-in-progress, Release candidate, Mod review, Finished, Submit(ted).
The way I've used the current categories "Finished" means a release candidate where I think it's finished, but am taking in more feedback (and usually end up changing the piece quite a bit). "Release candidate" is of course a software term, not a musical term.. could be better. It might be useful to differentiate "finished" from "release candidate", the latter meaning almost/possibly finished, but the artist is still willing to incorporate feedback, useful for both those who give and want feedback.
--Eino
Again, good stuff. This will all be very useful when we spec out what it is we can actually achieve
- Likes (only - no dislikes) enabled for ALL workshop mixes, period
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What did you think? Post your opinion of this ReMix!
Minor Site Changes - Report Issues Here
in Announcements
Posted
Should be fixed now, and thanks for the feedback!
SHADDAP STRADER! Err, I mean... I'll get right on that. Tomorrow.
Should also be fixed now.
Again, thanks for the attention to detail!