djpretzel

Pushed out some minor site changes tonight; please report any issues! Use of font awesome for icons New photo-based icons for game systems e.g. (still missing a few) Slightly redder color for orange link text 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 (up to) 20 mixes listed on homepage, artist pages, system pages, org pages, etc. (increased from 10) 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) 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. 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!

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.

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. 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. "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. 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. Nope. I guess it'd be nice if they had the effect of increasing activity, but nothing beyond that... did you have ideas? 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. 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. 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?

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

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! 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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... 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). I think that should be doable; it's definitely a decision point to be considered. 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. Agreed. Very fancy. Sounds like a "Phase 2" sort of thing, but I get what you're saying. 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. Again, good stuff. This will all be very useful when we spec out what it is we can actually achieve

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Well... I strongly agree. Certainly we'd maintain the current capability (via thread titles) of marking something as WIP or Finished, and certainly that would be emphasized wherever workshop mixes are being listed, throughout the site. Beyond that, and making ratings opt-out on a per-mix basis, did you have any specific concerns about the system I've been describing not being able to make both audiences happy? Great stuff man; I edited in responses based on current plans. Regarding automatic source links, well, you'd be able to link and/or embed YouTubes, and there are a lot of YTs out there. This isn't truly "automatic" but it should be easy enough for a submitting artist to quickly find the source tune(s) involved and embed them into the body of their mixpost, for quick reference. I think that's a good way of addressing this use case. Regarding SoundCloud style timestamp comments - that would be far too much custom development & wheel-reinventing to implement ourselves. And why bother, when SoundCloud's done such a good job? Instead, as with YouTube embeds, we'd allow SoundCloud embeds, which of course support timestamp comments. Hopefully this will have two effects: Get more of the community using & comfortable with SoundCloud, which has a lot of utility and... Drive more traffic to ReMixer's SoundCloud pages! All of your points about synergies between the workshop and submission queue need to be sorted out, and we're going to have internal staff decisions about what we think is best and makes the most sense before presenting our plan to the community. I can of course confirm that the judges panel isn't going away, and that mix evaluation will still be a core operating principle of the site. One option under consideration is that everything posted to the workshop that's marked as final will be also considered a submission. We could potentially add an "opt-out" of formal judging/featured status, but that's something we need to decide on internally and weigh the potential impacts. I love your thinking though, as you've touched on a lot of the potential impacts/uses of the planned system.

Thanks for weighing in and making your opinion known! I really want this to be optional as well; how would you feel, though, about the implications being that the mix might not show up in some prominent places - for example, a list of trending/popular mixes - if ratings were disabled? Is this an acceptable compromise? We need to encourage people to leave ratings enabled, because we'll want people to use the rating system as much as they're comfortable with, but at the same time we want to give artists like yourself a choice, for each mix... it's just that the choice might come with tradeoffs.

Not vgmix specifically - just the idea that another site is REQUIRED and that we can't make this work here. When the smoke clears and we've got something running & automated, I actually expect it to REDUCE chaos and bloat in the long, long term. In the short-term, like I said, bumpy ride, but we're gonna need more than godspeeds - we're gonna need support, feedback, testing, patience, and optimism. If you've got a list of specific suggestions, concerns, etc. regarding this entire notion, throw 'em at me here and we'll compile at some point. I'd like to talk this through a bit more with anyone willing.

All of this can be supported. We know from experience that there are certain artists who HATE rating systems, so I'd PREFER to provide an option to disable it on a per-mix basis, with the understanding that those mixes might not show up on trending/popular lists as prominently. It would make zero sense for the workshop to function as a microcosm of the main judges panel. A ratings system indeed makes sense, and like I said, I'd prefer to make it optional. A way of "liking" mixes WITHOUT rating them at all should ALSO be present. A way for artists to upload the mix but also embed a soundcloud or youtube preview would be supported. And of course, comments AND tagging (which handles genres to a certain extent) would be supported. If you add integration with OCR's game, song, and composer database on TOP of that, well.... I honestly don't get where the need for a completely separate site comes into play. Granted, we don't have ANY of that yet, and right now it's just a forum - which actually works pretty well, all things considered - but this is very much the plan. For this year, unless significant facts change. As we have done in the past, we will reach out to the community for feedback on building this new workshop, and I've no doubt people will have a ton of great ideas. The challenge will be integrating workshop content alongside featured content in a way that brings additional visibility to the former without compromising the integrity/visibility of the latter. I think we can do it, and I don't get the pessimism about "oh it needs to be another site". Perhaps people feel like the judging system here is so entrenched that anything that presents a feature-rich alternative will never happen, but I think we can - and SHOULD - try to make both systems work. Ultimately, it's the 21st century. If people want to release VGM arrangements, they have a multitude of instant-gratification options that make a lot more sense than a dedicated site, unless you ALSO care about community and integration into a larger, VGM-centric context. SoundCloud, BandCamp, YouTube, Tindeck... the list goes on. There needs to be value added. At OCR, the value added has historically been: a curated, judge-evaluated collection of arrangements that conform to a loose set of meaningful standards a database of games, albums, songs, composers, etc. that provides additional context a badass community & staff stability, continuity, and promotion I believe we can KEEP all four of these things INTACT while also adding on an enhanced workshop area that helps meet demand for instant-gratification, quick-feedback, ratings-enabled, community-curated mixes. Any separate site that wants to tackle these goals still needs to worry about #2 AND #3 AND #4. #2 can be solved in a number of ways that involve various technical compromises, but would be largely redundant effort. #3 & #4 are pretty difficult, when it comes down to it, and don't come overnight no matter how amazing a website you build. To be honest, I'm a little tired of the "it has to be a separate site!!" way of thinking. It feels defeatist to me, a little pessimistic, but most of it all it makes an artificial argument that a site has to be defined by a single means of content approval/workflow. There are already several sites out there, for one. vgremix.com, gameremixes.com, etc. It's been done, it's being done, and I feel like we've seen years of why just standing up a website that offers this functionality isn't enough. On top of that, I feel like OCR has proven and continues to prove that we're capable of amazing things when the community comes together. If we add this type of system to what we've got, it might be a bumpy ride for awhile, but everything I've seen from staff, visitors, and artists suggests we can work our way through it and emerge with something awesome. My personal observation is this: plenty of folks seem willing to weigh in and say "OMG WE NEED VGMIX BACK" or "IT HAS TO BE ANOTHER SITE" or express unfounded pessimism that we can't make this happen. Ultimately, if you care about the community, you should WANT us to succeed with this idea. I deeply hope that when we begin these efforts in earnest, we'll get constructive feedback and not kneejerk dismissal. As we get closer to making this real, we will absolutely start a thread detailing our specific plans, point-for-point, and soliciting community feedback. I can at least confirm that ratings, likes, reviews, genre tagging, embedding soundcloud/youtube previews, file upload, AND integration with the overall OCR database are all on the table. If you add all that up, like I said... I'm psyched, because I think it'll be rather awesome. Just need to get it done!

Disagree; I've always felt this was something that we CAN and SHOULD achieve HERE, and that's the plan for this year and next. Essentially, we're going to replace the existing workshop forum with "Workshop on Steroids" - where instead of just posting a thread, you'll be able to associate the mix with a game, songs, integrate into the main OCR database a bit more, embed a soundcloud or youtube, and optionally enable ratings and reviews and likes. It should be rather awesome, and rather popular, and the key is that it will be integrated on game, system, composer, etc. pages. "Featured" mixes will still be promoted more prominently - that's a given - but "Workshop" mixes will really become first-class citizens in most ways that are meaningful. This is a niche art form, and I believe centralization makes more sense than bifurcation. What do you think? I'd love to use this thread to discuss these plans.

Absolutely noted; will be handled in the redesign, and I'll try and handle it BEFORE the redesign. Some minor changes should be going live in the next couple weeks, and if I can work this in, I absolutely will.

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Wadda punk... Happy bday, of course!

1200x1200 resolution; higher preferred, if manageable! 1200 total pixels would be like a desktop icon Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

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We've extended the deadline an extra week - new cutoff is 3/31!!

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No logo yet - it's entirely optional, but if you wanna take a stab, as long as it's on a separate layer from the actual cover art, that'd be awesome!

Exactly. We're not sure about this yet. Hopefully IPS4/IPB4. At any rate, it's far more important that we make the RIGHT enhancements to the site... ultimately "V6" - and any version number - is just a milestone for a certain set of functionality & corresponding GUI changes. Nothing's broken right now, just a bit dated. It's extremely hard to work on improvements while continuing to maintain an active site, I can tell you that much. Patience is appreciated.

Pick-and-choose, absolutely.

It was never not happening, it was simply deferred as we: Dealt with life & continued site operations, and more specifically... Weighed our options with regards to the future of vBulletin and any alternatives Yes, we are slow & deliberate, but we've also been around for 14 years, with almost zero downtime, putting out some great music. Rather than doing radical overhauls or site resets on a regular basis, we've been pragmatic, and that pragmatism has contributed to stability & our ability to do a lot of other cool stuff, so I'm not crying. This year though, this year...