As some have you may have noticed, there are several (if not all) leaderboards on this subforum that are horribly out of date. Some are the best part of a year out of date, others include some recent scores but not all of them. I'm a firm believer in the spirit of competition and bragging rights as a motivation tool, and I know for a fact that if the leaderboards were so poorly maintained back when I was a blossoming TGM player, I probably wouldn't have kept nearly the same passion to improve my score as I did - (or at the very least I'd have been pestering for the boards to be updated every time I got a new personal best) A while ago I suggested to muf that I'd get around to clearing them up. Muf gave me relevant forum permissions for me to do it, and then I was a lazy fuck and never actually got around to acting on my word (also I was partly hoping that an automated system would come in and cover it and I'd never actually have to). But no longer! Over the next month or so I'm going to be making a concerted effort to update leaderboards so that they are fully up to date and represent all scores posted in the thread. This is a shitload of work (there are 193 threads on this board) and a lot of threads are essentially dead (which is good in a way, because most of the dead ones don't need further updating), so I'm going to be prioritising based on total number of replies, plus those currently on the first page of the board. Namely, in descending order: - TAP Master - TGM1 - TAP Death - Texmaster Special and Sudden Ti - NES NTSC A-Type - Ti Master - Texmaster Special & Sudden - NES NTSC A-Type Level 19 - TAP Normal - Ti Shirase - TAP Doubles - TGM 20G Code - TAP Master BIG CODE - Tetris & Dr Mario - Texmater Novice/Normal/Advance/Doubles - TAP Item Code - TGM|TAP Secret Grade - Ti Master BIG MODE - Ti Sakura Mode To assist me in this, I'll probably be converting all of those into a Google docs spreadsheet that will spit out the forum leaderboard text automatically (à la the one used for the Carnival of Death) to save a huge amount of hassle that is otherwise required with these threads. This is in the hope that reducing the faff will make it easier for people and therefore more likely that these threads stay up to date in the future. The plan is that there will still be the exact same leaderboard format as there currently is in each thread, which will remain up to date as much as a mod or admin can be bothered to copy across from the spreadsheet (I'll try and do it at least once a week), but that each thread will also contain a link directly to the source spreadsheet which can be updated by a wider team and therefore should remain more consistently reliable. So, from you peoples, I request the following: 1) If you've got any requests for leaderboards that aren't on the list, but you believe should be, name them now 2) If anyone already has any kind of spreadsheet format for any of the leaderboards that would save me the trouble of the data entry for a specific thread, please share 3) Anyone that is interested in helping and therefore would like spreadsheet access, give me a shout 4) Anyone that is interested in maintaining the leaderboards in the future and therefore would like spreadsheet access, give me a shout 5) If you're about to finish up some sort of automated leaderboard system please for the love of god tell me before I put serious time into this or I might just kill something when you later reveal it And obviously once I've marked a thread as "done", please tell me if I've missed scores here or there. I'm concerned that some threads might have patches where they were partially updated and it could be that I get to a point where it looks like I've caught up, only for there to be scores even further back in time that were never added (for example the Death thread indicates the last update on 22nd Dec but there are scores from before then that still aren't updated).
Hi Rosty, Great plan, I agree that having an up-to-date leader board would be a good motivation! I might be able to help you with some of the more repetitive work in this by writing a few scripts for you. In the last half hour or so I whipped up a proof of concept script that converts the TGM1 leader board to csv (see here for the output). It is a bit hacky and currently only works for that specific input format, but it's a start. Perhaps we can also automate the copy-paste from spreadsheet to forum, but I have no experience with that so I can't promise anything yet. And if you have any other ideas of things that could be automated let me know. I'm not sure how you had planned to format the different leader boards, but can I suggest being as consistent as possible between all of them, that would make it much easier if we ever transition to an automated leader board.
The format will most likely be as consistent as can be allowed. Also I'm lazy, and concatenating columns to give a standard output format means I don't have to put in a large amount of effort tailoring each leaderboard to replicate the current exact format, but will instead produce a general one. I'm not so fussed about automating the procedure to paste the scripted spreadsheet code into the actual forum post - I think if you've got to go through the process of looking up new posts and adding them by hand, then a Ctrl+V, Ctrl+C step isn't much extra bother. Unless the entire thing is automated from post entry to updating the first post, then I don't think any further automation really helps beyond what I'm planning to do already (which sorts out ranking and formatting). The main things that I'm wary of at the moment are actually generating the initial spreadsheet data (for which a script would be very useful and save me from writing my own), and ensuring that the final product is completely accurate and without gaps/mistakes.
Sorry it took while, but I got the script working for the first part of your list (up to and including TAP Master BIG CODE). The output is attached as a zipfile, the script itself is here on github. The script does not detect links or orange/green lines so those need to be added manually. It is also wise to check the output since I probably made a mistake somewhere (regular expressions are hard to get right ). Hopefully I will have time to do the rest later this week.
Cheers for the help. Mainly aiming to burn through the first handful of leaderboards on the 25th-28th March. Last weekend got eaten up by The Division being released and this weekend I'm in Paris, but have a good chunk of free time after that.
Death mode completed. Not top of the list, but it's the carnival this weekend so I figured I'd start with that one. Will hopefully get TGM1 sorted either today or tomorrow and will then do TAP Master as the next thread, most likely in the next week or so. Any comments or input and such would really be appreciated asap. Given how long it takes to do each one, I'd rather iron out any kinks or cosmetic suggestions now before I've worked my way through the majority of them.
I'd like to address the NES A-Type side of things since I have a script to assist with it. I'll try to get it as soon as possible. I might be able to make something a bit more open to additional moderators submitting entries, but I need to set aside time to figure that out as well.
At the moment I'm pretty much happy with anyone who is a moderately established member of this place having access to things - I just need google account usernames and I can add them. Editing the posts on the forum is a bit more of a bottleneck in terms of users but I think so long as the spreadsheets are kept up to date it's not too much of a hassle. I don't want to make things entirely public just to prevent proper abuse, but I'd trust the majority of people on here to have access and not fuck shit up. Better, fully-automated systems could definitely be a thing but it's beyond my effort and capabilities, and I'm more interested in getting something done to keep things up to date even if it's not an ideal fix right now. Either way a proper clear up of some of the less well-maintained threads is going to be needed even if an automated system gets put in place (which I believe is in the pipeline but fuck knows when it'll actually happen) - just from doing the Death thread today I found multiple points where the leaderboard had been updated in an incomplete way.
I wouldn't mind contributing some of my time keeping things up to date. Gmail is maverick.marq@gmail.com
I've been doing a lot of Phantom Mania lately, so I'd be interested in helping keep that scoreboard up to date. :>
Have added people who have volunteered - just to be clear, I'm giving permission to people for all leaderboard spreadsheets for the sake of simplicity of only having to maintain a single list of email addresses. Been a bit slow on this (though I have got the framework working for the TGM1 board), will hopefully get back on it fairly soon. I've got a week on holiday next week so can probably burn through a fair chunk of it while I'm away.
I created a new sheet in the document you sent us, to keep track of Phantom Mania scores. Hopefully those get updated soon.
I'm happy for people to pick up making sheets themselves, though the TGM1 works better than the Death one and I'm not sure it's fully shared yet (working on it). Death works fine for Death where things are ordered neatly by level then time, but once grades start happening then there's no longer a convenient sort (because TGM grades don't fit a typical alphanumerical ordering system). The Death leaderboard is a bit basic, whilst the TGM1 has the vlookup stuff sorted to allow grades to work and sort properly.
Phantom Mania is effectively a form of Death mode (it's literally TAP Death except invisible), so that's why I felt comfortable using the same chart. Also because the existing chart for that mode uses basically the same fields.
