These past few weeks, I've had several complaints about players being unable to join the Players' Page, and despite my assistance, I've only been able to help a few of them get on the site. I've had enough with this aforementioned situation and the general state YahooGroups has reached, so I felt the need to come up with a solution to improve the MK8PP.

I've contacted IsThatAGoodTime (Scott Abbey, former MKDD player) about getting a MK8 version of a submission site he created years ago for MKDD as a temporary bandaid, but this turns out to not be a great idea since YahooGroups still has to be involved.

This is when we agreed that a better, more appropriate solution at this point would be to revamp the site in order to bypass both the YahooGroups and this forum for submission. This would also provide an opportunity to streamline the submission process for both new and existing players, and also streamline the updating process, so that the PP can become both more accessible and up-to-date.


Here's a diagram that shows the rough plan I have in mind so far. Some things are bound to change a bit with time, but the general idea is there :



This proposed system may look more complicated that the existing one from a glance, but only staff organisation would possibly require more thinking and coordination that what we have now.


This new system provides multiple advantages and improvements :

-A submission site available in multiples languages (alongside translated site rules) will broaden the audience of non-English speaking karters;
-A submission form to fill-in makes it faster for the players to send in their times, instead of having to write down submissions under a predetermined format, so they can spend more time karting
-It will also prevent typos for track names and thus possible confusion for the updaters, no need to learn track abbreviations anymore;

-The team of verifiers involved in times approval can be large (5+). Since they don't have actually access to the database and cannot fiddle with the times they are verifying, the trust requirement to become a verifier is lower than that of a current times updater. The process of verification is also intended to be very simple and little time-consuming, which means that if at least 1 verifier is available at any given time, the charts could be up-to-date in near real time;

-We may also provide the players the option to add extra information with their time such as : character and vehicle used, shroom strategy, coin strategy...etc. Can be handy for the lower ranked players to know what the players around them are using, instead on relying on the World Record strategies which may suit them poorly.

However, there are also some questions that should be answered, and potential issues that have to be discussed, as a consequence of a new system :

-Account protection : there will most likely be a password system to prevent other players from sending fake submissions under your name, but I'm unsure if it should be mandatory or optional : some players may not be able to use an e-mail address yet (thinking of young karters)

-Site maintenance : who will be around for the years to come to keep these new site pages working? While I know Scott is willing to put in a lot of time making the sites, I cannot tell if he will stay to fix things, all for a game which I presume he doesn't even play. Ideally, a person (or two) from the MK8 community itself should be tasked with that. Or at least someone who just like the kart games in general. I honestly wouldn't mind doing that myself, but I'm not a computer guy to say the least, so I wouldn't be of much help unfortunately...

-Proof system : there will be soft proof requirements coming up in the future (somewhere around the DLC pack 2 maybe...), but I don't know for sure how a proof system should be integrated into the new site. Do we force proof delivering on players if they submit a top 10 time? Or do we leave it to the verifiers to make sure the times submitted are real? The latter implies more responsabilities and work from the verifiers, but also allows in-game ghosts to be a extra, valid form of proof.


Most importantly, such project is an overwhelming task for only 2 people, especially when one of them can't program for shit. Which is why it is really important that we get the support of the community, or else it's very likely that barely anything will come out of this.

We know this kind of idea has been relatively popular in the past, but has never come to fruition for various reasons (but mainly because it was too much work for the admins that are busy enough as is). We know that many people want this type of site, the question's now is if those people are willing to contribute to it.

Any help that you can provide will be greatly appreciated, but we're mainly interested in SERIOUS people that :
-have at least some programming skills/abilities
AND/OR
-are strongly involved with the MK8 time trial scene

And before you ask, I already have the OK from both Jonesy (site owner) and Penev (main programmer) to fiddle with the site, so it is now a matter of being able to pull it off.

Thanks for reading!

Current Stakeholders

• Jazzy
• Mr.Nosey
• IsThatAGoodTime
• Mick
• Anthony
• Jones
• Penev

Really nice idea, this is how a time database should really work, it's much easier. The french MK TT site works like that, and I find it good (I'm mod on it).

Doing this for other MKs would be nice also, MK7 is still really active.

Btw, I could help with Verification or Moderation if this project blasts off.

Hey, just happened to notice this topic.  I knew it would be coming along eventually but almost missed it up in the Sticky Zone.

The diagram Mick has provided up in the first post of the topic really does a good job at explaining what we have and what we want to have.  Thanks for explaining some of the issues we would be facing with an ambitious project like this.

I see we've already had a handful of positive responses to this thread, that's great.  I'm glad people see this as a valuable project.

Mick wrote on 03/13/15 at 10:49:20:


Right now I think this quoted section is really the focus.  In order for this project to get off the ground, we need a core group willing to put forth a significant effort.  It's nice if you get a few dozen people on a message board to say "oh yeah, great idea!" and then offer all their suggestions for making the site absolutely amazing, but that isn't going to be enough to make things happen.

Someone has to step forward and go "I'm taking this one on! *unsheathes big sword.*"  In our current situation, I don't see that person being one of the familiar leading figures from the past.  Most of these guys expended huge amounts of energy 10 or 15 years ago and have since moved on to other pursuits.  There's a bit of a gap here, can we fill it?

I envision this as a project with a small core team of 2 to 5 (maybe more!) people who spend many hours of their time working, along with a larger group of up to several dozen users who provide feedback, encouragement, and pizza.

Right now, we need to find out who is really going to be in that core group.  Once we have a team together, we can start making actual progress toward our goals.

If you think you would fit in as a core member of the team, please post here or contact me privately.  Please explain what skills you would bring to the table and a best guess at involvement level.  See my post below for an idea of what I want to know from you.  There are no minimum requirements and it's not going to be a super formal process.  Keep in mind, "what I can provide" could take many forms.  Maybe you want to be a programmer, or maybe you think you have a really good design sense, or maybe you want to fund the project, or something else.  Don't be shy!

Keep in mind, if you want to be a lead in this, it's not only an opportunity to have some control over the future site, it is also a responsibility.  You become responsible for providing a great site for everyone else to use.  You also are responsible for keeping that site going in the future.  Mick mentioned maintainability concerns in his original post.  I don't want to scare anyone away, but at least consider these things if you want to be part of the project.  Do you see yourself still being willing to help out 5 years from now if someone has an important request?

As much as I want to help, I don't know if I could do anything.. I have no programming experience and am not involved in the competitive scene

Zepple wrote on 03/13/15 at 13:54:23:

WillD wrote on 03/13/15 at 18:21:07:

Thanks for the support! Attributing jobs for the new site isn't gonna happen until it is done or near done, and thus is very low priority right now. And I'm more concerned about the "if" rather than the "when" regarding this project as you can guess. I'll keep your names in mind for later though =)

As for whether such site could show up for other games, you'd have to ask the admins first if they don't mind about that, but considering the kart sites are build on a similar base, it shouldn't be as difficult to redo or even port some of the work that would be done on the MK8 site (please correct me if I'm wrong).


IsThatAGoodTime wrote on 03/13/15 at 23:41:27:

That's interesting. Do you think you can help a "noob" like me to get into basic programming stuff for that project at least, or would it be too overwhelming for me?
I do have some time to learn and if I could somehow be directly involved in site building instead of being only a kind of "director"...
I'm sure other potential partners would enjoy assistance from you as well!

Added Mr.Nosey to the team for now, as well as Anthony Caiulo who is also interested in the project and with whom I had a private conversation on this subject. Some good ideas came out of it, I'll come back to those later once I have a more defined plan on what we should be focusing on during the project.

By the way, these past few days, I have been slowly building a document where I put together the track, character, and vehicle names in the 8 most prominent languages used by the karters around the world. It's now about 75-80% complete, but it won't be fully finished until we get the information about the second DLC pack. At least I do have all the current track names put down already (yeah I added Russian and Korean for the hell of it, just because I could!).

After I'll be mostly done with this, I'll try to organise ideas and features that should be worked on the site, in order of priority. Right now it is still a mess in my head to be honest.

RRD wrote on 03/18/15 at 12:47:13:

I'm already aware of that.

So far I only picked the PAL version as default except for English, since the overwhelming majority of non-English speaking time trialers is European (or Japanese).

For English, I'm leaning towards using NTSC as the default, as is the standard for all Players' Pages, however both the US and the UK have a massive pool of players, so you could case a case for including both PAL and NTSC names (helps that they're identical for the most part). Though I'm not sure how version differences for a same language could be implemented yet.

I'm consider collecting data for NTSC Spanish/French/Portuguese names if there is the demand and/or if there aren't too tricky to find (the reason Russian and Korean very likely won't be included ultimately). I guess I could add some NTSC French stuff already since you have provided track names right there!

I've written a list of features below that should or could be added to the new site(s) we're going to be working on, classed by importance :

http://pastebin.com/XSi2CPWq

Feedback is appreciated. I can clarify some points if needed. I will likely start working on some mock-ups to show more precisely what I personally have in mind for the site pages.

- Optimization for mobile browsing (including Nintendo 3DS)

The project is still in the planning stages, and I would like to get some more feedback regarding details for the structure and design of the submission site :







This is about the global structure the submission site could adopt for the end users that are the players.

The first option welcomes the players with a menu after they've logged in, where they can choose from here what they want to do exactly.

The second option brings them directly to the time submission page instead, with the possibilty to access other options through a sub-menu located somewhere on this submission page. While the navigation here would not be quite as intuitive, it brings people faster to times submission, which is the main purpose of the site.

Which one do you think is better?







This image above shows design suggestions about how time submission for a given track would look (there will at 48 of them in a row).

The fields available during a submission will depend on what the community wants and how hard/time consuming it would be to add the new info to the new site by modifying the current one. At least the first option will be done, but it could be interesting for some people to know extra information about the personal records players have performed, at least high level.

What improvements could be done design-wise? And what information is really deemed of interest by the players themselves?

Although I'm very busy and won't be able to do a ton of work on the site, I may be able to do some programming/design here and there. Maybe 3-4 hours a week max (mostly on weekends) -- this could change, though.

I've put together a basic initial version of the site. The pages I added were simple versions of the homepage, login and register pages, the times submission page, and the profile modification page. There is no database hooked up right now, so the data entered into the forms is not processed or validated.

The site is also optimized for mobile browsing! All the pages are designed to reformat when displayed on a phone or small browser window.

I'm looking for a place to host the code -- maybe you guys could help me find somewhere? For now, there are some screenshots (for all the pages, both desktop and mobile) located here, for everyone to look at:

http://imgur.com/a/6lptZ#0

Let me know what you think of the screenshots, and let me know if there is anything that can be improved. And if you have any questions, feel free to ask!

Well I certainly didn't expect somebody just show up like that and showing interested in the project at this stage. And even already pulling in work!

I really, really like what I see there from the screenshots. This site design is clean and slick, for both the desktop and mobile versions, and this submission page structure is even better that what I had envisioned!

Very interested in what you could do next, even with a limited freetime. This project is gonna take quite some time regardless and we're not in a hurry to bring such a massive change to the site, even though the earlier the better.

I'll get back to you in the next couple days. We haven't decided yet on where we would store code, since coding itself hadn't started for our project yet (still some things to plan regarding the sites to be used by the staff), but this shouldn't take too long...

A small update regarding how the project has evolved :

-The registration, log-in and time submission pages are near-fully designed at this point. Still not functional, but that will be worked on soonish. We will likely try to bring in beta testers then to see if the webpages are free of bugs that players may potentially encounter

-Many other aspects of the future site have also been discussed extensively, such as the moderation/approval system for times, how the rankings should be laid out, or interesting extras that could be added through interaction with other sites, amongst other things.

-There was at some point a test MK7 site, based on the template of the current test MK8 site, that Jazzy made on his own time, to see what similarities in the code could be shared between hypothetical new PP sites. It doesn't exist anymore after the code was transfered to Laravel, but we will try to remake another one as a side project (MK8 site still holds priority obviously). Maybe we will do others as well if the first project is ultimately successful, but that's not quite revelant to this board.