Hi everyone!

I hope this comes as a welcome surprise, but I'm very happy to announce that I've finished work on the Non-ZZMT website that I started on 3 years ago.
I've been working on it on and off over the years, but for various reasons, my interest and motivation was piqued once again in July shortly after I graduated. So I've been working many hours over the past two months to drastically improve it and finish it all off.

It's located at nonzzmt.com !
(The domain was bought by my irl friend Jake, and he's hosting the site too! thanks Jake)

Intention
My intention for this site is to be very similar to the PP sites, in the same way that the SMK Non-NBT site is to SMK. However the main difference that I am planning is to eventually enter in times from players that are uncontactable or have retired. I want this done for the sake of completeness and accuracy, especially for the top of the leaderboard. Also, this site will be strictly Non-SC, if it wasn't already obvious. Most stats and whatnot require that you have all 80 times submitted.

News
As you can see on the main page, I've implemented a basic blogging type thing (surprise surprise it's actually Greymatter - same as what the PP uses), and my plan is to have monthly news updates for the site.

Standards
As you can see, I've put in a placeholder 'Std' column in the site. My thinking is that this site will fingers crossed drive some small amount of non-zzmt interest, at which point a group of us can discuss some potential standards.

Alternative ladder systems
At the moment, I'm just using the standard AF ladder as the main ranking system for the site. But this is only temporary, and I would very much like to use either the Non-NBT site's score, and/or another one that Jazzy came up with, called AFR (Average Finish Ratio).
Explanation of Non-NBT Score: http://www.mariokart64.com/smknonnbt/statsinfo.htm
I'm going to PM Jazzy to check whether he minds me providing a link to his explanation of AFR.
Please give me your thoughts on this

Submissions
When creating a user on the Submit page, I'm asking that you enter a full real name as on the PP. You have the option to enter a Nickname, and I'm requiring people to enter an email. This is mainly to have some way of contacting people who may just rock up without saying anything on the forum/discord/wherever, and are otherwise uncontactable.
The submit page is a bit unusual, but hopefully I've made it intuitive. You can use your keyboard to control the numpad when entering times (numbers, backspace and enter). When you submit your times, they'll shoot off to a verification page that only I can access atm. Don't hesitate to submit multiple times close together, because the page makes it easy for me to handle. Unfortunately though if you send in an improvement for a time before I've had a chance to verify the previous one, it'll overwrite it and not save it in the database.

Dates
With encouragement from Lafungo, I made it so that the website tracks dates (i.e. there can be more than one entry per person and course, as long as the day it was submitted is different), with the intention that these dates will be accurate as per when their respective times were actually set. I know it may be a large undertaking, but when you first find and submit your times, could you please also search for the respective dates they were set, and PM/email them to me!
Then Lafungo and I will manually update the times until everything is at an accurate starting point. It'll take a decent amount of effort, but it'll be worth it.

AF chart
Updates automatically whenever I verify submissions. The 'Change' column automatically resets at the start of every month.

Future things planned
- Matchup page
- Standards as already mentioned
- A directory with links to youtube videos

Mobile
While I haven't specifically designed this site to work on mobiles (and tablets?), I've put in a decent chunk of effort to make it at least usable. But I've only bothered testing it on my Android Moto G. So don't be surprised if it doesn't work correctly or the header is completely broken or whatever. Please contact me with any problems.

Lastly, there's a small chance that if I haven't mentioned something here, then I may have written it on the About page: nonzzmt.com/about, so please check that out super quickly first!

My question to you
I would very much like to hear your feedback and suggestions for improvements if you have them. Anything from colour scheme/font sizes to big-haul changes are welcome. Dependent on whether you think your comments would be most appropriate said publicly or privately, please either post in this thread, or send me a PM/send me an email at noseykart@gmail.com.

Please don't be surprised if anything breaks. I'll honestly be more surprised if it doesn't. Just make sure to contact me with what wrong please

Furthermore, if you look at the Submit page, you'll notice that I have lovely thumbnails for the GBA tracks and ugly ones for the Retro ones. I've found better coloured pictures of the map for the retro tracks, but they're still no way near as good.
I found the GBA pictures on mariowiki.com, e.g. http://www.mariowiki.com/File:Mkscpeachcircuit.png
but I have no idea how they got them, if you have an idea on how to do this please tell me!

Thank yous
- Lafungo for nagging supporting me throughout the last few years, and most recently helping to test the site for me, and advising me on what changes or additions I should make. Implementation of Dates for times is down to him, amongst quite a few other things.

- Penev for helping me with a crucial SQL command a couple of years ago, and answering a few other questions of mine.

- Etch and Thingy for linking me to their submission pages that I shamelessly ripped off took inspiration from to create my own.

- Andy, Ethan and Stacy (and Lafungo) for submitting times to the site two years ago (because I said that the site was basically finished, lol), which has come in very handy when testing and fixing the site.

Enjoy!

P.S. Because of the times from the above four were submitted a while ago, some dates for them may be a bit funky, but they'll be fixed soon, just please ignore them for now.

P.P.S. I will PM them also, but Andy, Stacy, Ethan and Lafungo need to provide me with an email of theirs that I can enter in the database before they can submit any new times.

Hey, I submitted my times to the site! I don't have a complete timesheet yet though

The site is pretty clean design, although I find the submission form a bit unintuitive in some ways. Overall, I'm pretty impressed.

As for AFR, here is the description of the system:

Quote:


For AF itself, I personally recommend using it as the main ranking, with AFR possibly on the side. Now, I would prefer it if the AF system be modified to rank players without all 80 times, in the same way that the MK64 site does it: for missing times, use a rank of (last place + 1) for that track. (so if there are 100 players on a track, use 101 for a missing time). The new MK8 PP I am working on programming will most likely function this way. I find it provides more motivation for players who haven't submitted all times. Personally, I haven't played as much MKSC as I could, because I still have 60+ more times to submit before I can be ranked...

Anyways, great job! I look forward to future developments

I'm super happy to see the Non-ZZMT site finally go live! Thank you Nosey for all the work you've put in to make this project a reality! Despite all the pestering I've done over the years, I'm fully aware that no one else in the community had the motivation to do this (least of all me), so for you to pull through with it merits huge props!  

A quick note on rankings: as I've told Jazzy over Skype when he first brought up the idea in the MKSC group, I'm heavily against AFR because it's a slightly more complicated ranking formula than AF that fulfills the same role yet doesn't solve any of AF's inherent issues (or replaces them with similar ones).
On the other hand, I very much agree with implementing the MK64 solution for ranking players in AF with partial timesheets.

(Sorry for double post)

I've been using the site for quite a bit and wanted to provide some feedback

• The fonts used are nice and I like how you make them bigger when on desktop, this makes it really easy to read. I noticed the main font is Roboto: are you an Android developer by any chance?
• As mentioned in my previous post, I'd like to see MK64-style AF charts, which rank players with unfinished timesheets too.
• For the charts, rankings, and players list (and maybe site records?) it would be nice to filter by country. It's not a big deal now, but if we ever get dozens of players (which is possible if you're adding in other people's old times), it would be handy.
• I like how the "links" menu acts as an overflow when the screen is too small to show all the tabs. However, I find sometimes when zooming in on my phone, it has issues zooming out fully, and I can no longer see the links menu.
• The idea of a nickname column is a nice addition to the real name.
• On the submission form, I can't figure out how to clear an entered time if I entered it in the wrong track. I'd have to refresh the page, and enter all the times over again.
• It would be nice to be able to control the submission number pad with my keyboard.
• I like how the submission page warns you if a time is unusually slow.
• I strongly advise adding a password field on the submission page, which is provided when you sign up and needs to be provided every time you submit a time. Contact me for advice on doing this properly.
• The links to other sites like the players' page and mkwrs are broken.
• I'd like to see more links on the various tables. For example, clicking on a person's name on the site records page should lead to their profile, and clicking on the AF score at the top of the profiles should lead to the position on the AF charts.
• I think the site records page should show multiple names if there is a tie for first place. Take a look at RRR.
• I'd like to see PRSR beside each track on the profile page, and maybe difference from SR as well. These should also appear in the small table at the top of the profile page.
• I don't like how many of the buttons on the submission page are grey; they look disabled. I'd suggest using a different color.
• I like how the header hides itself when you scroll down. However, you can still click on the header links when they're hidden!
• A site record tally would be nice at the bottom of the SRs page.
• If you're looking for retro track course thumbnails, they can be found on mariowiki.com. Go to the article for each course, and click "course map" on the info box at the top right of the page.
• Two nitpicky things: (1) The courses/laps/combined links on the totals page look styled strangely; and (2) On some page, if you slide the mouse downwards over the table, black borders appear between the rows.
• The site doesn't pass HTML validation (meaning there are errors in the code). I'd also recommend using HTML5 instead of XHTML; the latter is from 2000.
• I'd like to see a recent times page, showing the 50 or so most recent submissions. I'd much rather this than AFR if I could only choose one.

Sorry for this huge list of things to work on, I'd just like to see the site get even better as time goes on It's fantastic already, great work!

Just one more thing, if you have any questions about coding stuff I can help too. I'm quite experienced with this stuff at this point.

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:


No problem, I'd like to see the site get better too!

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:

Hmmm... I'm not sure how much I agree here. If someone has 79/80 top times, and is #1 without the 80th time, they deserve to be #1, because, regardless of how bad their 80th time is, they would still be the champion with it. If you exclude that player, the "other" #1 is a bit misleading, since his or her times wouldn't be as good as the player with 79/80 times.

Now, I find that with over 60 new times to submit, I'm not motivated to play this game much. I have so far before I can even be ranked at all. If the site ranked me, I would probably be motivated to play more, since every new time submitted is easy cuts to my AF.

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:


Huh, I couldn't get it to work with the numbers at the top of my keyboard either. Maybe I'm missing something? I use firefox, in case it's something to do with my browser.

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:


If you're going to implement this, I'd make it a priority, that way you're not assigning passwords to tons of players in the future. Now that I think of it, you should have a "change password" feature as well, where you select a player, enter the old password, and a new password to change to.

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:

I'd say, that since there's a leaderboard for PRSR, it should appear on the profile too. That way players can see how it's broken down for each track. If you wanted, you could display PRSR and SR difference in a tooltip, that might be a good alternative.


Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:


I'm talking about the number pad, retro toggle button, and submit button. I thought they were all disabled at first...

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:


Yeah, that would be nice, but what I meant was to show the total number of SRs each player has. Look at the players' page site records page, it has this too.

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:

The problem is that if I move my mouse downwards over the table, the black borders stay after I move the mouse off the row.

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:

I can talk to you privately to explain what this means.

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:


The recent times page is useful to see where people have been improving lately. Wouldn't it be nice to see that someone is approaching SR? Or making a lot of progress on a whole bunch of tracks over the past week? Also, it's nice to see which players were active recently.

Nosey wrote on 09/11/16 at 03:27:30:


Again, no problem, and great job so far!!

Did some further work on the site today:

- Fixed key detection for numpad and other browsers on submission page
- Coloured the buttons on Submission page - Numpad, retro toggle, submit
- Made a check against current times on Sub page (i.e. query if slower than current)
- Made it possible to cancel/delete a time on submission page
- Grabbed screenshots of retro tracks for submission page
- Did HTML validation

Nice work! I'm very happy with the progress you've made over the last week or so. The rate at which you're adding things is crazy, keep it up!

Great work there!

All fixed!
Sorry, the error came about when I made it so that everyone's emails cannot be seen at all on the submission page, and after doing that I didn't doublecheck it was all working still.

Sent in my baby from SG flap!