RetroAchievements.org Workshop - mod-general

RetroAchievements.org Workshop

Moderation / mod-general

@sporky

you agree that you will not share and topics discussed on this server

"share and topics" ???

Breaking this rule can result in a server removal and removal of the subteam.

This implies that we kill the server and subteam if someone leaks.

some users might not wish to know they are part of a team and which one. (edited)

This doesn't make sense. (edited)

00:19

If you are on one of these teams and miss one of the roles

Something else that needs to be reworded. "If you are on one of these teams and do not have the corresponding role"

How do I leave a comment on a game wall as RAdmin? I don't see any type of switcher, nor do I see a password pinned anywhere

You don't

Do we leave personal comments or no comments at all? Given the number of players arguing there, I was just going to post "As a reminder, please keep discussions civil."

We usually do that from our own accounts, RAdmin forum/wall posts are usually meant for really serious situations

1

Holy shit I didn't know this was happening, congratulations!!!

ZeldaHeart

1

First time doing 2 under 2 so this is going to be fun pray

pray

I'm sure Searo could tell you the joys

Little Void wahoo

wahoo

ZeldaHeart

1

Congrats!

ZeldaHeart

1

Image attachment

18:45

does he think he's in some crazy trouble or something?

BahamutVoid

First time doing 2 under 2 so this is going to be fun pray

pray

I'm sure Searo could tell you the joys

Congrats! 2 really changes things compared to one but you've got this jackedfrost

jackedfrost

ZeldaHeart

1

18:45

Related to being removed from rollouts team I'm guessing?

AuburnRDM

Click to see attachment 🖼️

Short TL;DR is: I've had Slacker in my DMs for the past two days, he has been very depressive because he thinks all of RA (staff) is against him and he doesn't feel welcome. I tried to talk him out of it/get some positivity in there, but seems he has made his final choice and will retire

18:46

Tried what I could but to no avail

What's the tldr with his removal I haven't really read up on it?

Slacker inside the team was very self-centered (trying to get himself higher up the priority groups by fixing Wario World achievements he was put for in group 3, trying to bump friends up a priority), and was also caught leaking some details meant to be private

Ah yeah sounds appropriate to remove then, guess they aren't taking it well though

it's not even that big of a deal

is QA meant to be in the rollout channel?

AuburnRDM

is QA meant to be in the rollout channel?

They probably shouldn't be.

19:53

Slacker seems to have some kind of disconnect from reality. He broke team confidentiality and hasn't really seemed to take any accountability for that.

he's taking it like he was removed for personal reasons

19:56

at that point though it's probably better he doesn't have dev

19:56

19:56

i guess he's stepping down tomorrow

19:56

why tomorrow? maybe tickets? but still seems off to me

Suspect reached out to me yesterday that he was also curious why they had access and that it wouldn't feel like a loss, so we could probably just remove their access

20:01

Same probably applies to Playtester channels that they have access to but that one is not too big a deal

I went ahead and removed QAM from the rollout channel - no strong feelings one way or the other on other channels

I can't remember why they were added. I think it was something to do with checking sets for a rollout but it was never really done.

Nepiki

Actually decided not to. With RetroAchievements being behind paywall in Delta, we likely have a low volume of users using it and, even if we uphold policy, we'll likely get those annoying people again in the thread saying we support emulators with paid features. Will just let it sail by and answer the occasional question if it arises

lel

https://reddit.com/r/RetroAchievements/comments/1ng60pw/delta_issues/

From the RetroAchievements community on Reddit: Delta Issues

Explore this post and more from the RetroAchievements community

The inevitable pastebin: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Lj7py4fQqFh56VYU5OViGD-OkkkX6CiAZbl345WPAU/edit

Farewell For Now

Slacker here. I’ve seen devs come and go during the years I’ve been here and I knew one day I too would have to step away from being a developer. I just wish that now that my time has come, it was on better terms. The Lead Up My reasons for leaving didn’t come out of the blue. I’ve felt this way ...

I also got a DM about an untracked user - just going to respond and say I don't know anything about it

Image attachment

I do enjoy how he keeps bringing up how his set was broken due to player states not being able to load properly. How long was it fixed for before he finally fixed those cheevos and repromoted them?

04:14

Admits to leaking sensitive information, but we're the badguys for kicking him off the team without a message.

(that doc also leaks "it was totally the Dolphin devs who pressured us")

I alos like the part about dev-news and dev-chat being easy to mix up? They're on completely different ends of the discord list.

Hexadigital

(that doc also leaks "it was totally the Dolphin devs who pressured us")

Also the fact that we're in the process of a Wii rollout.

04:16

So he continues to leak shit to the public

I was debating posting that in the DevComp discussion but I'm not sure where that doc was initially posted

Hexadigital

The inevitable pastebin: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Lj7py4fQqFh56VYU5OViGD-OkkkX6CiAZbl345WPAU/edit

Where was this even posted?

What did he leak? I haven't heard anything on that matter besides he leaked something

I saw it in another server, no idea where Slacker posted it to though

Suffa

What did he leak? I haven't heard anything on that matter besides he leaked something

All I know is he leaked Rollout stuff to people outside of the RA server.

"I was removed for leaking information, so I can't share much information. Anyway, here's my pick for the Wii rollout we were working on."

The reason I didn't come forward about this when it happened was because goto had a golden boy reputation at the time Goto having a golden boy reputation? I wanna see that alternate reality

He leaked both picks of other devs as well as what devs were under consideration for lower priorities

This entire thing is "I leaked stuff and continue to leak, but I'm gonna complain about everyone and how everyone else is bad and to blame, but I leaked stuff but I'm not the problem, everyone else is!" (edited)

Hexadigital

I also got a DM about an untracked user - just going to respond and say I don't know anything about it

I swear, DryIce messages and comments are the hardest to read

I can read them, I'm used to the Babelfish era of IRC and MSN Messenger hahaha

hahaha

Many users get untracked unfairly makes me giggle

DUT has also been cheating for years

05:59

Pinguupinguu, I know you don’t have the highest opinion of me, but back when I was a CR I looked back at that chat and saw when you decided to promote me. Hopefully you don’t regret that decision. Thanks for giving me a chance.

05:59

He must have done a search on his name

06:02

Tomojin, the QA team is in very good hands with you on board. DOS is going to be amazing and it’ll be one of your finest moments.

Nobody tell him cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

06:06

Darky, I swear if you didn’t get Mario Kart Wii after all the work you put in i’m gonna burn the building down

What work?

06:07

Hopefully not digging ahead of time ssweat

ssweat

Digging yes but somewhat authorized? MK Wii was being used as the "best example" of the MEM1 and MEM2 split

Oh sure, that makes sense

06:08

Also this one is wild

Ghal, despite your troubles I can tell you’re a decent guy. Just make sure to test a bit more and whatever you get for Wii gets done in time. Don’t lose that passion you have.

06:08

Taking shots at ghal for no reason

AuburnRDM

Tomojin, the QA team is in very good hands with you on board. DOS is going to be amazing and it’ll be one of your finest moments.

Nobody tell him cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

Please

sophisticated

Clover is going to be tomojin's big moment lel

lel

Image attachment

I don’t want any major drama to come out of this or for anyone to point fingers: this is not an issue with individuals but rather “the way things are done” as weird as that sounds. It’s a leadership issue, in short.

06:13

I don't want to point fingers, but it's the leaderships fault i got kicked from a private team for leaking

I also was developing plans for not one but two standalones.

06:23

That's also news to me ssweat

ssweat

He says it right after that, but I spoke to him before and those were set plans, rather than anything technical.

AuburnRDM

Darky, I swear if you didn’t get Mario Kart Wii after all the work you put in i’m gonna burn the building down

What work?

Slacker fighting so hard to get Darky up on the priority list and not me is the funniest part for me

Tbh i thought more of slacker before he wrote that

tele

I swear, DryIce messages and comments are the hardest to read

He's watching you...

Image attachment

Hexadigital

The inevitable pastebin: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Lj7py4fQqFh56VYU5OViGD-OkkkX6CiAZbl345WPAU/edit

Kinda offended my attempts at getting him to reconsider and talk him out of his depressive state was not enough to get my own paragraph, no regrets now ban

ban

Nepiki

He's watching you...

He also posted on teles wall

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

07:50

Won't be long now until people start spreading rumours

I tried really hard in gaming chat to spread rumors of a TI-83 rollout and nobody ever believes me :c

Cause everyone knows it ain't happening Smug

Smug

08:46

Pretty sure I explained why at some point

I know why, but I can dream

TI-83 was postponed indefinitely because a ton of games require either Mirage or ION OS, which are what gets hashed in those cases. It also autosaves/autoloads when the core is loaded. So yeah, more work to be done there.

The harsh sting of reality...

I wonder if people bought my “catching up on hashing” thing

Pokemon got mentioned and everyone forgot everything that happened prior, don't worry

It's always Pokemon

https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/32298?comment=315187#315187 RA detectives are having a field day right now Hahaha

Hahaha

WII coming soon?

I was looking at some WII games here on RetroAchievements and I saw that many games already have linked hashes. Have the devs started creating achievements yet?

Hexadigital

The inevitable pastebin: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Lj7py4fQqFh56VYU5OViGD-OkkkX6CiAZbl345WPAU/edit

Well that was definitely a read. The main sticking point is that being removed without notification indicates a failure of leadership because they tried to force an answer through Nepiki who didn't know what had happened Also leaks Wii rollout and that dolphin forced the gamecube deadline I can at least sympathise with the not feeling like whatever you do is good enough, imposter syndrome sucks. Speaking of which, I didn't get a shout-out despite defending them on the lack of player states cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

I felt like like I was making a genuine point and then they brought up their own lack of accountability with the wario world which felt like it tainted the whole thing

Nepiki

Slacker fighting so hard to get Darky up on the priority list and not me is the funniest part for me

I felt so guilty for bringing up Darky knowing you were reading the chat ssweat

ssweat

I hope you know it's not personal in any way

10:40

Same with LordAndrew, certain games are just nightmares to dev and it itsn't a reflection on your skills at all (edited)

BahamutVoid

I felt so guilty for bringing up Darky knowing you were reading the chat ssweat

ssweat

I hope you know it's not personal in any way

Oh no not at all, I am keeping my hands completely off and don't let my personal feelings into it, it's not my decision to make at all lel

lel

(edited)

BahamutVoid

Well that was definitely a read. The main sticking point is that being removed without notification indicates a failure of leadership because they tried to force an answer through Nepiki who didn't know what had happened Also leaks Wii rollout and that dolphin forced the gamecube deadline I can at least sympathise with the not feeling like whatever you do is good enough, imposter syndrome sucks. Speaking of which, I didn't get a shout-out despite defending them on the lack of player states cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

I felt like like I was making a genuine point and then they brought up their own lack of accountability with the wario world which felt like it tainted the whole thing

For what it's worth I did tell him I know that it happened, I just wasn't aware if he was reached out to which was my question to him once I got back, but I guess that got lost in the translation to his doc

(edited)

I read Slacker's doc before my morning commute and had the whole commute to reflect over it. Upon reflection, I can confidently say I wouldn't have changed anything in how this situation was handled. His farewell doc is quite something. I noted many contradictions: 1. He admits to leaking information, but frames his removal from the team as unprofessional. 2. He says he doesn't want drama or finger-pointing, then writes a 4000+ word document pointing fingers at RAdmin. 3. He claims he doesn't want to leak more, then immediately reveals Dolphin forcing a Gamecube deadline. 4. He wants people to appreciate devs more, but takes passive-aggressive shots at several of them like Ghal. Every issue is someone else's fault - the admins, other devs, the "golden boy" (??) goto. He's framing legitimate consequences for his own actions as him being persecuted. The fact of the matter is he chose to dramatically resign rather than accept accountability for his own actions. His farewell doc, which continues to leak info even while acknowledging that's why he was removed, only validates the decision.

I can't wait for the day he tries to come back and become a dev again. Him labeling goto as the "golden boy" is probably the funniest thing I've read in quite some time. (edited)

Worth reading?

SporyTike

Worth reading?

If you like comedy.

So nothing important to know, gotcha

12:53

But is it a risk for the wii rollout announcement ?

yes, it straight up mentions it lol

Yea, he does leak in the doc that's what the rollout is.

Fun

To be honest, I think we should get ahead of this and publicly say we're doing a Wii rollout, with an expected system launch sometime in March 2026.

Sounds good that way we can keep a surprise factor

Yea - not 100% sure it's the right call but would like to pose it to the group here and the rollout team I guess.

Also should make a note to exclude them from further rollouts, I think our dev rules state leaking can cause such moderation

I can prep the youtube video and once Nepiki gets on we can coordinate a release today.

Golden boy Goto is the funniest, because the only one who saw him as a golden boy was himself with his ''flawless sets'' of which half are now demoted Hahaha

Hahaha

12:58

Yeah we can do the announcement today no problem

Wozld be good to do a dev announcement too requesting every dev to lie about it if they get asked if it releases soon with the effect wish to make it more wow

Nep, where did you post the video again? I'm derping on where it is.

One sec

13:00

The plan I had in mind was to first drop the teaser whenever we want, and then the next day do our due diligence and remind people ''don't harass devs, emulator, etc.''

13:00

But I can also combine it PacThumbs

PacThumbs

"Due to a leaker who didn't want to leak anymore information but leaks the rollout in a pastebin, we've decided to announce this early"

Hahaha

13:04

For anyone not in the loop, this is the teaser I have created HamtaroWave

HamtaroWave

I would run it by Lily first if you weren't already planning to

Lilly is informed yeah, but I'll do a rollout ping in a bit because there was one small thing to work out that we may want to add to the docs

1

What time do you want me to set it to go live?

Let me create a hammertime, one sec

SnowPin

What time do you want me to set it to go live?

15 September 2025 18:00 This would be ideal for me

I'll set the video to go 5 mins after that

Perfect, thank you!

at least they cool

Image attachment

Blessed Yoshida Brothers

all set for release 5 mins after your post

Alright

PacThumbs

Oh look it's this exact same joke again

Image attachment

Everytime I hear Lily talk about the hack issue, I feel like her statement changes.

this seems to be where things have landed. i'm not sure what several of these words mean tho

Image attachment

As I understand it, riivolution acts as a frontend launcher for a game substituting its file system library for the real file system library, allowing it to intercept file requests and inject data over the top of a disc without requiring the disc itself be patched/re-burnt.

This is the riivolution xml for Super Mario Galaxy 63

SMG63FULL_USA.xml

158 KB

15:38

I haven't messed with any of the patching stuff yet

The game I've been testing with (New Super Mario Bros Wii) has at least one Riivolution patch (Newer Super Mario Bros Wii). The game image is 4GB. The patch image is 600MB. Rather than patching the 600MB directly into the 4GB image, they sit side-by-side. You launch the patch image, and it launches the original game with the overlayed files.

Lily's mentioned about having to update the hashing algorithm which I hope it isn't true. Esepcially after tele just triggered a ton of them on the site.

616

The biggest problem is how do we identify the game is being loaded through the patcher? The secondary problem is how do we ensure the user is using the correct base game and patch files.

15:41

The current algorithm uses header data and what the header data says is the primary code:

Opened New Super Mario Bros. Wii (USA) (En,Fr,Es) (Rev 2).iso
Hashing 128 byte main header for [P[B.]
Hashing 520 byte title metadata (partition type 0)
Hashing 1024 encrypted clusters (32505856 bytes)
Generated hash 22072114884813d3693de1bf8ab04270

15:42

That doesn't really translate to a filesystem of any sort to which we can detect the injected data.

15:42

The dolphin dev is suggesting that attempting to hash the filesystem catalog itself won't work because it's not guaranteed to be laid out consistently - particularly across dolphin releases.

Image attachment

1

Not sure if it's worth asking them to change it. It's a valid opinion, even if it's not compatible with how the site functions

I never bother with it, they're more just making a fool out of themselves so they aren't really winning like they think they are

Could riivolution be used as a way to cheat in hardcore mode? Seems like this hashing problem needs to be figured out.

Most likely. Someone could cheat by modifying any disc image for any console as long as they don’t modify the portion that’s hashed.

Dolphin Memory Engine can be used the same way, for example by playing an Archipelago randomizer, since other players in the multiworld can send you items before you'd normally have access to them (and you can pre-define what items you start with)

16:27

That's been an issue for GC as well though so I don't know how much of an issue it is

For example, challenge indicators can be seen in the bottom right here

Image attachment

That's really not good https://docs.retroachievements.org/guidelines/users/global-leaderboard-and-achievement-hunting-rules.html#not-allowed-6

Looks like Spory brought it up before here: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002689485005406249/1381370725050613920 and I had mentioned it to RACheats four months ago: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1373522681718247464

The issue is we can't easily track that since people can modify the files and they never get fully hashed

A while ago I thought about some stupid solution which I wanted to talk with Jamiras about at some point but I simply had forgotten about it until just now. The main reason why some systems don't hash full files for my knowledge is due to it taking a lot of time and it's shit for a player to wait like 10 minutes before playing at worse. But what if the game only requires this time on the first launch to identify the game. Hashes the file, grabs the related set and saves the file path + returned game ID for future load ups. Next time the player loads the game file it checks if that file path is known, if so loads up the set for the game ID it expects it to be and while the player can already play, the file gets actually hashed in the background. While waiting people can technically still obtain achievement however, they won't actually sync as long the file is not completely hashed to avoid cheating. If the hash matches the one from the last session it just works as normal, gives feedback that hash was completed and successful and syncs, if not it erases the achievement progress saying a different game was loaded. The only issues would be that people could get achievements, then close the game before hashing was complete and their progress gets reset since it wasn't synced I have no idea if this would actually be possible or if hashing would take too much resources or other reasons it should not work. Maybe even completely missed something obvious in that idea. (edited)

I would think the concern there is that storing it on the device would open it up to manipulation (edited)

I mentioned before that RA hashes should be “launch hashes” while the full hash loads, but it’s not like I can do the coding necessary to pull it off.

How long would a full file verification take on something like a 4gb game?

~/Desktop
❯ md5 "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
MD5 (Onimusha Warlords.iso) = 95ba88f008047afe383438de812d947d

~/Desktop took 5s
❯

17:56

seems to only take 5 seconds on my machine with the baseline md5 tool provided by macOS

it is machine based, bad machines can take up to a minute or two

right - it's cpu intense. but one might argue those low end machines may not be emulating PS2 or GameCube anyway

1

Yeah, just thought about that as well

17:59

if you can't play those, then it is interesting for you if it hashes for a minute - although my 2.5 GB wii rvz just took about 30 secs for me

17:59

But in the end it's something Jamiras needs to decided

If possible, i like the idea of a launch hash and full hash

for speed and tamper-resistance (which seem like the things we're trying to optimize for), md5 may not even be the best hashing algorithm to use

18:03

~/Desktop
❯ time md5 "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
MD5 (Onimusha Warlords.iso) = 95ba88f008047afe383438de812d947d
md5 "Onimusha Warlords.iso"  4.59s user 0.42s system 99% cpu 5.016 total

~/Desktop took 5s
❯ time xxh128sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
d0296aba2b74fc939dd2999fc76c5ace  Onimusha Warlords.iso
xxh128sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso"  0.23s user 0.18s system 99% cpu 0.410 total

xxHash128 is fast and tamper-resistant. I can hash a 4GB iso in 230ms.

18:04

more info on this hashing algorithm: https://xxhash.com/

Blake2sp is worth note as well.

yea, it is mentioned on the xxhash site as well. i'm not sure how reliable their benchmarks table is, but apparently xxHash128 is ~30x faster than Blake2

Blake2sp is about 4-8x faster than Blake2, depending on thread capacity of the CPU. That said, the real question likely becomes how easily implemented the libraries are, especially across platforms.

Original message was deleted or could not be loaded.

True!

Image attachment

1

There's also Blake3 now, but I have no direct familiarity with that one.

Original message was deleted or could not be loaded.

Ah, I didn't see that. Congrats!

pray

1

KickMeElmo

There's also Blake3 now, but I have no direct familiarity with that one.

a coworker broke the build, so i will benchmark now!

Lol, nice

18:34

I generally test against Xenosaga Episode 1. It's nearly a full 8GiB and compresses for shit, so it's a good test of hashing speed.

18:34

Basically a worst case scenario

BahamutVoid

True!

Hahaha

onimusha is the only game i have at my disposal at the moment

18:37

ya b3sum is ungodly faster than b2sum

18:37

will have a scientific measurement in a moment

18:39

Benchmark 1: xxh128sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
  Time (mean ± σ):     397.8 ms ±   1.8 ms    [User: 210.3 ms, System: 187.0 ms]
  Range (min … max):   396.3 ms … 401.3 ms    10 runs

Benchmark 2: b3sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
  Time (mean ± σ):     200.6 ms ±   0.8 ms    [User: 2142.2 ms, System: 389.4 ms]
  Range (min … max):   199.1 ms … 202.0 ms    14 runs

Benchmark 3: b2sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
  Time (mean ± σ):      3.048 s ±  0.020 s    [User: 2.806 s, System: 0.238 s]
  Range (min … max):    3.020 s …  3.085 s    10 runs

Benchmark 4: md5 "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
  Time (mean ± σ):      5.024 s ±  0.036 s    [User: 4.576 s, System: 0.444 s]
  Range (min … max):    4.996 s …  5.111 s    10 runs

Summary
  b3sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso" ran
    1.98 ± 0.01 times faster than xxh128sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
   15.20 ± 0.12 times faster than b2sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
   25.05 ± 0.21 times faster than md5 "Onimusha Warlords.iso"

18:39

b3sum is the winner

Oh damn.

I know shits getting serious when I see Elmo chiming in hahaha

hahaha

I mean, I do keep a general eye on things. It just usually doesn't require my input.

Always watching. Waiting for the moment to pounce.

I would generally expect the drive to have more impact than the algorithm. I/O is almost always the bottleneck.

19:33

for speed and tamper-resistance...

The other thing to consider is collision rate.

19:34

And we wouldn't just be able to swap out the algorithm without regenerating every hash already in the database. Even if we only did it for disc-based systems, that's still a lot of hashes that will change.

Right, we'd only be able to swap the algorithm for new systems. Those 4 benchmarks above were on my MacBook Pro, ran subsequently after 3 warmup runs each. The SSD speed is about 3.5GB/s read write. xxh128 does have a note about collision tests in their docs - I didn't check b3sum:

All variants successfully complete the SMHasher test suite which evaluates the quality of hash functions (collision, dispersion and randomness). Additional tests, which evaluate more thoroughly speed and collision properties of 64-bit hashes, are also provided.

The SSD speed is about 3.5GB/s read write.

How big is Onimusha Warlords? You'd only be able to read 700MB in 200ms, and that's just the I/O.

The ISO is ~4GB

19:44

I was mistaken about my disk speed. It's ~5200MB/s read, ~6400MB/s write.

That still makes me weary of these results:

Benchmark 2: b3sum "Onimusha Warlords.iso"
  Time (mean ± σ):     200.6 ms ±   0.8 ms    [User: 2142.2 ms, System: 389.4 ms]
  Range (min … max):   199.1 ms … 202.0 ms    14 runs

200ms to load a 4GB file implies 20GB/s read.

Let me run a formal test

19:48

Image attachment

19:48

Let me dig in to why b3sum is so fast despite the file size

19:52

Time (mean ± σ): 200.6 ms ± 0.8 ms [User: 2142.2 ms, System: 389.4 ms] 200.6ms is wall clock time, but CPU time was 2142.2ms. It's using all my CPU cores (14+) simultaneously. That probably makes it not a great candidate for an alternative hashing algorithm - it's just spreading CPU time across a bunch of cores, and I just happen to have a bunch of cores. xxHash128 is single-threaded.

I wouldn't argue that it's not a great candidate. Being able to speed up is a good thing, especially in an age where even phones usually have 4-8 cores. If you're worried about the benchmark, just pin it to one core. Re:blake3, I found the collision resistance in their closed issues: 2^128 at default size, which is 64 characters, double the length of md5. It can be trimmed down to md5-length if that makes it easier to adopt, but it'd lower the resistance to 2^64. In practice I'm not sure how much is needed to be reasonably safe.

21:37

I would assume the most important question is simply what can be easily integrated on all supported platforms. And that is a question I don't know the answer to.

BahamutVoid

Click to see attachment 🖼️

https://x.com/HereBeYourDrink/status/1967643691235033519 No way look who I just found in the wild

Drink (@HereBeYourDrink)

@Wario64 Oh boy, incoming more grindy, damageless, RNG & speedrun achievements.

If they hate RA so much why are they here?

Need something to complain about

They'll have to complain off-site from now on. I just ran through my checklist here: https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/453242743292952578/1411346191253241966 They tick 0 boxes, and all their on-site discourse is negative. I muted them.

ZeldaHeart

1

Final tally for the night on Twitter: 300+ retweets, 1.3k likes, and about 500 new followers. This is probably one of, if not the best-performing tweets we've ever had, definitely excited to see how many new users we gain from this lel

lel

Image attachment

excellent!

Thanks wario64 prayo

prayo

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This seems problematic https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002687577280757770/1417312026371555442

wes

This seems problematic https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002687577280757770/1417312026371555442

I'm testing this on new builds. I was able to do it on the ones mentioned in the thread.

03:01

So it doesnt work on the latest stable build which is good

03:04

Welp! confirmed, on nightly releases you can load states if youre loading them from the manu's on pcsx2.

03:05

@wes do we have someone in our server who handles PCSX2 since Sten doesn't anymore?

03:11

Trying to pinpoint exactly which version it changed at

Ah it's Stern here. I found the issue 2.5.23 it broke with this https://github.com/PCSX2/pcsx2/pull/12763

FSUI: Add Save State Incompatible Warning by SternXD · Pull Reques...

Before: After: Description of Changes This pull request adds an explicit warning in Fullscreen UI when a user attempts to load a save state that is incompatible or outdated. Rationale behind Chan...

03:32

Took a little bit to narrow it down

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These people

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SnowPin

@wes do we have someone in our server who handles PCSX2 since Sten doesn't anymore?

CookieMonster I think

@Nepiki can you make a community post warning everyone that they have until 19 September 2025 14:00:00 to update PCSX2 to nightly 2.5.162 or above. All previous versions as well ss 2.4 stable will be un supported at that time. Stable will be resupported when 2.5 releases. (edited)

Sure thing, will get to that after work PacThumbs

PacThumbs

1

I'll probably have a ManicEmu announcement tomorrow as well from the sounds of it.

15:26

And now we hope people dont go digging as to why and abuse it for a few days

I might post the draft here for the announcement first in that case, I'm thinking of how to make it without saying there was an exploit found, but that is probably what people will assume so that may lead to discussion about it

You can always be vague and mention "achievement stability issues"

Ah yeah that could work

## Important notice regarding PCSX2

Due to recently-discovered achievement stability issues, **all nightly versions of PCSX2 must be updated to version 2.5.162 or above** by <t:1758286800:F> to continue earning hardcore achievements. Unfortunately, the stable version of PCSX2 will be incompatible with hardcore achievements until the next stable release (2.5). We have no estimated period for the next stable release, so please use nightly in the meantime. The nightly version can be found on the homepage of [PCSX2](https://pcsx2.net/) by clicking the "Latest Nightly" button. 

And of course, please do not bother the PCSX2 developers about it; assuredly, they are hard at work to resolve the issues, and PCSX2 Stable will be re-enabled for hardcore achievements when we confirmed the issues are resolved. Thank you for understanding!

(edited)

15:54

I do expect developers pinging us about it, I guess we can be honest to them that an exploit was found at least (edited)

good call

Unfortunately, the stable release of PCSX2 will temporarily be incompatible

I think "temporarily" should be removed. It implies that the current stable will become available again once the next stable is released.

Good call, removed it ✅

And this will also need to be shared on the news widget for people who don't use discord.

Yep, I'll have a post ready there as well; still pondering if I should do social media or not as well, might be good if we do though

I'm a little weary about such a short window as many affected users won't visit discord or the webpage until after they unlock one or more achievements in softcore.

16:15

But I understand the concern over the severity.

16:16

And users don't read things anyway. Even with a news post and a popup in the emulator, I bet we get a few hundred users who won't know what's going on.

Still, it probably wouldn't hurt to consider a future tooling improvement to sending arbitrary "announcement achievements" to select user agents

so please use nightly in the meantime

Suggest:

so please use nightly in the meantime (link on Downloads page, then look in the right column)

Or something similar. (edited)

Updated it to:

so please use nightly in the meantime. The nightly version can be found on the homepage of PCSX2 by clicking the "Latest Nightly" button.

Pretty much guaranteed someone is going to blab in the forum thread / Reddit "SAVE STATES WORK IN HARDCORE". I'm pretty sure that's mute worthy and maybe even untrack worthy on the forum. On Reddit, we should be prepared to wipe those comments.

I'd go as far as to say untrack worthy because that means they are aware and may potentially have used it (edited)

16:35

We're very strict in not sharing exploits

On our forum maybe it's just best to lock the thread

Good call, I agree with that

16:38

But that may also make users suspicious, hm

16:39

Then again for other forums it's perfectly normal do to locked announcement threads so maybe we also need to follow that more regularly

Yea on this one in particular I don't know what constructive chatter could be had. It's either going to be people complaining or people posting their "gotcha" comment about the real reason we have to do this.

I would go with locked yeah. This is an announcement, not a discussion (edited)

Jamiras

I'm a little weary about such a short window as many affected users won't visit discord or the webpage until after they unlock one or more achievements in softcore.

Wouldn't they get the "not supported" error when launching a game? (edited)

The challenge is players who are mid-session when we flip the switch. The emulator will claim they're unlocking stuff in hardcore, but the server will record it as softcore.

16:51

I think a tooling improvement we should make is the ability to send arbitrary "announcement achievements" to emulators/user agents so we can reach players who never visit the website or Discord

True but I feel like 3 days should be enough time to check something discord. Website, reddit x

Agreed, but we actually have a large chunk of players who leave us on as a background feature and almost never visit the website

Would this be something similar to the set rules proposal?

16:54

You're correct that a lot of people just don't visit the site/discord

It wouldn't - this tool would be only for critical announcements (simplified technical explanation: it shoehorns itself into the achievement list by tricking emulators into thinking the announcement is an achievement)

When I'm travelling, I usually don't check the website at all, and discord only every couple days. Given that I basically have discord open if I'm at my computer, that's quite a cut-back. There's probably going to be players who already don't visit discord at all, and only visit the webpage every few weeks.

16:54

I'm frequently amazed when someone has issues logging in because their token has expired. They're good for two weeks!

wes

It wouldn't - this tool would be only for critical announcements (simplified technical explanation: it shoehorns itself into the achievement list by tricking emulators into thinking the announcement is an achievement)

I'm confused, I thought that was what I meant https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/1136420280881922069/1139222825656406096

16:55

Top of the achievements list in-emulator, similar to the out-of-date announcement (edited)

In general, achievements should be achievements

We pop the announcements by sending a fake achievement to the emulator, and setting its logic to instantly unlock the achievement so it appears as soon as the user opens a game.

16:56

This whole thing is a workaround because we don't have a real announcement system for emulators

Gotcha

My biggest concern is its gonna spread about the save states and its gonna be abused.

We do have the banner thingy we use for downtime announcements, but that still requires the user actually visit the website.

16:57

And read

19 September 2025 14:00:00

16:57

Okay so 3 days

Yea, I strongly agree that no matter what tooling improvements we make, there are always gonna be people who get snagged and blame us.

I wouldn't be too concerned about users abusing it for this time frame, I'm assuming it was already known about by certain users for even longer (edited)

Yeah, its only been broken since June 29th

17:09

Now I'm gonna be paranoid and watching the changes like a hawk and checking it every few days.

Alright on Reddit it looks like I can lock comments anyway so unless people start making new threads, we should be good there

1

Oh looks like I missed this post by Sten as well. https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/757767535293890682/1417391769850613831

17:59

I don't know if that emulator is popular enough to warrant a new post or not.

Hm I can include it in the post, I don't think many people use it but best to clarify

1

So Sten is saying that the Xbox version won't be fixed until he has time to work on the new update but has no idea when that will be. He said 2.0.8.4 was in march but no idea when hes doing 2.0.8.5. Might have to block hardcore support for it completely until he gets to releasing the update who knows when.

20:38

I'm not sure how much of our playerbase actually use that emulator though.

BahamutVoid

You can always be vague and mention "achievement stability issues"

Ah yes, the Nintendo strategy

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21:16

(they posted that whenever they patched out a way to homebrew a 3DS)

It just works

I've been chatting a lot with meleu over the last week. He has been sharing a lot of stories about RA's early days. So many people pitching in when they weren't even sure this was a good idea and when tooling was extremely primitive is pretty inspiring. I've noticed lately that tonally, our community is a lot different now than it was then. My perception is newer users have a tendency to treat RA like a commercial service they're consuming rather than a community project they could help build, and the ratio of consumers to contributors is growing lopsided. I wonder if there are things we can do to redouble the collaborative spirit and help users see themselves as potential contributors rather than consumers.

They need more stuff like points unlocking set requests. I think curated lists would get a ton of use and could be unlocked the same way. I guess in the site’s current form, they’d be personal hubs that only the player can edit. Public visibility would be up to them.

00:38

But yeah, the ways they can currently contribute is mostly limited to being in the Discord server.

00:41

Another thing I think would be cool is if we had forum topics exclusively for users with set requests for a game + any devs who have it marked as “want to dev” - the latter has so much potential, but it’s just an invisible list for most.

00:43

Basically, people need more reasons to actually use the site. I think if we do that, they’ll naturally wander into figuring out how to contribute.

00:44

Could also bring back the rating system, but do it right lel

lel

Slightly off-topic but seeing meleu's name reminded me that one of the first things sting did when I became a mod was them accusing meleu of being corrupt

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I remember that

01:09

I think you’re the only person who got mod without a vote lel

lel

Admin without vote maybe? hahaha

hahaha

Sting sent me some stuff when I became mod as well, but nothing too detailed like that lel

lel

He tends to message everyone who gets a higher rank and rant about something

wes

I've been chatting a lot with meleu over the last week. He has been sharing a lot of stories about RA's early days. So many people pitching in when they weren't even sure this was a good idea and when tooling was extremely primitive is pretty inspiring. I've noticed lately that tonally, our community is a lot different now than it was then. My perception is newer users have a tendency to treat RA like a commercial service they're consuming rather than a community project they could help build, and the ratio of consumers to contributors is growing lopsided. I wonder if there are things we can do to redouble the collaborative spirit and help users see themselves as potential contributors rather than consumers.

On-topic, I think we have a lot better structure nowadays for collaboration. Before, we just had dev. You want to help out? Become a dev (I still think this is good route for most people) Nowadays we have Art-Helpers, Writers, Play-Testers, RANews contributors, RAtube submissions, an actual web team, site translations, and a dedicated Cleanup Crew. Not forgetting DevComp, QATeam, and Cheat Team for higher level stuff If there's anything I would want to see most it's highlighting the different ways non-devs can contribute. I like to think the discord revamp helped but as mentioned, website contribution still doesn't have good representation. There's a few ways we could go with this, we could:

Hold an event specifically for non-devs to contribute to the site. We have something similar in Devember/House Cleaning for save files/states, but this can be expanded to new icons, writing changes, and page/hub maintanence. Historically, event badges work best as a motivator (we badly need to tap into the tidal wave of potential states that could be used to fix active tickets or be available for when a ticket is filed)
A weekly/monthly (or whenever it's relevant) user highlight for significant contribution while not being attached to a team. There's a general misunderstanding in the community that you're not able to contribute unless you're attached to a team. Regular highlights like this would remind people that there's always a way to contribute
Add a HOW YOU CAN HELP section to the homepage which includes all of the options that's in the "Report an issue" button: https://retroachievements.org/achievement/171106/report-issue This would also include steps to becoming a developer and reminder that everyone in the community is a volunteer and they can be too

01:38

To add to this, I would love to see a way for users to upload new mastery icons on the site, maybe via the "Report an issue" button. This would send it in a message directly to Art-Team which would hold an Icon Gauntlet without needing the discord. I'm hesitant to include achievement badges because they're usually done as a matching batch

uhh, i was just sent a whole google doc on wave3prime15

That's the underaged user right?

i don't even know anymore

01:42

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TEFAwYik_FmBlPY02uMK8Agskt43Lm95pf_PL_89H_E/edit?tab=t.0

Wave3Prime15 Exposé Document MK II

Hey guys so um, I've been screenshotting a lot of Wave3Prime15’s malicious online activity (HEAVY amounts of cyberbullying AND SOME FEDERAL OFFENSES I BELIEVE) and I don't want to just keep having them drift around in my camera roll and have to go on a treasure hunt whenever I want to show evide...

There was an expose video on them last year https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/1318414091114647655/1318414094306512998

AuburnRDM

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TEFAwYik_FmBlPY02uMK8Agskt43Lm95pf_PL_89H_E/edit?tab=t.0

This reads like it's from someone their age

01:46

And naked flashbang

01:50

Ignoring him will not do anything, he will keep doing this over and over and the only way to stop him is either his parents somehow being contacted or authorities being involved. Something has to be done.

I'm not sure what they expect us to do, we don't have their personal information so neither are an option. Terrible people exist online, it's not our job to police that and we typically don't moderate for actions out side of RA. They already aren't in the discord and there's barely any site posts (edited)

01:50

Would be worth checking their DMs just in case (edited)

@Nepiki If you want to coordinate with Mafty in Integration, Wes as signed off on core licensing on their end and I've confirmed the emulator meets our standards from what I could tell by testing and working with them the last while. He's looking to coordinate their announcement/launch with ours

feel free to add to the post if anyone finds any issues to dm me on site or discord and I can relay to the emu team to get fixed. Hopefully I caught everything for us

(edited)

1

02:36

He's fine with DMing him directly and he can provide any info you want to compile in the announcement

BahamutVoid

On-topic, I think we have a lot better structure nowadays for collaboration. Before, we just had dev. You want to help out? Become a dev (I still think this is good route for most people) Nowadays we have Art-Helpers, Writers, Play-Testers, RANews contributors, RAtube submissions, an actual web team, site translations, and a dedicated Cleanup Crew. Not forgetting DevComp, QATeam, and Cheat Team for higher level stuff If there's anything I would want to see most it's highlighting the different ways non-devs can contribute. I like to think the discord revamp helped but as mentioned, website contribution still doesn't have good representation. There's a few ways we could go with this, we could:

Hold an event specifically for non-devs to contribute to the site. We have something similar in Devember/House Cleaning for save files/states, but this can be expanded to new icons, writing changes, and page/hub maintanence. Historically, event badges work best as a motivator (we badly need to tap into the tidal wave of potential states that could be used to fix active tickets or be available for when a ticket is filed)
A weekly/monthly (or whenever it's relevant) user highlight for significant contribution while not being attached to a team. There's a general misunderstanding in the community that you're not able to contribute unless you're attached to a team. Regular highlights like this would remind people that there's always a way to contribute
Add a HOW YOU CAN HELP section to the homepage which includes all of the options that's in the "Report an issue" button: https://retroachievements.org/achievement/171106/report-issue This would also include steps to becoming a developer and reminder that everyone in the community is a volunteer and they can be too

I think these are great ideas. I definitely want to think deeply over the coming days about how we can remind newer members of the community that without the hundreds of people contributing to the project, none of this would be possible. Hopefully, we can inspire more people to contribute.

ZeldaHeart

1

SnowPin

@Nepiki If you want to coordinate with Mafty in Integration, Wes as signed off on core licensing on their end and I've confirmed the emulator meets our standards from what I could tell by testing and working with them the last while. He's looking to coordinate their announcement/launch with ours

feel free to add to the post if anyone finds any issues to dm me on site or discord and I can relay to the emu team to get fixed. Hopefully I caught everything for us

(edited)

Alright, I'll get in contact with him later PacThumbs

PacThumbs

Not sure if this is something we should warn the user about:

Btw if anyone needs a save file, saved at last boss.

Probably worth warning

Hardcore player so definitely

When the role checks out

Image attachment

Manic EMU announcement is planned for today, in a few hours

1

Ping me when the announcement goes out and I'll flip the switch for the download page.

16:34

Or i guess I could just do it now. Incase I'm busy lol

It looks like they got approved so you can flip it yeah

16:36

I got the announcement written up so I can do it at any time the switch is flipped

Oh sorry its done

No worries, he DMed me so I got it out PacThumbs

PacThumbs

17:05

Very tame response so far, hoping the anti-premium people will chill out because they can just sideload it for free but we'll see

@SnowPin did you have a playback? (edited)

18:01

Image attachment

AuburnRDM

@SnowPin did you have a playback? (edited)

I do.

18:03

I don't think I have anything that we don't support though. I'd have to unlink to test

https://github.com/RetroAchievements/RAWeb/pull/3673

allow QA and set authors access to achievements for incompatible ha...

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002695123030773790/1388105488473784471

https://retroachievements.org/user/Falcus/game/793/activity

That would explain it

18:17

I could temporarily remove Falcus' QA role if he doesn't object for testing lel

lel

QA sets the testers, shouldn't be on by default

18:18

Yeah do it hahaha

hahaha

Yep it's the QA role

Image attachment

Wouldn't have expected QA to auto tag as a tester

The feature was requested by a QA member. https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002695123030773790/1388105488473784471

The hell happened in general last night

Image attachment

@Nepiki I updated the PCSX2 requirement to 2.5.162 and above, not sure if you want to make a follow-up announcement to say it's done

Sounds good, I'll do a short non-ping announcement notifying people about it as well as social media

1

Nepiki

Sounds good, I'll do a short non-ping announcement notifying people about it as well as social media

Oh and XBSX2 has been fully disabled until the patch goes out.

Check ✅

AuburnRDM

The hell happened in general last night

Streamer's dad died so people jumped to celebrating because they don't like them

15:39

Standard internet

wes

Pretty much guaranteed someone is going to blab in the forum thread / Reddit "SAVE STATES WORK IN HARDCORE". I'm pretty sure that's mute worthy and maybe even untrack worthy on the forum. On Reddit, we should be prepared to wipe those comments.

Not sure if it matters now that the switch has been thrown, but people "know": https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/752271759138357249/1418638370547961856

Image attachment

It's wild that PCSX2 has only implemented this as a UI-only check

Maybe worth pinning the news post for the weekend? It's already fallen to page 2.

Sure, repinned. I'm also gonna nudge about the UI-only nature of this fix in #integration

I think (didn't confirm myself) every PCSX2 update starts with what has changed so I wouldn't be surprised if people noticed right away (edited)

Yeah, it was noticed pretty much right away

FYI: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/757767535293890682/1418973503280910502 PCSX2 2.4.0 is now supported in hardcore again. Our tools still don't support allowlisting ranges, so we made a temporary band-aid change in the server code.

ZeldaHeart

1

Is this purely for stable? No versions before it right? I can make a follow-up announcement for it, given the amount of people I had in my DMs I'm sure they happily welcome it (edited)

Yea, latest stable only.

@BahamutVoid You might be able to weigh in on this - Alexdatadestroyer is digging in on some of the changes we recently made to the "top masteries" stuff: https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/1299083037908406402/1419050976140202044

Responded

Got a DM from Whoops that supposedly PS1 hashing seems to be broken in the latest Bizhawk build, anyone aware of this? I don't use Bizhawk so I don't know what's up with it

Image attachment

Looking at the referenced PR, the changes wouldn't have changed the hash, just whether or not a hash could be generated.

Suffa

Oh, it's that guy again. Buginhead and Buginhead55 https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1169696672243265537 (edited)

Apparently discord is banning this user from our discord when he gives discord his phone number.

Image attachment

I dont think there's anything we can do for that lmao

20:48

Unless hes on our ban list as another user and his number stays tied to that account?

I told him that this is between him and discord. I can't help him.

21:12

Wtf, does this guy think he's Uchia? https://retroachievements.org/admin.php?action=alt_identifier&u=RetroGamer1032

Goddamn

I got this message the other day and still don't know how to respond

Image attachment

23:21

I'm definitely on board with never letting slacker get the dev role again

Honestly based on the fact he leaked full on conversations, espeislly ones about developer picks and their priority due to issues in the past. I would be in favour of just straight out banning him. (edited)

23:28

He leaked far more than I thought he did and who knows what else he sent out. Betrayed the trust of anyone in that team that anything said in there was confidential. That would lead to full termination in any position outside of RA. Why not here.

23:30

And this is a guy who claims to have his own startup he created. Imagine if his staff just went around telling everyone everything said behind closed doors about their projects.

I'm not usually good at admitting anything emotional but this has really shaken me. I'm probably just exhuasted from the newborn

BahamutVoid

I'm not usually good at admitting anything emotional but this has really shaken me. I'm probably just exhuasted from the newborn

Honestly its pretty nice to see a something like this come from Blended. It's shitty it had to be this way, when he should have never known from the start, but at least hes admitting his fault in the situation too.

23:31

I would have expected him to blow up based off his attitude just a few years ago.

Damn, it really is 2006

Image attachment

SnowPin

He leaked far more than I thought he did and who knows what else he sent out. Betrayed the trust of anyone in that team that anything said in there was confidential. That would lead to full termination in any position outside of RA. Why not here.

For real, I thought the leaks weren't severe at first but this goes far beyond what I expected

00:53

Wild how far he went

It just looks like he joined the team to sabotage anyone with some sort of rank by leaking everything negative that was said about any user based off ttheir history.

This is an AI bot trying to get forum approval, right?

Image attachment

1

definitely looks like it

"...above - the..." Really looks like AI

03:43

Yeah, the entire paragraph has many tells.

Blocked them bigboss

bigboss

bigboss

1

SnowPin

Honestly based on the fact he leaked full on conversations, espeislly ones about developer picks and their priority due to issues in the past. I would be in favour of just straight out banning him. (edited)

BenGhazi leaked the entirety of admin/mod chat and eventually just came back as FBern. If I remember correctly, he confronted us about being BenGhazi and wanted to have everything transferred to the new account so he could maintain his old work. Obviously he’s not permitted to be on any teams, but he’s one of those people who would have been less trouble to not straight up ban so we kinda just forgot about the whole thing. It’s been weirdly effective…

@Nepiki What happened with Gudra?

11:21

They probably deserved it regardless

BahamutVoid

@Nepiki What happened with Gudra?

Muted him for this post

Image attachment

11:23

Might remove it in an hour but I'm also not objected to letting him sit out the whole 24 hours

Same with Capthecat6

Capt is from https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002697251812020234/1419987782771802144

Gotcha, sorry about that

No worries PacThumbs

PacThumbs

I’m really frustrated by this situation with Slacker and think we should take some sort of action. Nothing is off the table. @Moderator See: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002689485005406249/1419812308644921384 He leaked entire conversations from the rollout team chat.

tele

BenGhazi leaked the entirety of admin/mod chat and eventually just came back as FBern. If I remember correctly, he confronted us about being BenGhazi and wanted to have everything transferred to the new account so he could maintain his old work. Obviously he’s not permitted to be on any teams, but he’s one of those people who would have been less trouble to not straight up ban so we kinda just forgot about the whole thing. It’s been weirdly effective…

This was always before my time when he leaked stuff.

wes

I’m really frustrated by this situation with Slacker and think we should take some sort of action. Nothing is off the table. @Moderator See: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002689485005406249/1419812308644921384 He leaked entire conversations from the rollout team chat.

I feel he already has burned all the bridges at this point, so not sure if we want to take any moderation action beyond that; if he makes any public callouts, then we for sure can That said, DevComp could probably be brought into the loop so they can decide what to do if Slacker ever decides to return to development (e.g. ban him from the program, force him through juniors)

This also especially hits hard because they complained that they weren't informed that they lost the roll immediately and nepiki spent all that time trying to appease them

I don't think he should be even allowed back. From the sounds of it he leaked full chats about people to the user themselves which just takes one of them posting it publicly to make an entire team of people look bad.

13:04

There's a big difference between leaking pick order or what group people are in and leaking entire chat logs of why people don't deserve to be top priority picks.

I don't think I could pick on an action without bias right now so I'm happy with whatever the team decides

I feel it's a bit tricky to do moderation action because while we have clear proof, it wasn't leaked within RA itself; the document to my knowledge was not shared on RA for example

13:16

So we'd be taking action on other people their (confirmed) words

I think that’s fine in this case. Leaking stuff isn’t always going to be done on-site - it’s the fact it was leaked at all and we conclusively know it happened.

13:28

At a minimum, I feel an extended, if not permanent, devban is appropriate here. These sorts of leaks are malicious, and they greatly undermine the time and effort many people donate to RA for free.

That I agree with

Same. I think dev repercussions and no further mod action (mutes, etc) until it spills over to RA itself (edited)

Disappointed to hear this about Slacker I didn't think he'd be that kind of person but seems to be deliberately trying to cause problems at this point

i'm getting tired of seeing crap like this on the forum.

Image attachment

17:20

this user in particular i know has made other inflammatory posts elsewhere, but dunking on newly-graduated developers when we wouldn't even have a website without the developers is a low blow.

17:20

i'm thinking about bumping the priority of some kind of infraction system / better moderation tools in my backlog of stuff to build

prayo

1

Oh, I didn't see you muted them, I just responded hahaha

hahaha

Image attachment

no worries at all, that's a good response

17:22

i've noticed these "race conditions" happen on the forum often

it makes me wonder if it may be desirable to poll for new replies and auto-update the page if you're typing a response

How did he even reach the conclusion the new grad is a child

17:28

To my knowledge he is anything but a child

You guys are a lot nicer to me when it comes to leaks

I go for the throat.

I have no strong opinion for Slacker punishment btw so I'll go along with what the team wants, just figured a (permanent) devban would be enough lel

lel

wes

this user in particular i know has made other inflammatory posts elsewhere, but dunking on newly-graduated developers when we wouldn't even have a website without the developers is a low blow.

In general I think it's time we (or at least, myself) become more stricter with mutes, it's ridiculous how the forum gets turned into a toxic minefield for literally no reason. doomhiker shortly after his unmute immediately started acting like a mod again and I'm think of a permanent mute or at least a very long one the next time he crosses the line (edited)

i'm wondering why people post such toxic things to begin with - like what is the root cause of this

17:32

is there some way that we're misaligning community expectations?

For what it's worth this is the first time ever on a grad post that a toxic comment was posted, never seen it before

I think it's less about the community, and just that retro achievements are a niche and tend to attract older/stubborn people

yea i guess what i mean is like, attacks targeted towards developers. maybe this is going back to my fixation on the consumer mindset problem

17:34

it's very common on reddit, for example

I mute them when I see them but they just keep popping up, like I'm playing whac-a-mole

I wonder if it's just that we're attracting a very different audience now that RA is popping up in things like new articles and hundreds of clickbait YouTube videos - I haven't watched any of those but I doubt they put much mention into the community-driven aspects of the site, just "here's a way to get achievements just like Steam/Xbox/PlayStation while playing older games"

Yea, meleu had very similar feedback when I asked for his advice on the subject. I wonder if there are more hooks we can add to the website or ways we can speak to the community to reinforce that this is all homegrown and anyone can get involved

I guess a lot of the people we mute don't really partake in the Discord, and it's a lot rougher to contribute on the site; you can't become a dev, reaching out to devs to change icons/writing is a hassle, etc.

Could we do something like an automated "here's how to contribute" DM whenever a player gets their first mastery/completion or reaches 1000 points in either mode?

I've thought about ideas like that too. Now that our email capabilities are improving, we could do either DMs or "Welcome" emails or something.

pinguu is discord friends with the Dangobee account (edited)

Image attachment

I think that's him, he was in goto's server as well

18:44

Still has my note from the 15 minutes I saw him for lel

lel

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18:46

excerpt

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yea i was under the impression that person was Euclide

Suffa

pinguu is discord friends with the Dangobee account (edited)

I've confirmed this is definitely Euclide. Banned.

Suppose I should report this to you guys, though from what I remember he was a headache at some point anyway.

Image attachment

23:48

‍♂️

He was messaging Suffa as well: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002689485005406249/1419750474432643072

I missed the dangobee stuff when it was going on, but I could have told everyone that was Euclide. lel

lel

he was using that name the last time I was in a server with him, Celeryyy, ackman, and other banned folks (edited)

Myrient is now hosting RA sets, but they’re going by UltraGodAzgorath’s DATs https://myrient.erista.me/files/

Content Listing | Myrient

Experience an unmatched video game archive with fast downloads and no ads.

22:46

Myrient is one of our auto-modded terms, right?

I'm pretty sure it is automodded

22:47

Huh, is that the person behind the RA files on internet archive?

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thumbs2

2

Suffa

Huh, is that the person behind the RA files on internet archive?

If you’re referring to this, it was wholee: https://archive.org/details/retroachievements_collection_v5 he went MIA, but that collection was impressive in the sense that it was almost entirely automated

Full Retroachievements collection, Updated Jul 3, 2024 : Free Downl...

Disclaimer: Please respect RA.org's policies and do not post links to ROMs on their website or Discord. Due to archive.org size and file count limits, this...

22:50

~~I helped him track down around 200 hashes, but also had him put up the disclaimers and made sure I wasn’t mentioned anywhere~~

22:52

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1

1

1

Suffa

Huh, is that the person behind the RA files on internet archive?

UGA occasionally asks me if I want to take over his DATs because he’s been running into the exact thing I warned him about when he started doing them lel

lel

am i missing something or is there no easy way to get to manage claims from the game2 view? (edited)

It’s missing currently

Lily send me a build of Dolphin during initial testing that still had her login tokens and such all saved so it instant logged me in as her, this time she did it with a public release in rollout channel ssweat

ssweat

Admin/Mods don't have the ability to link hashes to inactive consoles anymore?

Hmm, that doesn’t sound right. Maybe a bug

Is there a way to manually add it to the site? I just know dolphin gives me this error now.

Image attachment

Can you try giving yourself the hash manager role

13:02

Then trying again

13:02

As an admin you can give yourself any role

Can confirm hash manager is currently needed. I had to add that the other day

13:07

Just thought that was intended ssweat

ssweat

Ah, I have no idea why I didn't think I could give myself the role

13:32

my brain is still programmed to root having to do most of the higher ranks

Adding the role worked

https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/752271759138357249/1421122055994081320 (edited)

Acting as an unofficial rep for RA support, ended up making us look bad
Generally made people feel uncomfortable in chat, puts users like HauntedCache and JamesBond to shame
Username and icon they refused to change

No thanks

17:39

He just wants back because wii I'm sure

He always wants to come back and feels like he has been treated unfairly

17:53

Also often uses some proxies like SuperRAGamer18 to talk through or that share stuff with him

17:53

He still does not play games btw

Yeaaaahhhh, I really don't feel like dealing with it again. Especially for someone who doesn't actually participate on the site.

17:55

speaking of fet when looking for his profile - https://retroachievements.org/achievement/327835

Thanks Fetishmachine in ~Homebrew~ Flappy Birds 2 (Interton VC 4000)

Fly through 900 pipes in Rocket Mode. [No Pipe Glitch] [10 points, Progression], won by 13 players - ~Homebrew~ Flappy Birds 2 for Interton VC 4000

17:55

~~Did he name change or delete his profile? I can't seem to find it on the site?~~ Not sure if intentional wes, but when you search "Fetish" it doesn't seem to pull his profile the results are kinda off since only 1 of them have fetish in the name. (edited)

17:57

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I think it's because his username is thefetishmachine

I figured it would pull any names with "fetish" in it but then noticed all the others dont even have it at all lol

SnowPin

speaking of fet when looking for his profile - https://retroachievements.org/achievement/327835

That's not writing compliant Smug

Smug

18:01

https://docs.retroachievements.org/guidelines/content/writing-policy.html#username-references

RetroAchievements Docs

Inactive dev so we can definitely change that Hahaha

Hahaha

I better watch out

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Whinge

2

18:07

Mini mario vs the special world hahaha

hahaha

Baby achievement sleepo

sleepo

wes

https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/752271759138357249/1421122055994081320 (edited)

Fet shall never be allowed back. He gave every indication that he just doesn't understand that his behavior is undesirable, has no idea how his own demeanor made other users uncomfortable.

Agreed - I spoke with him multiple times prior to his Discord ban, and he didn't understand why people might be uncomfortable with him spamming hugging emojis and saying "I love you" to minors in the general chat

Generally I understand your opinions, but time passed so I am at least willing to read their mail to see if they self-reflect what went wrong and want to change that behavior themselves

08:17

And probably a forced rename if so because the name is weird by itself

They can send a message, sure. I'm not expecting them to acknowledge anything they did though

14:41

Also can't they just message radmin instead of the modmail? It's not like he's banned

AuburnRDM

Also can't they just message radmin instead of the modmail? It's not like he's banned

Probably doesn't even know of the account since, you know... he doesn't actually participate anywhere but in discord chatting.

Image attachment

14:43

That was on his wall

14:43

How? That's way after he was muted and that user seems fresh

14:44

Older account, i guess. But still

probably from another discord?

Wouldn't shock me

Probably some girl he was DMing tbh

AuburnRDM

How? That's way after he was muted and that user seems fresh

Did we ever mute Fet on site? I can't find any record of such.

Oh really? He should be if discord banned

16:56

Even more confusion why he doesn't reach out himself

16:56

Same old shit using children as proxies to garner pity

What were the pings in gaming chat about?

Just your usual scam account

I noticed a bunch of channels indicated unread messages but there were none to be found. Figured it was a scam account that was already dealt with.

Suffa

Did we ever mute Fet on site? I can't find any record of such.

I think Fet predates any of those functions

https://retroachievements.org/game/34730 When I added hubs the log said I changed rich presence.

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Blaster Master - Overdrive (Wii)

No achievements have been created yet for Blaster Master - Overdrive. Join RetroAchievements to request achievements for Blaster Master - Overdrive and earn achievements on many other classic games.

this manual unlock should just be closed since they did it pre-revision right? https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/1418298942306648145

17:51

seems unreasonable to verify all that data

I've been awarding most of the leaf green requests. Gudra helped verify a lot of the ones with saves and others usually show the measured trackers (oh that was for Emerald revision) (edited)

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Might ask Exce if they know that person, might require further moderation (edited)

Already chatted with Excess and banned them, #mod-log

A site cleanup disagreement?

Seems to be just ''achievement too hard developer please step on lego'' situation

Less amusing

Has there been any discussion of a set design team before? Devs and/or players who could review sets for things like challenge balance or spam, and give suggestions on ways to help improve sets?

Just been working on brainstorming. I don't have a list of devs or players to be on it yet

I feel like a team like that could end up doing more harm than good. Similar to how devcomp just keep adding more and more rules that are sometimes just extra steps for no reason

The idea would be to have it reigned in

04:41

The most interaction with devs i envisioned is probably approving subsets or jr dev set plans

04:44

For active devs it would probably be as consulting or maybe signing off on rollout sets like we already do

04:46

Initially I'd want the team to analyze inactive dev sets and offer revision plans to be executed by devs for either a devquest tie-in or a standalone award system Once that slows down, they could maybe handle something like UWC reports

04:48

For recruitment i guess it could be a google form with open ended questions. Here's a set: what would you change, if anything?

04:52

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04:53

Kinda ties into this

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I don't know if it would ever go over well enough to have any control over active devs sets outside of maybe a rollout setting where everything is controlled and excellence is expected

A set design team would likely unmotivate devs since they then lose their free style and are just workers

I was thinking of it as less active enforcement and more reactive cleanup and proactive feedback - like the bulk of it would be aimed at inactive dev sets, but devs could also submit unofficial sets (or set plans?) for review if they want advice/suggestions. Especially for stuff like "which difficulties should I cover", "do I have too many challenges for the same section of the game", "are these progression achievements spaced well apart", etc (edited)

Yeah, that's exactly what it'd be for

05:19

Consulting for active devs and cleanup for inactive

There's quite a few RPG and rhythm sets, for example, where you can spend 10+ hours on progression and only get one achievement ssweat

ssweat

I'm unsure how to handle inactive dev revisions. Does the team have to get dev approval and a revision vote, or should they have authority to approve a cleanup plan and present it to devs for immediate use?

Would probably want to stock up on a good number of plans before releasing them to devs just so they're not fighting over them

SnowPin

I feel like a team like that could end up doing more harm than good. Similar to how devcomp just keep adding more and more rules that are sometimes just extra steps for no reason

This has been my stance on it. It'll further push the gap between devs and players, and overall discourage taking risks in set design. RA has had plenty of new rules and systems recently for overall quality but this I think goes over the line for the site being about collaboration (edited)

One of my biggest worries about DevComp has been having too much say in how things are done and basically turning sets into cookie cutter nonsense. I have the same worry about a potential set design team, too…

UWCs are starting to feel like that. Feels like the same achievements keep getting reported with no new information given and eventually caving to pressure

I’d really like for all this to happen: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1152683553348407409/1418008500872675328 I think so many issues could be solved with it…

I've been trying to push DevC, or just the process in general, to be more transparent and/or include the whole developer userbase for decisions, especially one that even within the team are divisive, but we're pretty much always landing on the roadblock ''this will add work when we cannot have more work'' (understandable but it sucks) https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1399796310256648313

That mark of approval that got floated around might help towards that

09:50

Although I'm pessimistic on it, I'd hope it doesn't just increase tension towards DevComp

What is the mark of approval?

A little icon on an achievement showing that it's been reported as an UWC and been accepted as welcome

Ah right, I remember now

It could also be a message that pops up when attempting to report the achievement

09:54

It's reasonable for someone to think they're the first to report

I think as a whole, the site is already feeling the strain of major playerbase growth while still keeping to the mastery-only focus. While I agree it's a good move for a set design team to only focus on inactive sets, I'm concerned about something that's affecting a few other systems recently where as soon as a dev goes inactive their projects are soon revised. This is fine in concept. Devs hold no ownership over their sets and shouldn't expect for their stuff to stay stagnant just because it's how they designed it. The knock-on effects however are devs feeling chained to the site and not taking breaks as there's almost no trust that whoever comes to the set have a similar design vision they did. This is especially true for faceless teams. We joke that it's fine when it's someone like JAM and it'd never happen to someone who makes good sets but it still carries that negative atmosphere. I'm guilty of it too, I still feel bad over this PE2 revision because of how jank the existing one is. But ultimately it's still something someone spent time and energy on and it feels disrespectful to the dev that I think my vision trumps theirs.

10:08

Sorry for the wall, it's been in the back of my mind for ages and now that there's an excuse to bring it up I think I'm failing to get it across properly.

10:14

Tldr I think the benefits of the concept are outweighed by the drawbacks.

Updating older sets for set stability while allowing any dev to revise it = good
A team designed to homogonise set design = bad

I know it's more nuanced than this but from when it's been brought up in devcomp threads, I'm not a fan

as soon as a dev goes inactive their projects are soon revised

I think it’s more that devs tend to avoid conflict. Active devs are biggest obstacles with changing an existing set.

11:00

If a dev goes inactive, then that particular red tape is gone, even if it wasn’t really there to begin with.

1

Not denying that, don't think there's a good solution for it

There really isn’t unless the dev agrees to make the changes.

11:01

I know I’d be annoyed if a revision passed and all of my achievements in a set were modified. I’d still get the tickets

As much as we state that devs don't have any possession of their sets once they're published, that's not how most devs think of it. You can't ask someone to put passion and time into something and separate it from their pride and responsibility

Oh I know. I think the “handing it over to the community” part of the docs really shouldn’t be there since that’s not how it actually is. It’s only brought up when there’s a major disagreement about a set

Sure its the ones with egos are the ones that are loudest and push back but it links to a deeper problem

There’s also the argument of “if I’m handing it over to the community, why am I dealing with the tickets” part

tele

Oh I know. I think the “handing it over to the community” part of the docs really shouldn’t be there since that’s not how it actually is. It’s only brought up when there’s a major disagreement about a set

This. It's a nice ideal but this isn't a workplace, volunteers only continue to volunteer if they think their time is respected (edited)

I think it’s less about ownership and more about agreeing to take responsibility for your work

tele

There’s also the argument of “if I’m handing it over to the community, why am I dealing with the tickets” part

Which feels like it was a step to get out of the wild west era where stuff was released without a plan or maintenence

That section of the docs also gives non-devs a sense of entitlement about how a set should be even though they’re not the ones putting the work into it

11:08

Yeah, it’s in dire need of a rephrase to reflect how it actually is

I wonder if an additional role might help. "Retired Dev" means that you've retired from set development but are still committed to maintain your existing work. I feel like a lot of devs don't communicate that they're burned out and instead we just run out the clock until they're negligent (edited)

11:13

Would need limitations like no new claims and can otherwise only work on their own stuff (edited)

"Retired" doesn't seem like the right term for it. Need more of an in-between term lel

lel

We don't want people to feel chained here, especially because going through jrs takes forever. Which isn't really CRs fault, the site's growth causes that

Passive and Part-Time sound silly so probably not one of those

I just want devs to be able to request a sabbatical rather than keeping a role they aren't using that's otherwise just stressing them out (edited)

I do hate seeing some devs get flat out demoted, though. Like most recently: Bartis. Dude may be behind with his tickets, but he's always been a huge help with making custom patches for people

11:17

And now that he's demoted, he won't see those requests

Game technician pray

pray

11:18

With the new discord it wouldn't be difficult to only let them into that channel

I will be traveling starting this Thursday and will be generally unavailable until the following Monday.

All good, we'll hold down the fort bigboss

bigboss

ZeldaHeart

1

BahamutVoid

I think as a whole, the site is already feeling the strain of major playerbase growth while still keeping to the mastery-only focus. While I agree it's a good move for a set design team to only focus on inactive sets, I'm concerned about something that's affecting a few other systems recently where as soon as a dev goes inactive their projects are soon revised. This is fine in concept. Devs hold no ownership over their sets and shouldn't expect for their stuff to stay stagnant just because it's how they designed it. The knock-on effects however are devs feeling chained to the site and not taking breaks as there's almost no trust that whoever comes to the set have a similar design vision they did. This is especially true for faceless teams. We joke that it's fine when it's someone like JAM and it'd never happen to someone who makes good sets but it still carries that negative atmosphere. I'm guilty of it too, I still feel bad over this PE2 revision because of how jank the existing one is. But ultimately it's still something someone spent time and energy on and it feels disrespectful to the dev that I think my vision trumps theirs.

I think it's fair to consider your version better--the dev majority did, otherwise you wouldn't have had the revision approved. Revisions by nature are to make sets better

BahamutVoid

I think as a whole, the site is already feeling the strain of major playerbase growth while still keeping to the mastery-only focus. While I agree it's a good move for a set design team to only focus on inactive sets, I'm concerned about something that's affecting a few other systems recently where as soon as a dev goes inactive their projects are soon revised. This is fine in concept. Devs hold no ownership over their sets and shouldn't expect for their stuff to stay stagnant just because it's how they designed it. The knock-on effects however are devs feeling chained to the site and not taking breaks as there's almost no trust that whoever comes to the set have a similar design vision they did. This is especially true for faceless teams. We joke that it's fine when it's someone like JAM and it'd never happen to someone who makes good sets but it still carries that negative atmosphere. I'm guilty of it too, I still feel bad over this PE2 revision because of how jank the existing one is. But ultimately it's still something someone spent time and energy on and it feels disrespectful to the dev that I think my vision trumps theirs.

One thought that comes to mind is the new game page makes some subtle cues that mastery-only isn't the focus. The way progress is shown is a very intentional design.

Image attachment

ZeldaHeart

1

17:16

On the old page, you transitioned through various states: Unfinished -> Beaten -> Mastered.

17:16

On the new page, your Beaten state is always shown, and the global progress bar is hidden within a tooltip

Much better prayo

prayo

It is really is

17:18

Now we just have to convince people to lose the mastery wall hahaha

hahaha

I love the wall but a mastery-only view ends up dictating a lot of design decisions, achievements and otherwise. It's just not healthy for players or the project as a whole (edited)

Agreed - even just on the player side, there are so many players that view mastery as a requirement and either start resetting 80%+ complete sets if they can't master it, or grow disillusioned with RA and stop playing games, instead going onto other sites and just complaining repeatedly

17:24

Like a "if I can't get a PNG on my profile, then it is better to have never played at all" mindset

The mastery wall being in a tab eventually will be good

17:24

And the ability to showcase individual cheevos

i think rebuilding user profiles is going to be significantly easier than rebuilding the game page was

17:25

compared to the game page, there really isn't a lot of functionality on user profiles

It's kinda crazy since i think most people care about the ranking more than mastery count, but the ranking literally does not care about your masteries and they don't get that

with user2 we'll definitely make sure the beta is much more controlled though. for a while it'll probably just be restricted for viewing to mods/admins only

That's fair

people tend to get hysterical regarding even minor changes to the user profile. we're going to need to make slow nudges on that one so people don't flip out

17:28

i'll probably want to run the game page beta for at least a month before we say the UI is good enough. another thing i'd like to do is add some kind of call-to-action to game1 (the old page) that allows people to instantly opt in to the beta without having to go to their settings. i think only power users even know the beta is going on

17:29

overall, there have been 100 submissions to the beta feedback form, and 96% of responses are either a "Like" or "Strongly Like" rating (seems to be split down the middle)

Here's how the beta page feedback is shaping up so far. Unfortunately, the sample size is still kinda small. I'm hoping we've addressed most of the leaderboard woes. The hubs thing is still a tough nut to crack. It seems people really want us to put those tiny icons in the game metadata section for the hubs. I have mixed feelings.

Image attachment

17:41

Image attachment

I personally don't like the tiny icons for hubs, but I don't like emoji in RP either hahaha

hahaha

I'm indifferent to hub icons in general, it's cool they are there but it's a list in the end just like a list of games is

I'm strongly against tiny icons. Anything smaller than 32x32 is basically a smear of colors. And large icons disrupt the flow of text.

18:32

I'm also strongly against emoticons in RP, but in that case, they're used as a substituion, so you have to infer what the icon is intending to convey. At least with image+text, you can still just read the text, but then why have the image?

With the shortening of RP display there's a stronger incentive to use emoticons now

18:47

I also think the tiny icons is a waste, there are better ways of separating items in a list visually

18:48

Off topic but since getting a 4k screen the challenge icons in ralib are also tiny and hard to tell what they are

I'm also strongly against emoji in RP. I feel people are gonna use emoji in RP no matter what we do. I really want to avoid walls of emoji like this on the new game page.

Image attachment

18:57

With the hub icons, it's really tough. 20x20 is basically the only size that works without disrupting the hub labels, but it's almost impercetible what the hub icons are at that size unless you're using a HiDPI display.

I find the emojis useful, just don't get ridiculous with them

Image attachment

wes

With the hub icons, it's really tough. 20x20 is basically the only size that works without disrupting the hub labels, but it's almost impercetible what the hub icons are at that size unless you're using a HiDPI display.

One argument against hub icons is that it will also make language flags more prevalent; of course, the flags are present now too, but we did specifically avoid it for international channels

19:01

There are only 3 flags here but there are games with Russian support or PT-BR support specifically

Image attachment

Yea, flags on languages is gonna be controversial

That all just looks pointless

Searo

@Jamiras a user just showed me a video where they could enable cheats in RetroArch (1.17.0) and then resume hardcore mode while keeping the cheats enabled after it reset. Have you seen anything like this before or has anything related to this changed in 1.17 or 1.18? I tried to replicate it but my RetroArch is crashing when I try to re-enable hardcore (I'm on 1.18.0 but also may be due to some other issues I started having) so I'm not able to confirm it on my end yet. They also said they are on a mac if that matters https://youtu.be/wa6knljzXho?t=119 (1:59 mark shows it off) (edited)

Bumping this - is RetroArch 1.17.0 still allowed in hardcore?

1.17 isn't two years old until February

We've bumped up things earlier for lack of hardcore protection (like PCSX2 most recently), so I wasn't sure if the same happened for RetroArch

The two year grace period is so we can get users off versions with exploits. It usually takes something pretty severe to accelerate that schedule.

Sorry, not sure if it went through - the message I replied to was one about how cheat codes work in hardcore in 1.17.0

1.2% of users who created sessions in September did so with RetroArch 1.17 (which is actually more than I was expecting).

01:02

17.4% of users who created sessions in September did so with PCSX2 2.5.x versions. Save states are much more accessible to users, and it was (as I understand it) pretty easy to stumble upon the behavior.

01:03

I'm not opposed to bumping the version, but RetroArch is embedded in a lot of devices, and a premature forced upgrade would have a lot of backlash.

It's probably not a big issue either way since it has been out for so long, I just found that since it came up in a cheater discussion and I vaguely remembered seeing something about that version: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1330486301727658104

As a heads up - I assume they'll be fine with it, but I've made a pull request to get the RetroAchievements page in libretro to point towards our list of Supported Cores instead of using their own: https://github.com/libretro/docs/pull/1087 I've updated their list a few times but it's been causing confusion for players, since it keeps getting edited by other people to say that cores are supported that aren't (like Geargrafx, DeSmuME 2015, and ClownMDEmu). It also mentions that hardcore mode gives double points, so I've included a correction on that.

1

Don't think there are any objections if I reject all of these usernames right? Jigga I'm not sure if it has a different meaning but the guy has a black person as pfp so I can take a guess

Image attachment

nah go ahead and reject them

Alright

PacThumbs

1

Image attachment

04:31

So consider this me inquiring

KickMeElmo

So consider this me inquiring

First thing we usually do is invite them to this discord for #integration Here's the full list of requirements: https://docs.retroachievements.org/general/hardcore-compliance-requirements.html

That's more frontend stuff. Libretro cores we've traditionally identified support for ourselves, since we have home rolled tools (RALibretro) specifically for working with them.

We don’t have a formal process at the moment for verifying core compatibility. What really needs to happen is we need people to test the cores. Or, we could monitor ticket rates or something over a sustained period of time.

Yeah, used to be I was the one doing that testing. Guess when I stepped back no one stepped into that role. Buggery.

I wonder if we could put together a small list of games that have sets using memory from each section of RAM for a given platform, and then those could be loaded up to see if any appear as unsupported, as a quick test for unmapped RAM

Well, finding out if it's explicitly unsupported is simple. Just load RetroArch from a terminal and check the memory map information. The real test is unlocking achievements from different regions. You won't get a notice for things like timing issues or memory misalignment.

Picodrive

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

might be mia for a few days -- employee that was supposed to be back from maternity leave tomorrow decided 18hrs before her return she was quitting so my work schedule is gonna be stupid the next little bit

bigboss

4

https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/1423439285750726697 doomhiker reached out to me that he would like to voluntarily be permanent muted, so I'm currently in discussion with him. Pretty respectable all things considered, he acknowledges he is too tempted to interact with toxic forum users and drama, so he wants to cut it from his life entirely

11:28

Can't say I've ever seen someone show this self-reflection to the point they would ask for a permanent mute (edited)

wes

Yea, flags on languages is gonna be controversial

ironically that's such an appropriate 1990s thing, having flags in your language select

11:47

literally even this (in modern England zeitgeist) has potential to offend someone, and that's literally just the choose language screen

Image attachment

Nepiki

Can't say I've ever seen someone show this self-reflection to the point they would ask for a permanent mute (edited)

I get it. Sometimes the self-restraint just isn't there and this is probably the best outcome

bowsercry

3

I kinda gotta agree with him tbh

2

I've removed the slowmode from #gaming and left the one in #general-chat on since that's where the discussion has gone

04:03

It's 4am so I'm out

gnite bahamut. ima sleep too

I've been busy with RL stuff, still am for a couple days, and then I have someone dear to me visiting through Thursday or so, so I doubt I'll have time to truly get involved with any of this before it's effectively decided. That said, I do stand with tele. I dislike the concept that we use our platform to tell people what they should and should not play. Hosting a set for terrible content doesn't mean we endorse it. It just means we host a set for it. We make exceptions for legally problematic things, but outside of pedophilia, there isn't much on that list. We shouldn't be in the habit of censoring -anything- without a legal motivation, because that game has no end.

KickMeElmo

I've been busy with RL stuff, still am for a couple days, and then I have someone dear to me visiting through Thursday or so, so I doubt I'll have time to truly get involved with any of this before it's effectively decided. That said, I do stand with tele. I dislike the concept that we use our platform to tell people what they should and should not play. Hosting a set for terrible content doesn't mean we endorse it. It just means we host a set for it. We make exceptions for legally problematic things, but outside of pedophilia, there isn't much on that list. We shouldn't be in the habit of censoring -anything- without a legal motivation, because that game has no end.

Unfortunately, even just clover had moved 2 of our partners (that we know of) to be concerned and consider pulling support if we platform that sort of content. One being dolphin and the other horizon. This drama has also spread far through speedrunner channels and has been coming back to users from those not even associated with RA. I get that you guys want to stay neutral, but that doesn't seem to be doing the site any favors

05:56

Next thing retroarch catches wind and decides to cut ties--then we're royally fucked over the sake of a dated pokemon hack and other content that the site would be fine without

05:58

It just paints our users and devs in a negative light to allow such a game to be supported to that degree on our platform

06:00

I've seen multiple users and at least one dev say they were contacted by others about this ordeal

It's insane how much drama Pokemon creates again.

07:14

If our emulator supporters want to cut ropes we need to remove it, otherwise this project starts to fall apart

It's already gone

Took care of four days of unlock requests in the radminbox. Lots and lots to go.

KickMeElmo

I've been busy with RL stuff, still am for a couple days, and then I have someone dear to me visiting through Thursday or so, so I doubt I'll have time to truly get involved with any of this before it's effectively decided. That said, I do stand with tele. I dislike the concept that we use our platform to tell people what they should and should not play. Hosting a set for terrible content doesn't mean we endorse it. It just means we host a set for it. We make exceptions for legally problematic things, but outside of pedophilia, there isn't much on that list. We shouldn't be in the habit of censoring -anything- without a legal motivation, because that game has no end.

I've made my stance clear a few times but I am 100% on the side of anti-censorship like tele, wil, and you are, from minute one of when that message landed in our inbox. I'm as annoyed as anyone we had to do this, but the concerns Scott had I also understood and don't want to object against. Doesn't help that Dolphin also started to put pressure on us. TL;DR Pokemon keeps ruining the site just by existing, proof me wrong sophisticated

sophisticated

1

Fyi, some of you might think it was too much info I was given out here if so, feel free to moderate me: https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/752271759138357249/1423956735525130241 I am just tired of people of either side now telling us we do a shit job and I hope giving them at least some transparency would make their minds more clear that we aren't just being a marionette to the users but that the current decision is more important to the future of RA. Like canceling Dolphin would split the community completely

10:09

Sorry to anyone fully dealing with this stupid situation at the moment

Nepiki

https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/1423439285750726697 doomhiker reached out to me that he would like to voluntarily be permanent muted, so I'm currently in discussion with him. Pretty respectable all things considered, he acknowledges he is too tempted to interact with toxic forum users and drama, so he wants to cut it from his life entirely

@Moderator I'm reading through the thread now and I'm seeing a clear pattern, so I want to make this proposal. If you disagree, please explain why. On no objections, I am planning to permanently mute doomhiker and remove him from the Discord. He already asked me yesterday voluntarily, and given how much drama was caused just by him replying to everything, I think it's time we cut ties. Not only for our sake, but also for his own sake.

Nepiki

@Moderator I'm reading through the thread now and I'm seeing a clear pattern, so I want to make this proposal. If you disagree, please explain why. On no objections, I am planning to permanently mute doomhiker and remove him from the Discord. He already asked me yesterday voluntarily, and given how much drama was caused just by him replying to everything, I think it's time we cut ties. Not only for our sake, but also for his own sake.

Sounds good, especially given his request

12:27

It's like he knew drama would brew yesterday

SporyTike

Fyi, some of you might think it was too much info I was given out here if so, feel free to moderate me: https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/752271759138357249/1423956735525130241 I am just tired of people of either side now telling us we do a shit job and I hope giving them at least some transparency would make their minds more clear that we aren't just being a marionette to the users but that the current decision is more important to the future of RA. Like canceling Dolphin would split the community completely

I deleted the message. This isn't really the sentiment that we want coming across to people. This gives people the idea that it was just removed because major contributors wanted to pull out. All that does is make us look insensitive and encourage people to bug those contributors to get things done, which in turn would probably give them an even bigger reason to want to cut ties

1

Fine by me.

I'm also going to be making a general thread in mod forum for reports that came in and then close the reports individually, I can't work with this mess Bonk

Bonk

Alright the thread is now made and every post is locked; not because I don't want to give them attention, but because the forum became a bit messy so it's better to have everything in one space

Nepiki

Alright the thread is now made and every post is locked; not because I don't want to give them attention, but because the forum became a bit messy so it's better to have everything in one space

Would it be better to post in the respective forums and pin that megathread?

14:23

Though i guess that makes newer messages harder to find

I don't mind if we open threads, take action, and then close them again, that would be more effective after all

14:27

Also should mention that the game wall itself has a lot more potential mute/ban reports but I uh, want to take a small break if you don't mind Hahaha

Hahaha

(edited)

For sure. Posted my initial user report feelings in the main post

Man I was hoping I'd wake up and the drama would all be gone cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

Time to grab some coffee and jump back into the trenches bigboss

bigboss

Oh don't worry, it is slowly dying down

14:43

When I tell people to stop in the discord now they do actually stop

14:43

Bluesky is still a mess but that ain't going to get resolved so we might as well not bother, it's full of lies

It's honestly insane how much this shit has dragged out. So much over reaction over a fucking rom hack

Yeah, i don't think there's any point in engaging with the social media

14:44

Keep it to announcements

I've resumed my regular social media announcement schedule on both platforms

That's good

I did post the apology post on Bsky yesterday to douse the fires and left a response from my own account that I'm available for a chat, but of course nobody actually will do that because then they will be proven wrong and we can't have that Hahaha

Hahaha

https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/32655?page=1 Can we lock this to moderators only? It was finally starting to die down

I don't know if this forum will be locked or deleted, but I hope mods and admims can atleast take notes of what I will write. While I understand the issue with censorship, I think is different in real world vs an interne...

I'm good with it

maximdraco had a great post, shame people shitted it up

Gonna speed up doomhiker's permamute as he was yet again injecting himself into this thread, let me write up a draft message

16:58

doomhiker,

You have been muted for an indefinite time, and your access to the Discord has also been revoked. We have warned you multiple times to not mini-mod, or be combative towards other users, but the warning has clearly fallen on deaf ears. An appeal may be made once enough time has passed.

However, we want to state once again that we are doing this for your own good. As you had contacted Nepiki for a voluntary mute, as well as your post in site-feedback, it is clear that you cannot resist the temptation to visit the forums and join discussions at the cost of your own mental health. We cannot provide what you have requested for at this point in time, which is to hide forums entirely, but we hope this at least will make you less tempted to visit them. Furthermore, attempting to evade the mute will result in a ban, so hopefully this works as extra motivation to avoid the forums.

That said, your reports are justified, and we would not like to pretend they aren't. Please be assured that we are taking your reports seriously, and will taken action where needed.

-RAdmin

Might need a few more looks (edited)

4

@AuburnRDM any thoughts on the above?

sounds good i think

17:14

maybe some reassurances

17:14

"Please be assured that we're taking these comments seriously and will act accordingly." or something like that

Oh yeah good call

17:15

Alright, added an extra line and will start the process now

do we not have the power to wipe a motto?

17:28

or does the mute do that/

We do

17:29

We can change a motto to whatever but if they're not muted they can change it back

wiped fedani's motto for now then

how long should we poll mutes for?

1-2-3 months?

18:09

I don't think any were outrageous to be longer, but won't object a 6-month poll

Lovely chap

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Very effective indeed

makes our job easy

probably worth muting

Image attachment

Image attachment

Unexpectedly I just had a breakdown out of nowhere so I probably pushed myself beyond my limits with this situation, so I'm gonna step back for a bit and take a small break. Sorry, that's not usually something I deal with but I clearly need some time away

bigboss

2

do what you need for you prayo

prayo

thanks for all your help

AuburnRDM

Click to see attachment 🖼️

any qualms with a ban?

Can't read it at the moment but passing this along: https://blog.xkeeper.net/thoughts/rants/retroachievements-and-moderation/

RetroAchievements and Moderation

this guy is opening up multiple threads about bringing back clover, too bad he's not verified and nobody can see them

Image attachment

Image attachment

20:18

"go ahead and ban me if you want to" sounds like we have their consent prayo

prayo

20:22

i worry about what this entails

Image attachment

20:25

ssweat

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bVYbw3z4Q8

GTA Vice City True 100% Plus - 48 psycho killer

Yeah, that's what has been brought up before - there are so many major/official games rewarding racism/sexism/transphobia/etc

20:28

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424114901986578444

not a fan of how appleando is handling themselves as a jr

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AppleAndo has been problematic for a long time, I think they've been devbanned?

nah they're in the program

20:32

they had those autism cheevos for pac man

Hexadigital

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424114901986578444

we good to lock this? seems to have gone off topic

Should we be locking the new threads that pop up? I don't see much good from them but can hold off until they start getting out of hand https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424088537229168692

20:33

Dammit Ben c'mon facepalmsf

facepalmsf

Image attachment

AuburnRDM

nah they're in the program

I meant that they got a 6mo devban before: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1304635052289953813

oh i see what you mean prayo

prayo

I probably should've communicated that I'm taking a break for my mental health too. I probably overdid it last night as I've been asleep for most of the day and that's caused fallout in my offline life. Sorry for letting you down like this

bigboss

3

The next few weeks will be rough. I wanted to step away too due to migraine not only here but private life causes, but since the mod team seems to thin out due to others having the same issues I will try my best to support where I can

bigboss

1

prioritize your own healths first

1

For sure, if you are having stress/anxiety or it's affecting your actual life take a step back. We will handle it as best we can but there doesn't seem to be any huge issues atm it's mainly just taking notes of bad actors and snipping any potential new drama from starting

any qualms with a month mute and note on the post? it's also the last one in the thread Smug

Smug

Image attachment

1

Jfc the game page is already back up to 301 comments. Going to create a thread to track them and delete them again

Image attachment

it's probably fine to let them pile for now just to make it easier to read

20:55

we did a wipe at the time of the game being denied

Fair enough I'll hold off then

Honestly we should be very generous with mutes, especially shorter ones

1

21:16

I've been muting people for a week whenever I see a link posting or requesting a copyrighted game

Was meant to share this but completely forgot, but this was a nice thing that happened today

Image attachment

1

Gonna be out with my wife for a bit

I'm not going to send the user I just muted for a year a message - I'm not sure if we'd want to up that to a full ban but there's no way they don't know what they did.

i'd up any doxxing to a full ban

22:37

that is extremely egregious and serious

I agree completely, I just know unbans are a pain to do and I don't want to ban someone unless the rest of the team agrees (since they can't do anything at the moment as a result of being completely muted)

yea, bans are pretty much a one way trip unless we tweak a few things on their account. my vote is a ban, maybe 1 more person should weigh in.

Doxing = ban

22:38

Agreed

22:39

No mercy on that front

Three's a team, I'll push the button

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424129511905165332

22:41

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424140323482767543

22:41

Once action has been taken on the people in the comments, we should consider purging them all. Before purging them, I can dump the rows so we have them for archival purposes.

22:42

I honestly wouldn't be opposed to just deleting the game ID

22:42

I need to step out for a few hours

Probably would be best or else people will just keep commenting on it

Before I head out

22:43

RE: 177, do I need to purge all those site awards?

I'll come help out with the comments in a bit, was meant to take a small break but we really need all hands on deck we can get now

If it's possible, I'd say so. No point in keeping awards around for a game that has been explicitly banned from the site.

If for whatever reason it came back at some point awards could be re-awarded I'd assume anyways so it's not like we'd lose anything permanently anways right?

Probably, but I'd say the odds of it ever having a set again are close to 0

Wouldn't it be better if we archived the comments now, delete the page, and take action against these people based on the archive? Or is that not desirable

That would be ideal imo since comments will stop once it gets deleted

I just don't want deleting the game ID to be perceived as us sweeping things under the rug

Agreed, but unless these people are obsessively refreshing accounts, they could not see the moderation actions we take

22:49

I'm fine with keeping it up for now and picking out the offensive comments though

A lot of people seem to feel we are doing nothing about the users posting bigotry/etc because it keeps going on

Yeah we keep getting reports that we are supposedly doing nothing

22:50

Not that these users would be satisfied anyway but if we can stop it, that would already be a big help

We very clearly need some kind of tool to lock comment walls

4

22:52

I'm torn on whether we should delete the game ID or intervene in the code directly for this specific comment wall

22:52

If we intervene in the code, I can make it such that only the RAdmin account can reply to the wall. That way we can blast a notification out that we're doing something and the wall has been locked.

Reroute that game page to a custom page that says you need to chill and get some fresh air lel

lel

That could prevent people assuming we throw it under the rug yeah

wes

If we intervene in the code, I can make it such that only the RAdmin account can reply to the wall. That way we can blast a notification out that we're doing something and the wall has been locked.

I would support this

I would also be in support, we can just slowly start deleting comments as we go through them

Let me see what I can come up with

Several votes are already pretty much concluded so I'm going to take action on them. Do we wish to send out a message or just mute and leave it at that?

There's so many people that I'd say just mute, most people will know what they did - if they have a question they can send it in and we can respond then

sonicpoint

1

Alright, works for me

23:07

Oh sad

Image attachment

23:08

I guess I'll just not mute Maize in that case, no point in beating them down when they are already planning to head out

I like Maize, but I think it's best mutually that she parts ways with us.

I've always liked them as well even if they are super negative about RA all the time

Yeah, whenever we talked about rhythm games it was comforable conversations

sonicpoint

1

23:10

But their idea of how we should run this site just doesn't align with ours, sadly

I may have misread, but she seems to believe we're pivoting to crypto ..?

I think it was a "joke" about selling out to vocal minorities (edited)

Which is weird because they definitely wanted us to remove Clover so we are basically doing exactly what they want from us

dedpacman

1

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424157355968299191

Balthius was the least offensive but they still ragebaited in the comments and I feel that also should not be rewarded

Something I've been thinking about - while hopefully this never happens again, would it be a good idea to show if a user is muted or banned wherever their username shows up, to all users? Other communities I'm in show something like

️ for warnings and

for bans, near their usernames on forum posts and profiles

https://github.com/RetroAchievements/RAWeb/pull/4000 adds the ability to lock game comment walls. There is no management app tooling around this (yet). For the time being, it needs to be done manually with root.

23:20

cc @Jamiras with your review, i'd like to cherry-pick this and deploy it to support the team.

https://bsky.app/profile/xkeeper.net/post/3m2fjky7llc2s

X ΘΔ (@xkeeper.net)

-# ↩ X ΘΔ (@xkeeper.net) in case you're wondering how it's going, one of the people in their discord just tried to post my irl picture as part of their argument. i thought our side was supposed to be the doxxing and harassing people? weird at this point i think i'm with everyone else: just delete your account.

They're not exactly helping

23:34

We banned the user and slowed down chat asking them to move on, what more does that person want from us

23:35

And it's another locked thread

Probably what they outlined in their blog post

23:37

Image attachment

I need to head out for ~4 hours. I'd like to deploy that PR tonight. We can't have another day of the comments flying off the handle.

prayo

1

Oh, lovely. Apparently all of this is being actively discussed on KiwiFarms as well.

23:45

Spoilering because it's a bad site

SPOILER

Image attachment

23:46

I'm laughing really hard at them saying that Sting is going to take over anything that tele is no longer doing, though

sigh: https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/1137793910329057451/1424165551621800057

Alright I've went through the entirety of the Clover wall and screenshotted the comments that we may or may not want to do anything against: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424122709490667560

just ban everybody opening a bait topic about why the game was removed

I'm about to just start timing people out in general chat for a day I'm tired of it being non-stop discussion cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

Yeah might be better than channel slowdown at this point

Doesn't help that I'm also trying to work on my car and the last nut I need to take off is a sonuvabitch and mosquitos are eating me alive bowsercry

bowsercry

also the fuck are we gonna do about people like fbern stirring shit

No idea, ben always finds a way to put himself in this position

This comment or have they done more?

Image attachment

they then posted the video

00:31

completely out of context of course

Might be good to bring it up with DevC

sonicpoint

1

Yeah I'm pretty sure we could devban for it, we did it for JAM iirc

Yes, I feel that's devban worthy. Developers are representatives of this site and need to be held to a high standard.

it's honestly a long time coming

00:53

always seemed to edge the line just right

I'll start a discussion on DevComp's end (edited)

i'm all for heavyhanded actions on most of these users tbh. we can clean it up and put it behind us

01:06

it's not like they're going to ever add value to the site anyway

I've left a screenshot of every user that have left a potentially nasty comment in the clover thread, we could probably start polls there or just take action and lock the wall once we can

I'm not sure who has the ability to check users by IP, but Xkeeper mentioned that these two have been leaving nasty comments on their blog about RA, if it warrants a cross-check for users on our end: 73.37.109.82, 46.110.132.171

01:11

Made a DevComp thread for FBern now: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424186780005171293

I can check when I get back to my hotel room.

01:28

Jamiras found a logic error in my PR - users will be able to still delete their own comments once the page is locked.

01:29

This is non-blocking, so I’ll still deploy when I get back.

1

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1136753038019805286/1424212898728640614 I've deployed RAWeb. Going to lock the game comments now.

1

02:59

@Moderator The comments for https://retroachievements.org/game/11575 have been locked. The RAdmin account specifically has special access to bypass the locking mechanism. I recommend we post a message to the wall quickly to (a) blast out a notification saying we're reviewing the comments and taking moderation actions or whatever accordingly, and (b) so people don't inadvertently think they're muted.

2

I know it has been a long day. Here's a rough draft:

This comment wall has been locked while we review comments, address user reports, and take moderation actions in accordance with our Code of Conduct. If you are unable to post a comment to this page, this is not because you have been muted. The wall is locked for all users while the moderation team addresses Code of Conduct violations. Users who have violated our Code of Conduct will be subject to appropriate moderation actions.

3

03:18

I think that's a quorum of everyone online, and I can't imagine this post being picked apart on social media - it's fairly dry.

03:18

I'll go ahead and post it.

03:20

Posted

Hexadigital

I'm not sure who has the ability to check users by IP, but Xkeeper mentioned that these two have been leaving nasty comments on their blog about RA, if it warrants a cross-check for users on our end: 73.37.109.82, 46.110.132.171

Nothing in my local DB in player sessions for either of these two IP addresses.

Thank you

prayo

1

wes

@Moderator The comments for https://retroachievements.org/game/11575 have been locked. The RAdmin account specifically has special access to bypass the locking mechanism. I recommend we post a message to the wall quickly to (a) blast out a notification saying we're reviewing the comments and taking moderation actions or whatever accordingly, and (b) so people don't inadvertently think they're muted.

Was the wall archived for posts?

04:00

Don't want scared people deleting posts

nope, the wall is still preserved

04:00

i didn't want people to think we were sweeping everything under the rug

04:01

sorry - to clarify: the wall is completely visible. it's just locked now. locking game comment walls is a new feature that i just deployed.

I took long screenshots of all the comments just in case. I imagine people can still delete their posts when it's locked, right?

unfortunately, they can. however, they're only soft deleted in the DB. i can pull any comment as well as dump the entire list.

04:13

i'll write the query now

In brighter news, the libretro devs are happy to change their documentation to differentiate between memory exposure and RetroAchievements support, and will be removing their list of cores to point towards our documentation instead. That should massively reduce the number of new players using unsupported cores over time prayo

prayo

ZeldaHeart

1

11575-comments.csv

183.88 KB

04:17

This includes:

The timestamp of when the comment was submitted.
The current display name of the user.
Whether the user is banned, muted, or deleted.
The actual comment body.
Whether the comment is currently deleted.

Thanks wes

1

I have limited faith DevC is going to devban FBern: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424186780005171293 Assuming they don't, I think there's enough here that we mute him, which is going to implicitly remove his developer role anyway. This more seems like a moderation issue to me anyway. He's being willfully malicious and directly undermining the team's work in getting the site's situation under control. (edited)

I think it's likely, at least so far nobody has said anything or sent any reactions in favour of FBern (if I am reading right)

Image attachment

@wes Absolutely no hurry, but how much work would it be to filter out ~Z~ games from the Most Requested Sets page? Someone just pointed out to me that the old page for Clover is already at 49 requests, since users are trying to get it to the top of the list

08:41

That list of requesters could be good to cross-reference for mod actions, too

There's a lot of reference that the only reason clover was removed was because of threats--nobody is even considering that the team thought the people wanting it gone might have good points

11:31

Even taking scott in a vacuum, he didn't do it to protect his image, he simply did not want that content on the site after looking into it

11:31

There seems to be sentiment that scott only did it to protect his image (edited)

Yeah with the team flipping on it that's exactly what it looks like.

Sending a feelgood message from Mafty here, the dev of Manic EMU. Think we can all appreciate those messages right now

Image attachment

I'll start a few more polls for both clover comments and reports in a bit, and close existing ones that we have already taken action on, just need to quickly do some other stuff

where did flareonthehero post that?

Oh I forgot to mention, that was the Mariomon hack wall

are they disappointed in bryan or the hack devs?

The hack devs, because they expressed interest in wanting Mariomon removed from RA following the controversy

Hexadigital

@wes Absolutely no hurry, but how much work would it be to filter out ~Z~ games from the Most Requested Sets page? Someone just pointed out to me that the old page for Clover is already at 49 requests, since users are trying to get it to the top of the list

I’ll take a look at this in a few minutes.

ban both? perma mute both? (from custer's page)

Image attachment

I think I saw Catgirl come up before, one sec

16:16

Yep

Image attachment

16:16

Let me start the polls and then we can include those two users as well

Alright all polls are live now, after that I feel we can start backing up and cleaning the clover wall

Also random comment because we keep hearing ''you guys are keeping comments up'', which mostly applies to the forums; do we want to private our original thread of the announcement, or at least split the announcement itself from the replies and put those to moderator-only?

i'll defer to whatever Auburn thinks is a good idea

it's tricky because if you hide it then they say we try to sweep it under the rug

Yeah I agree

17:28

I just feel we have taken action against anyone on that thread now, and keeping it up isn't beneficial either because people can't identify these people have been actioned against

17:29

Doomhiker for example who was very present, has received a permanent mute but nobody will know and expects we didn't do anything (edited)

Hexadigital

Something I've been thinking about - while hopefully this never happens again, would it be a good idea to show if a user is muted or banned wherever their username shows up, to all users? Other communities I'm in show something like

️ for warnings and

for bans, near their usernames on forum posts and profiles

prayo

It may be valuable if we show mutes on user profiles.

Possibly

17:38

Has its up- and downsides

17:38

I'm not against it at all though I want to discuss all the positives and negatives of it

We generally try to hide user punishments, for example, you can only find out someone is banned by trying to land on their profile

17:39

I'm a bit bearish on exposing if users are muted.

17:39

Idk, would like some 2nd opinions.

17:39

It's precedent-setting so we should discuss before I just blast out a PR.

Does a mute disable comment walls? I don't want people to go to muted profiles just to bully

Automatically, it doesn't, no.

17:41

Changing that seems more obvious

17:41

Gotta run for about 6 hours.

I don't like public shaming, but it would send the message that there are consequences for breaking the Code of Conduct.

https://bsky.app/profile/brossentia.bsky.social/post/3m2hjvldqfc2o Managed to convince one ''popular'' Bluesky user that we are truly trying to do our best resolving this, so that's good at least

Brossentia/Digby @ BLFC (@brossentia.bsky.social)

Having worked community management both voluntarily and professionally for about 15 years, I can say @retroachievements.org has a nightmare of their own making to deal with, but they are actually doing the right things to fix it. The difficulty is finding a way to heal once things are right.

Image attachment

who was this?

reddit user Swamp_Green_Creature

ah this probably https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424421865707012249

anybody around? I could use a second opinion on a post I'm interested in seeing if we can put out

I'm around

1

Scott

anybody around? I could use a second opinion on a post I'm interested in seeing if we can put out

please post it here before sending anything out

1

Should we just ban these two users? Accounts made yesterday and today

Image attachment

2

can this be undone?

Image attachment

Yes

Catching up on stuff, should any action be taken here? https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/25381?comment=321857#321857 Everything else in the thread leading up to that comment seems fine/reasonable, but this comment seems like baiting

Image attachment

AuburnRDM

can this be undone?

I can do it when I’m back in my hotel room

prayo

2

Hexadigital

Catching up on stuff, should any action be taken here? https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/25381?comment=321857#321857 Everything else in the thread leading up to that comment seems fine/reasonable, but this comment seems like baiting

if this is incorrect i'd probably just mute and put a mod note to not spread false information

Tomo wasn't harassed, not sure about Scott but that's what Tele wrote on his profile

bonk

1

I'll make threads for a few more games later too in light of the current discussion

23:02

Someone should probably just pull up and check Anic's list of devved sets for other good candidates hahaha

hahaha

ssweat

1

Hm probably best to hold off on making too many threads until we have finalized our restrictions (though I think we are all on board with what we have written in #deleted-channel )

AuburnRDM

can this be undone?

undone and DMed them

prayo

1

Okay, posting them here for later discussion - the only ones that I think might warrant removal are Color Some Shit, and Pokémon Periwinkle (along with the POC subset) Possibly of concern (but I can't find enough info to verify) are Awful Fantasy III, Pokémon Grand Dad Version, Pokémon My Ass, and Pokémon Outlaw (edited)

pornoman seems fine?

00:35

from what i remember you just... aim and shoot at bees

00:36

but i might be misremembering

00:37

oh then i guess there's a crude sex animation at the end https://youtu.be/iUQzHZvSEr4?t=165

Oh, are the screenshots on RA edited?

yea

That might be fine then, I thought it actually had the bleeding head

of course they use deng to censor everything cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

cAAAAAmerAAAAAA

00:38

could offer a proper censor filter

Hexadigital

Okay, posting them here for later discussion - the only ones that I think might warrant removal are Color Some Shit, and Pokémon Periwinkle (along with the POC subset) Possibly of concern (but I can't find enough info to verify) are Awful Fantasy III, Pokémon Grand Dad Version, Pokémon My Ass, and Pokémon Outlaw (edited)

hong kong 97 stuff? it's bruce lee killing everybody in china

Excuse you it's Bruce Lee's distant relative Chin qbert

qbert

Pornoman seems fine imo the "sex" at the end doesn't seem like rape

Nah it reads to me like he had a boner and she's waiting for him

Yeah that was my mistake, I was going off the screenshots and figured it warranted further scrutiny

:/

Image attachment

Alright I'm back at my desk

02:26

What should I do next? Nuke Custer's Revenge?

02:27

@Moderator Unless someone stops me I'm going to nuke Custer's Revenge

wes

@Moderator Unless someone stops me I'm going to nuke Custer's Revenge

Only thing i could see is if we want to let searo demote and then we announce it later with our letter

Of course - we'll need to do much more than demote if it's to get the Clover treatment though. I'll need to make a few DB writes

02:29

@Searo Would you like to demote and I can handle the rest?

Sounds good to me, I'll go ahead now pthumb

pthumb

ZeldaHeart

1

02:29

Done

Thx! Going to work now

I'm assuming I'm good to nuke the linked hubs, screenshots, RP, etc as well?

02:34

Ah I see you are removing them already

Oh wait

02:35

Did we want to ban any people that posted?

02:35

Actually, i think i put it here

02:36

Embedded image

Those are the only relevent comments yeah. And catfirl already has a vote leaning towards ban

It's looking like it's going to be a ban for both of them. https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424016445372760164/1424415853297926154

Done - I wiped everything related to the set I could find. I also locked the game page comments.

prayo

1

02:53

Literally took minutes for this dude to find it and request a set again: https://retroachievements.org/user/Rossco

Rossco Profile

I saw that, and his motto...

Tired of this - banned

What was the motto?

something to the effect of inciting people to request sets for banned games

Something like ~Z~ Play Z'd games ~Z~

yeah, something like that.

Image attachment

i was probably too hard on them, but my goodness am i getting exhausted by people actively working against us trying to put these fires out

I'd be fine with unbanning, I get the frustation though it's been pretty nonstop

unbanned, i'll shoot them a message

03:57

https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/1137793910329057451/1424591169626837054

hmm, didn't know this was public

Image attachment

Probably Lilly running her mouth. She doesn't know how to keep stuff to herself.

1

04:24

She was in the other server with me, wes, scott and some of the dolphin guys going off about how its been a waste of time and we might as well cancel the rollout and the guys from Dolphin were like bruh, relax

should we pin the apology post until the follow-up is made? the bluesky people are going to go nuts if it rolls off the front page

Personally I'm over the bluesky people. The amount of made-up bullshit I keep getting linked to me from that site is wild.

04:32

Everyone on that platform just seems delusional.

The vast majority of the comments on BlueSky are stuff like "I hate emulation but wow, RetroAchievements is the worst" or "I've never had an account here but you won't believe what this person said"

04:34

In other words, people that don't even use or have any relation to our site

04:35

Also since we're nuking game pages, we should probably nuke 177 just to be consistent

you're absolutely right

Sting sent me a good one earlier. I guess Max was streaming and his "distraction" from all this BS was to release Castlevania Dual Pack to be developed. Everyone will forget about it and cheer.

Sting's been messaging most of staff I think, I spoke to him a bit but kinda lost interest in responding to most of the stuff he was saying

sonicpoint

1

I think that was the first thing he actually sent me in a few days. I was shocked

I think he wanted me to approve of some statement he posted on BlueSky and I just ignored that message hahaha

hahaha

I'm not sure if I posted it here, but our Bsky barely lost any followers; quite thr opposite, we are gaining

07:07

The people being assholes, like Punchy and xKeeper, lock their posts like the pussies they are and never followed us in the first place, and neither do their followers

I have been replying to a few people on bsky that I was sure I could leave a good response to that would also be appreciated. Sadly, Punchy has tagged me personally now. I think it's in our best interest I don't reply, not only because of my hatred for the guy but just because of how he will keep spinning it out of proportions.

Image attachment

Hexadigital

hmm, didn't know this was public

I'd say delete this, but might be too late. Still, don't want people blame shifting to dolphin team

09:30

Which would still potentially cause issues

Nepiki

I have been replying to a few people on bsky that I was sure I could leave a good response to that would also be appreciated. Sadly, Punchy has tagged me personally now. I think it's in our best interest I don't reply, not only because of my hatred for the guy but just because of how he will keep spinning it out of proportions.

Is this just a visibility thing? They might think message visible means user isn't banned?

Don't think so, Punchy keeps calling us out because the users that should rightfully be banned (of which we have addressed most now in #mod-log ) have been able to remain up for so long

09:39

But they would definitely like to see users we have decided to mute banned like most of Bsky, but that is not their call to make; we are the moderators, not them

Nepiki

But they would definitely like to see users we have decided to mute banned like most of Bsky, but that is not their call to make; we are the moderators, not them

A nonzero amount will probably have outbursts when the mute is over and it'll make banning them easier

09:53

We do need that clause like the cheevo rules

While these rules aim to be comprehensive, the RetroAchievements team reserves the right to designate an account as Untracked if a player's methods, even if not explicitly forbidden, clearly violate the spirit of fair competition and legitimate achievement hunting.

Hexadigital

Okay, posting them here for later discussion - the only ones that I think might warrant removal are Color Some Shit, and Pokémon Periwinkle (along with the POC subset) Possibly of concern (but I can't find enough info to verify) are Awful Fantasy III, Pokémon Grand Dad Version, Pokémon My Ass, and Pokémon Outlaw (edited)

How are we feeling about the games hexa listed?

10:00

Color some shit can probably go

Possibly but I want more discussion; I don't understand what Periwinkle is about aside from that it was made by 4chan, to my knowledge it's not actually offensive (edited)

10:03

I don't want us to follow the idea that 4chan =/= hate speech

10:04

Periwinkle also has a decent amount of players so I don't want to make a rushed decision specifically on that one, Color Some Shit could probably go though, doesn't have a set anyway (edited)

I can't even find it, but sounded like there was nazi stuff involved anyway

10:14

And that title screen ssweat

ssweat

10:15

I'd be fine removing this https://retroachievements.org/game/5629

~Unlicensed~ Hong Kong '97 (SNES/Super Famicom)

There are 16 achievements worth 187 points. ~Unlicensed~ Hong Kong '97 for SNES/Super Famicom - explore and compete on this classic game at RetroAchievements.

I need more evidence for Periwinkle before I am (personally) willing to discuss it, I know it's a Clover spin-off but I can't find actual evidence of it containing anything offensive from a quick google search; I even skimmed through a longplay and the dialogue seems mostly unaltered, unless I was looking at a wrong part of the longplay

10:28

Yeah just watched the battle against Brock, a trainer whose dialogue I would expect to be altered, but it's exactly the same

Image attachment

11:12

That's all i have to go on

11:14

It was also removed from romhacking.net

Seems to be removed from pokecomminity too

@AuburnRDM when you have time, would you start a thread/vote on Periwinkle based on your research. My understanding is it’s connected to Clover, but I don’t know enough details.

@Moderator We’re axing FBern’s developer role. We should decide if a mute is also appropriate.

Why that?

Throwing gas on the fire

1

13:17

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424186780005171293

Would we mute as a user? Maybe. As a dev? Definitely

13:42

Won't be around for most of the day

wes

@AuburnRDM when you have time, would you start a thread/vote on Periwinkle based on your research. My understanding is it’s connected to Clover, but I don’t know enough details.

I haven't really found much of anything yet tbh

As the POC developer, maybe Hexa has some input regarding it

Ohh didn't realize voice didn't do the poc

I don't remember the specifics but I'm pretty sure the main story and the Pokemon designs are fine, but talking to random NPC's gives you some wildly inappropriate dialogue

16:27

Mewtwo wears a plastic Barack Obama mask and there's a subplot about how it is Giovanni's son, if I remember right

16:27

I might be able to check for some dialogue in a bit

I bumped the apology thread back to the home page

17:14

Until we have the follow-up written, IMO it should remain. cc @Scott (edited)

Anything that you guys need help with? Ive been busy the last bit but spent the last 2 days finally wrapping up wild arms 5 and last night to do some wii catchup. Im just not fully up to date OK everything from the drama.

I'd like to see FBern's dev role zapped today, ideally within hours

17:15

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424186780005171293

17:15

I don't know what kind of message needs to get sent to them, or from whom. I guess DevC.

wes

I don't know what kind of message needs to get sent to them, or from whom. I guess DevC.

I'd say from devcomp for the developer side and probably one from us for the mute.

I think you're right

We should probably warn rollout team as well since hes lead claim on i think skyward sword

17:25

So this is gonna be a bit messy in the rollout side I think

You're absolutely right.

17:26

That thought crossed my mind last night but I completely forgot about it this morning

Isn't it a collab, might be possible to just move it to someone else. But might be worth to backup notes in case of a hijack

That's a good point

SporyTike

Isn't it a collab, might be possible to just move it to someone else. But might be worth to backup notes in case of a hijack

It is a collab but we would have to see if either of those collabs can take over. Technically I think the official ruling was if a claim was dropped or something happened, they had to ask who wants to take over and it goes into a lottery spin of all available developers who entered.

Before Scott's follow-up post goes out, we also need to decide the fate of Pokemon Periwinkle. Based on this, I don't see how we possibly can't axe it, but we should make a decision: https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1002689485005406249/1424779883304849470

Would probably need some discussion from them on what they want to do since its not a traditional lead dropping a set. But they like to do everything by what's written in the docs unless they want something different ssweat

ssweat

17:35

Im not familiar with any of these enough. Realistically all these things have been up with no issues presented to my knowledge shrugdrmario

shrugdrmario

It may be fine to keep, I just don't want it to fly under our radar. What I don't want to have happen is Scott posts an eloquent message and then it's ripped to shreds because "LOL they kept Periwinkle up even though it has all this racist stuff." That's actually a good thought - it may be plausible this happens no matter what we do. Maybe the post should include how a note on how to report games or something.

Here's all of the dialogue for Periwinkle: https://github.com/CameruptQDX/pokeyellowmeme/tree/master/text/maps

pokeyellowmeme/text/maps at master · CameruptQDX/pokeyellowmeme

Contribute to CameruptQDX/pokeyellowmeme development by creating an account on GitHub.

ZeldaHeart

1

wes

It may be fine to keep, I just don't want it to fly under our radar. What I don't want to have happen is Scott posts an eloquent message and then it's ripped to shreds because "LOL they kept Periwinkle up even though it has all this racist stuff." That's actually a good thought - it may be plausible this happens no matter what we do. Maybe the post should include how a note on how to report games or something.

We've actioned on the biggest offenders (games and users) so that should hopefully be enough to show we are taking actions but I think it's fine for Scott to state we are still working to further review and action on other necessary issues. Regardless though I think we will continue to get people bitching about anything for at least a while until this starts to calm down regardless of how much we do

agreed

Hexadigital

Here's all of the dialogue for Periwinkle: https://github.com/CameruptQDX/pokeyellowmeme/tree/master/text/maps

i'll have claude run through this and see what it finds

I feel that we have already reached a point where it's dying down; I'm optimistic we have one more hurdle to overcome (the announcement) with a few days of aftermath, and then we are back to our usual schedule

Even with all this drama and people claiming to be leaving were still getting over 5k users during peak times. Just the few are loud as fuck.

Image attachment

Assuredly, our social media accounts have not lost any followers either; quite the opposite, we gained

Hexadigital

Here's all of the dialogue for Periwinkle: https://github.com/CameruptQDX/pokeyellowmeme/tree/master/text/maps

content_moderation_report.md

13.16 KB

I'm surprised, the longplay didn't show any of this paper

paper

Based on that yeah, I understand

17:56

I wonder if this hack has a SFW version but that's besides the point

claude is also overtuned for human safety, but some of this is really hard to look past (assuming it didn't hallucinate, i specifically asked it to cite filenames and line numbers for whatever it reported it)

I'll verify this quickly but based on Claude's results, I'm on board having a discussion about it

Ah, yes, the Vermilion Gym, that was the one that really threw me off when I was doing the POC

Looking at the results posted in the text above that seems pretty blatant

Alright yeah, Claude is accurate; it was tough verifying this through a longplay because it is a lot of normal pokemon dialogue, but then occasionally some random line is thrown in

18:06

And those lines are what you expect

Also if it wasn't mentioned here - Periwinkle is meant as a prequel to Clover, I don't think there's any direct connection between the two other than Blobbos though (and Periwinkle was someone's solo project rather than a group of people on 4chan)

18:09

If we get a ban appeal to the gmail soon, hold the user in scrutiny because that's being recommended to someone on KF

18:09

(Probably going to be something about how we didn't follow our own CoC by not warning first)

I thought doxxing was giving info like the person's real name, address, or face. Is this person just trying to be an ass?

Image attachment

He is, he has made a few smarky comments before (when I said ''good morning chat'', I got a ''1984 morning'' reponse)

They'll end up being perma muted or banned

We should add Pokemon Noon to the list of banned games as well - it doesn't have a page yet but it's the hack that "tries to out-Clover Clover"

1

@Moderator

FBernkastelKues, After review by the Developer Compliance and Moderation teams, we've decided to suspend your developer status for 6 months, effective immediately. During an extremely volatile situation for our community, you made comments that are deliberately inflammatory and inciteful. Your posts showed a willingness to throw fuel on a fire at a time when the team was dealing with serious issues. Developers are held to a higher standard as representatives of RetroAchievements. We need to be able to trust that our developers won't actively inflame situations during a crisis. Your actions demonstrated a breach of that trust. The teams unanimously agreed that a suspension is necessary. You may reapply for developer status with Developer Compliance after the 6-month period. The moderation team has also decided to mute your account for 1 month. -RAdmin

(edited)

Maybe "crisis moments" -> "critical moments"? Not sure if that's an actual term I'm unfamiliar with

How about "won't actively inflame situations during a crisis"? Does that read better?

1

20:58

thx, updated

21:00

i propose the mute last 1 month. does that timeframe seem reasonable?

1

We should also post that draft to DevComp just to get their feedback on the wording

I don't think it needs the harassment and potential threats part @wes

no problem - edited

Hexadigital

We should also post that draft to DevComp just to get their feedback on the wording

https://discord.com/channels/476211979464343552/1424186780005171293/1424883301939937320

prayo

1

Image attachment

I'll be opening a few threads in a bit regarding Periwinkle and our updated policy so we can make final decisions on them

We may want to stop Stenzek from villainizing Afterplay in #general , I just don't have enough knowledge to do it ssweat

ssweat

I don’t have the mental capacity to handle two crises

I locked this thread: https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/32705?page=1

Content Policy Consistency and Community Standards

Hi RetroAchievements community and moderation team, I wanted to open a respectful dialogue about the recent content removals and how we might ensure consistent application of community standards going forward. I understa...

13:46

It was well-intentioned to keep it open for respectful dialogue, but it’s already beginning to devolve. The OP is well-taken. I’ll send them a follow-up reply via DM.

Yeah sounds good

13:49

I fear we may have yet another issue on our hand but it's not something I can verify, especially not without a sub. I was talking with Falcus and apparently AfterPlay has introduced PkHeX support after we had reactivated them. We were not able to verify if this actually works though, but apparently it is able to show on screen--you just can't actually save it unless you have a sub. The question is whether it is actually blocked by hardcore @SnowPin might be relevant for you ssweat

ssweat

(edited)

Image attachment

13:51

oh lovely

13:52

it was definitely blocked back when I tested it

I’m at the verge of saying if this works with a sub while hardcore is enabled we should sever ties, but only if that’s the case.

Let me do some digging, I have some time this morning and if it's true I'll unsupport it and let them know

1

I do enjoy how they say my account has 7 days of free trial for premium left but then the premium features I try to access ask me to pay for premium

removing afterplay support. Cheats are blocked but PKHex is fully usable. I honestly don't like the idea of pkhex being in the emulator at all since it's just even easier access for people to turn off hardcore edit save and reload hardcore.

6 month suspension of hardcore support

14:14

i also just removed it from the downloads page

Yeah I'm not a big fan of it being in the emulator in the first place

14:14

Especially when we do everything to avoid it xd

I'm fine with that. I did tell him we removed access and will discuss as a team further. Speaking of delisting it, the active button seems to be gone. Do I just remove the useragent now?

keep it but set the minimum version to something like 999999

14:15

yea we changed the labels on those toggles to be more intuitive

Image attachment

1

done and done (edited)

14:17

Now I'm curious how many people have played pokemon sets since pkhex was added through afterplay.

14:18

@Nepiki Did you want to make an announcement about afterplay losing support for now? Or do you want me to issue a quick post?

If you have time that would be great, otherwise I can do something in 15-30 mins or so

14:19

Gotta do some work stuff

All good, I'll just post something quick and simple like "Due to recently discovered issues with Afterplay, we have dropped hardcore support. The team is in discussion on future plans."

Sounds good PacThumbs

PacThumbs

14:20

Wait, one sec

14:21

''Due to recently discovered issues with Afterplay, the emulator can currently not be used to earn Hardcore achievements in. The team is in discussion of future plans.'' to avoid the whole ''Support'' word usage

1

sounds good

14:25

@wes I think something is broken with the download page. I marked it as to not show on the download page but I can still find it. (edited)

Nepiki

We may want to stop Stenzek from villainizing Afterplay in #general , I just don't have enough knowledge to do it ssweat

ssweat

The license itself is ambiguous on this issue. The Free Software Foundation supports Stenzek's interpretation, but I've seen other developers offer dissenting views and I don't believe it's ever been tested in court. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins

SnowPin

@wes I think something is broken with the download page. I marked it as to not show on the download page but I can still find it. (edited)

doesn't seem to be appearing for me

14:26

this pkhex thing is wildly egregious.

14:26

a 6 month hardcore verification suspension is warranted

1

Ah, might have been a caching issue. I cleared cache and it's gone now

LordAndrew

The license itself is ambiguous on this issue. The Free Software Foundation supports Stenzek's interpretation, but I've seen other developers offer dissenting views and I don't believe it's ever been tested in court. https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLPlugins

Gotcha

paper

I agree. It's definitely a stupid choice on his part when he knows where we stand on things.

DM'd Freedfox:

Hi Freedfox, Thank you for taking the time to write such a thoughtful and well-structured post. We genuinely appreciate when community members engage with these difficult topics in good faith. We've locked the thread because, as you likely saw, the discussion was beginning to devolve despite your best efforts to keep it constructive. The topic started being brigaded, and numerous replies are in an invisible state. Understandably, this topic is charged, and we want to prevent it from becoming another divisive argument on the eve of our broader community announcement we've been working on. We'll be making a public announcement soon that includes a specific policy framework that should address your concerns. Thank you again for approaching this constructively. Best regards, -RAdmin

Sounds good

14:29

I'll inform the cheat team about it too btw, I don't think it has been abused much with it being behind a paywall but it's certainly possible

SnowPin

Now I'm curious how many people have played pokemon sets since pkhex was added through afterplay.

This is everyone who has loaded any Pokemon game in Afterplay. I didn't filter by play time or system.

Pokemon_Afterplay.txt

57.42 KB

Jamiras

This is everyone who has loaded any Pokemon game in Afterplay. I didn't filter by play time or system.

Is there a way to filter it down to the last 3 weeks?

15:10

I can go through every profile manually if needed, but if there's a quick edit you can pull that would be great

Jeez what a thing to wake up to, more pokemon causing problems ssweat

ssweat

It's always pokemon

RA without Pokemon

Image attachment

Searo

Jeez what a thing to wake up to, more pokemon causing problems ssweat

ssweat

You're still dreaming, it's okay.

Man that is stupid

When we give them the notice of the 6 months hardcore ban. Do we announce it in the #integration channel as a warning to other devs? Or do we do it in a DM with him?

SnowPin

Is there a way to filter it down to the last 3 weeks?

This is for sessions started on or after 14 Sep, having more than 5 minutes of playtime. If you wan the the list including less than 5 minutes of playtime, there's about twice as many results.

1

15:35

Pokemon_Afterplay.txt

11.59 KB

Thanks, I'll share this with the cheat team and we can start investigating them.

prayo

1

@Moderator @Scott has prepared a final announcement that will be going live in a few hours. This is intended to be posted from Scott's account, as it holds more power if it comes from the owner of the site than from ''the anonymous admin account''. We have proofread this in-depth to ensure it is as perfect as it can be, but please feel free to also read through it and comment on it before we go live. Specifically scroll down for draft 2, as that is the one that will be posted on the forums PacThumbs

PacThumbs

https://docs.google.com/document/d/110xrZ9tGLPVE7a9MhWrXsZTodnZktK5jW5klcU3-yIA/edit?tab=t.0

Clarifying RetroAchievements’ Goals

Summary / TL;DR scroll down, new draft is written in forum bbcodeRetroAchievements supports openness and game preservation, but we will not provide a platform for games that contain illegal, hateful, or otherwise abhorrent content. Achievement sets for such titles will not be allowed. Our goal i...

2

Looks good to me, although I wonder if it would be worth clarifying the last paragraph before the FAQ to "working continuously to address these issues, such as by muting or banning those who broke our code of conduct, though many of our actions"

16:59

I've seen some criticism about how we're not banning users because it isn't directly visible and our last post was vague - but if we explicitly state that, I think it would help assuage some concerns

Looks great overall and hopefully will appease most of the people who were waiting on the follow-up

17:17

We should probably update this as well if we haven't yet

My only comment has already been brought up. A blanket ban on all pornography eliminates the entire eroge category, and things adjacent to it like the Dragon Knight series.

Agreed - I could've sworn we omitted that

17:17

cc @AuburnRDM

That should have been removed, yes

I think it is removed, Draft 2 doesn't mention it

Draft 2 is the final draft yeah

17:19

Which only disallows glorifying rape, sexual assault, and sexual activities involving minors

Oh, i didn't realize the entire first couple pages are getting thrown out

1

Can we get a strikethrough the old draft?

17:20

Especially to ensure that one doesn't accidentally get posted ssweat

ssweat

The sexual restrictions might become problematic once we get to PC-98, but as that's not on the radar yet (and most games are rated in Japan so they should be fine), that has been shelved until a far later date

Was pc98 rated?

To my knowledge, yes

i can't figure out how to strikethru in google docs, just did the next best thing i could think of

Pc98 seems to predate cero

Hm

17:23

Fortunately it's not something we have to discuss yet as PC-98 is probably very far away but something to keep in mind yeah

Esrb was like 1994 while cero was 2002

Maybe I'm reading this wrong but I don't think there's an issue with PC-98? The way it is written gives an exception to games with official ratings for three of the four "no longer approved" categories, rather than saying that anything containing sexual content has to be officially rated

Yeah, just unsure if PC-98 got official ratings

17:26

I thought they did when I looked at the Rance wiki but I'm not entirely sure

oh, Rance

17:26

I was thinking the confusion was over sexual content in general but hmm

Nah, specifically the glorifying restrictions

17:27

Sexual content in general is fine

Gamechamp was worried about Rance the other day - https://discord.com/channels/310192285306454017/319157017619070977/1424797876558499941

17:34

Given you are a villain protagonist serial rapist qbert

qbert

Yeah, that was in the back of my mind

17:55

Rance is this very weird series that doesn't hide the protagonist is an actual unjustifiable rapist, but is actually a really highly regarded VN series for it's gameplay, sometimes even regarded as one of the best

So was clover Smug

Smug

At least Clover was a hack but yeah this one may be hard to justify and would be a shame to not be able to support if so

Yeah Rance is official at least

18:05

(Un)Fortunately I don't think we will see PC-98 in the coming years so for now it's nothing to worry about

We do have these potentially

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18:16

Uh oh

lel

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Tomooooo

1

18:17

Never realised they were on PC8800, interesting

Hexadigital

Looks good to me, although I wonder if it would be worth clarifying the last paragraph before the FAQ to "working continuously to address these issues, such as by muting or banning those who broke our code of conduct, though many of our actions"

Any thoughts on this?

I think that's a fine addition

Just tried to check out Rance to see what the controversy is, I didn't pick up on the raping part at all, just looked like a weird amateur/early eroge game

Oh it's not really controversial, just has themes that could be in contest with our policy

20:25

But it's good that we judge on a case-by-case basis regarding that

1

Ban?

Image attachment

I would mute, I hate people directly banning

I would normally say I don't really moderate based on user walls buuuuuuut

on the other hand, can I personally keep the comment since I find it more amusing than actually insulting?

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Why does he want to kill every butterfly

Nah this tele wall guy double downed. His first post was way more tame

21:15

They know what they're doing

It's for the Super Mario 64 all 1-up achievements which require the player to kill butterflies to spawn lives

Ah

Image attachment

21:16

Deleted that for the one i posted first

Yeah give him a long mute ig

I'm off to bed for the day but this might be worth keeping an eye on: https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/32715

Make hide certain games feature

I'll add my 2 cents to the current situation about removing certain games from the site. There is a filter like that on a certain hentai sites. If something is straight illegal, you won't find it there. First, you agree ...

honestly should just close it because the decision isn't driven by any particular group

this really needs to be closed

23:17

@AuburnRDM i 2nd your opinion, shall we?

should we lock it to mod only?

we can just lock it

23:22

locked

The whole "o7 tele" thing feels very much like Elon musk's accidental "salute"

00:19

Really handy tbf, it does help them stand out

I think most of them just appreciate teles work at least

2

00:33

The verbose ones though...

Who is managing the draft? If the team is fine with it, I'd like to get my small clarification added to it lest it get posted without it

Please go ahead, it's revisioned so we should be able to see a history on it either way

I have not used Google Docs in so many years that I forgot you can just have a doc open to be edited - added it prayo

prayo

1

Is this something we'd take action on? It's both aggressive and completely out of place (in the new page requests topic) https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/13871?comment=322905#322905

New Game Page Requests [No Wii requests]

Please concentrate on more older systems? The newer the systems get here the more entitled woke types are going to appear and demand censorship when they think their feelings are somehow relevant to absolutely anyone els...

Yeah I'd say toss a mute

I kinda want to mute the people who replied for a week as well since they're attacking that user, even if he baited them into it

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That specific user is a troll, pls mute

I don't think they're a troll, I've seen them being vehemently anti-softcore before so I think they believe what they say

17:19

Definitely will mute though

Muted. Decided not to take action against the two users who took the bait, but responded with a reminder to keep threads on-topic.

ZeldaHeart

1

Thanks hexa

Just as a reminder for anyone that sees drama being started in an existing thread, Rule 3 is "Keep the Discord channels and forum threads on-topic" prayo

prayo

17:32

I should not be surprised that these are the latest two commenters on that user's wall ssweat

ssweat

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Hello @Moderators and @Admins, I have not been present in the last few days. As one of you is already aware, I have been doxed. The information that was leaked was only present in this server. So that's at least two people who know. I initially reached out to Wes as they have had previous issues of this nature during their time at RA. In my mind, they were the least likely to do anything like this because it would be the height of hypocrisy. They are welcome to confirm for themselves if the proof given to them was credible and that only someone here could've accessed this information. I want to make it very clear that since I cannot understand why anybody present here would do this, or what I did to deserve this, I find it impossible to rule anybody out. I have spent 5 years in this community and cannot reconcile that this is something that was ever possible. I am asking for: 1. The timely reversal of all actions taken place since the initial "Why I do not feel safe here" message. This is not about any specific piece of media. This is about how the entire scenario has resulted in me and my family's privacy being permanently violated, during a time when online privacy is at an all-time low. By allowing any of these actions to be seen as justified in light of what has happened to me, you are admitting that our entire management is susceptible to threats of retaliation. Which is exactly how this all started.

19:05

2. The immediate removal of the person(s) responsible for this leak. I do not know how you will find this information, frankly I do not care. Hopefully they will remove themselves to prevent others from taking the blame with them. You will provide credible proof of where this information was leaked as it is clear that either it was posted by an alt and/or provided to someone else in another server to do the dirty work for you. I will not accept anything that even remotely looks like a scapegoat. I believe the intent of the leak was to provide myself as a scapegoat since there are a number of people who are convinced that anyone who supported the initial announcement needs to be removed from management. 3. A public facing apology from @Scott who will also represent this team's feelings. I firmly believe after reading every piece of information available to me, within our community and out, that by crossing the line in bypassing the team's duties, they are personally responsible for allowing things to escalate to this degree. You have been hands off from the community for months or even years at a time while we have given your blessing to act on your behalf with your full faith. There are those who responded to our statements who also feel that you have stepped in to "keep the mod and admin teams in-line." The ship sailed long ago on you being involved in the current state of RA even though you had many chances in the past to do so. I am not expecting an immediate answer from anyone. I want an honest discussion on where we go from here. Please understand that I am very busy at the moment and will get back to this channel when I am able.

I can confirm the entire Discord server has been compromised.

I'm really sorry and very disappointed to hear this has happened Bahamut. Most of all, I hope you are- and will remain safe.

I'm deeply sorry to hear this has happened to you and hope that you and your family are safe and I can only imagine the stress that has to be causing

That sucks man. I'm sorry. I don't know who would have done that, I can only promise it wasn't me.

That is horrible to hear, Bahamut - as someone who has been doxxed (and worse) in the past, I would never wish that upon anyone else and I hope that you can find a good way to minimise any consequences.

Its unacceptable, that's for sure

It's sad to see how far some people will go for such ridiculous reasons. I feel sorry for you, Bahamut... especially for it happening on a server that's supposed to be more controlled.

This is horrible. I hope you are able to stay safe.

That's pretty shit and really makes one wonder who would go that far for a handful of fictional points... But I am curious, Wes, how do you know the entire server has been compromised?

I felt what I was shown was credible. To respect BV's privacy, I don't want to go into details.

Ah, so it's not like full logs has been posted somewhere but more that we can assume whoever leaked the data, must have higher roles

It was 100% guaranteed to be a mod or admin

wtf...

By the server being compromised, do you mean the info was leaked out of moderation channel or even higher channels? Or jut general stuff from this server outside of our modmin channels?

It's definitely ruled out it could have been some Discord mod? I remember there were plugins or such which allowed people to see existing channels when they should be invisible for those roles normally. That's one of the reasons why this server was used. I wonder if it would be possible to do the same but to actually access channels (edited)

Not the person who necessarily did the doxxing, but entire conversations and threads from this channel wound up in the hands of that person who connected the dots to send distressing things to BV. And the content of the posts they got ahold of spanned timespans over multiple weeks.

Oh just saw Wes' post (edited)

19:55

What the fuck man

I can't imagine who in the mod/admin staff would have done something like that... I've always trusted everyone here

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