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Wow, I haven't blogged in about two years. Between a lack of things to blog about, my computer being offline for months for equipment testing, and me lacking the motivation, I guess I kind of forgot about it. I don't really come here anymore, except for the occasional event, and to observe that I don't come here anymore. Not that it matters, nobody reads this anyways, but that's not the point. =P

The Stadium community is in a state of limbo right now, and I'm working on a plan for our future. That with the occasional SSBM playing is sucking up most of my free time right now.

NDJ, the Stadium community's current home, has the most comprehensive collection of SSBB and SSBM scores on the web. Unfortunately the site is probably not going to be around much longer. When the site goes under, most of the scores--our history--will be gone along with it.

My number one priority in solving this is copying down all the data we have now. For all I know, the site may be gone tomorrow. I've got virtually all the Melee Stadium scores copied down and archived here and have started copying Brawl scores. I'm also using httrack to download the forums to preserve our conversations and history and the relationships we've built. What can I say, I'm a sentimental archivist. heart

As a short term solution for all these lost scores, I'm going to be starting a campaign soon to try to convince every Stadium player to join CyberScore and enter their scores there. CyberScore isn't an ideal solution for various reasons, and it's popularity has been on the decline too, but I don't think the site is going anywhere anytime soon.

Of Cyberscore's various shortcomings, the most important being that we'd have to find everyone who hasn't touched the game in 5+ years and convince them to spend many minutes if not hours of their time to type up scores for a game that they probably no longer care about. Someone may have been willing to type up hundreds of scores in 2010, but will they be willing to do so today?

As a long term solution we want to eventually build our own Stadium site similar to CyberScore, only one that we have control over. Instead of trying to convince people to sign up and enter their scores, we can just do it ourselves. I'm working on a plan on what this site might entail and how to make it better than any other site before it (including NDJ and CS and elsewhere). I have collections of scores from a half a dozen high score websites from around the web I'd like to combine and enter into this database to make it as comprehensive as possible.

The more I work on my plan for this site, the more I realize what a MASSIVE undertaking it's going to be. I'll likely have to hire someone to code it professionally since it's going to be too much to ask anyone in the community to do it to the degree that I have in mind.

If all else fails, we at least want to have all scores from NDJ and elsewhere dumped to Google Docs or Pastebin for historical preservation. I'll eventually be dumping the scores from the half dozen sites as well. Most of them are still available through other means, but I'd like to keep things centralized.

I have other stuff to blog about too, but I need to go to bed, and I don't know if I feel like it anyways. We'll see...