Merge pull request #4 from n-rook/nrook/year-in-review-2023

Year in review 2023

content/blog/2023-12-28-year-end.md

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+---
+title: "2023: A Year In Review"
+author: nrook
+date: 2023-12-28
+tags:
+  - year-in-review
+---
+
+2023 is nearly over. The first year of Silent Selene!
+
+We got a lot done over the past year. Of course, we launched the site. It's really gratifying to me to see it get used. I am very fond of the Touhou game community, and I'm glad to have been able to give back to it like this.
+
+The modern style of the site is great, of course! Big thanks to Nylilsa, who came up with the fundamental style, and to Addamelech, the artist who drew the logo.
+
+We also included historical data from RoyalFlare, making the site a true repository of the history of competitive Touhou. This was a feature [Morth](https://www.silentselene.net/replays/user/morth) was passionate about, and he did almost all the work making it a reality. He has been the main person responding to people claiming their own RF replays, too. Actually, I was kind of nervous about this feature; what if people don't want their replays on Silent Selene and get mad at us? But I haven't heard any complaints, so I'm glad we did it.
+
+Another thing we did was add Japanese translations. It was a lot of work annotating everything on the website properly, but that is still much easier than actually doing the translation! Thanks to everyone who contributed, including MaribelHearn, anomalocaris and ゑふまいか. There is still more to do… I wish I could help more, but I can't read Japanese so there is only so much I can do! I hope that it is helpful to Japanese players as it is now. After all, the idea of a high score site not used by Japanese players would be ludicrous.
+
+And, of course, there has been plumbing work as well. We updated our server to a newer Debian version, we fixed bugs on the site, and 32th System did some work on the best way to host the server. Actually, 32th did a bunch of random improvements.
+
+What we didn't do was update this blog! To be honest, I put off writing blog posts until I got around to refreshing its look, making it look less like bare HTML and more like our current style on Silent Selene. And I put off refreshing the blog's look because hey, we never write blog posts anyway. A vicious circle! (Plus, of course, I had things to do on the main site.)
+
+So, what will we do for 2024? Well, there is still lots of work to do! We just finished a feature to edit existing replays, so that should appear on the site soon. This will help if you spell your name wrong in a comment, but more importantly it should clear up some of the weirdness around "counterstop" scores in newer games. Currently, if you played with a special patch to display your true score while you were playing the game, your replay will get ranked above people who didn't do that. Of course, this isn't right, so I want to add a way on the site for players to say what their true score was even if they didn't play with a patch like that.
+
+Plus, this will let people annotate replays after the fact to say whether they played with survival challenge rules; that is, if they used no bombs, didn't die, stuff like that. Once we have that, and once we add options for things like "did you use a border in PCB", we can do more with the annotations. It would be cool for example to have a special page to celebrate players with LNNs, Lunatic runs which did not use bombs or ever die.
+
+In addition, there is a big hole in Silent Selene: We do not accept replays from "scene games" like Shoot the Bullet. I would like to rectify this in 2024.
+
+Will I? Well, only time will tell. But I hope Silent Selene can still help people out in the new year.
+
+nrook