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Big News from the High Speed Halo Staff 20/03 - 12:39 (link) Posted by NOKYARD

A metamorphosis will soon take place at High Speed Halo. Preview! Reach is coming soon and we want to be ready for it with a completely new High Speed Halo. The site is in the process of receiving a top to bottom rebuild in order to better showcase the amazing videos our stable of runners provide. This new site will streamline the submission and presentation processes so that we may get the runs out to you much sooner than we have in the past. In fact, if a runner supplies his own video you may be seeing the speed run posted to the front page within hours, rather than weeks or months. The new format will dispose of the old structure where the news post and run table are separate entities, you will soon see the news item attached to the video in a single news post. The navigation will be much improved and the site will be fully searchable. The front page will feature the latest speed runs, news items and submitted articles like walkthroughs, tips & tricks, speedups and tutorials. Click on Halo CE and the front page will show the same content as above but only show articles and recent runs related to Halo CE. Click on The Silent Cartographer to see it's related articles and recent speed runs. From there you can select individual records like Single Player Easy, or 2 Player Legendary, and all of the latest runs within that category will be viewable, with older records posted directly below the latest records. With YouTube hosting (see below) there is no longer a need to dispose of old runs, and future runs may be provided in HD, but more on that at a later date. Once the site goes live runners will be grouped into 3 classes: Onyx, Gold, & Silver. This class system will be for internal use only. You will now what class you are in, but there will be no external references. Silver runners will be retired runners and runners who chose not to maintain accounts here. HSH Staff will retain control of these accounts, yet the runners will be able to submit runs through a submit form similar to what is used now. Gold runners will be able to use a more advanced form of submission including an editor much like you see in forums. They will be able to upload their own video, customize the content and layout of their news posts, and upload custom wallpapers (Halo Screenshots, including scenes from their runs) for other users to select as their backgrounds. Their runs will be saved in draft form for posting by HSH Staff (we receive an email when you submit a draft). Onyx runners will be those who can be trusted to edit and post their own speed runs, including the editing of posts for their existing runs. They will have access to advanced features like the ability to turn commenting on or off, or to moderate the comments under their runs. Accounts will also be available for subscribers, fans and cheerleaders. These will be read-only but will enable account customization, avatars, RSS feeds and the ability to comment on runs. Once they submit a speed run they will be automatically advanced to Silver or Gold Runner status. The plan is to have the site fully functional well before Halo: Reach falls. There is no set timeline but here are the steps you will be seeing over the next few months. I will move the '<- We are here' marker as a step is completed. Step 1 - Get the new site's administrative backend functioning properly. Step 2 - Set up Silver accounts for all existing runners. The HSH staff will be in control of these accounts until the site goes live to make sure all of the current records are attributed to the correct runners. Step 3 - Upload all existing records under 10 minutes in length to our new YouTube account. Note: The videos you see there are placeholders for testing purposes. We may add the ability to include the run's news post to the YouTube video in the future. Step 4 - Migrate all of the current records over to the new format. Somewhere around this step we will be 'leaking' a link to the new site so you can watch it grow and make suggestions. Signups will be disabled. Step 5 - Match the text of all (or most) of the old news items to their respective runs. Step 6 - Encode and post all outstanding runs. In order to complete this process in a timely manner, we will be encoding recently received runs first, and working backwards. This means that we will only be processing the most recent records in the case of multiple submissions. Please check to see if your outstanding record is on your File Share as we will be downloading the file soon(ish). We will be encoding your videos concurrently with the site rebuild so the tables will be up to date for Step 7. The run tables, as you see them today, will be locked and runs will no longer be posted here. This is an unfortunate, but necessary part of the process.<- We are here Step 7 - Once the site is up to date we will be announcing our Grand Re-opening. Step 8 - Existing runners will receive an email with their password so they can login and manage their own account (Gold account for now). New runners and subscribers will be able to sign up. Step 9 - Runners will be able to submit new runs. Video formats will now include bungie.net Saved Film link (we encode), Bungie Pro Video link (we re-encode), Video upload in any format (we re-encode), Youtube link. We will still require verification by Post Game Carnage Report link. Step 10 - New features, like a YouTube uploader, will be added to the site as needed. If you have any questions or concerns please post them in the provided HIH forum topic. I will visit the forum on a daily basis to answer your questions. cheers nok