Less Projects Idea

[Sebastian]

This is an idea that recently came to me. Currently, we have 3 projects going, which is too many. Even 2 projects seems like a hassle and is too slow.
Olimar and I were talking and thought it'd be a good idea to go from 2 projects at a time to 1.
We usually have a fixing the sheets project and a normal arrangement project opened at the same time, but what does everyone think of having only 1 at a time and switch off between normal and fixing the sheets? I noticed that not too many people are interested in fixing the sheets projects.
Here are some Pros to this idea. There is actually a lot of Pros which is why I brought this idea up.

Pros of having 1 project at a time:
- Pro: Projects would go faster; the Updaters could focus on one project at a time intern making things faster.

- Pro: Submissions would go faster. With less projects, the Updaters could focus on subs more and not have to worry about a handful of projects.

- Pro: With only 1 project, submissions could be bumped up to 3.....maybe.

- Pro: With only 1 project, the Updaters could work on other cool projects like, Olimar's featured arranger project(s), surprise/special projects, one vs. one competitions etc.

- Pro: We could discard the fixing the sheets project all together. We could make a board like submissions that is dedicated to replacements and the current arrangement board could be for new arrangements. I could design that board if people are interested.....

So, what does everyone think?

[Tobbeh99]

I wonder if we were going to have only 1 project. Couldn't it also be a combination of fixing and arranging? There are many games where there are some sheets that are old and poor but also songs that haven't been arranged, and this would be perfect for those games. One game that comes to mind is SSB Melee.

[Oronoco]

- Pro: With only 1 project, the Updaters could work on other cool projects like, Olimar's featured arranger project(s), surprise/special projects, one vs. one competitions etc.

These all sound really cool! Could you explain more about them since I've only been around for several months?

[Yug_Guy]

Yeah, three projects does seem kind of excessive at times. Plus, the Mario & B-K ones barely get any attention at all. I think the mods would appreciate more time getting sheets on site than worrying about some of these projects. The only question should be which ones to get rid of and why. Here's my thoughts on that:

In my opinion, the "Replacing the Sheets" project seems kind of unnecessary, as we already have a "submit replacement sheet" option in NSM Panel already. Out of the three, it's the one I would get rid of automatically. Sure, there are some sheets that are in dire need of replacements, but someone can always replace it in Submissions.

"Fixing the Sheets" is a bit harder to justify getting rid of, since there's some sheets that look awful on site. However, we could institute one big project to reformat every single sheet that does not conform to standards, much like the "Replacing the URL" project. The two downsides to this would be 1) The music wouldn't be fixed at all, just the formatting, and 2) There wouldn't be much incentive for any of us to get it completed, considering most of us didn't make these sheets. But that's just an idea.

I do like the Arrangement Projects, considering that it gets a lot of attention, and tends to get down quicker than the other two. Imo it should stay.

But hey, that's just my two cents. 

[FireArrow]

Are you considering the fact that arrangement projects reduce traffic towards regular submissions as well?

Why not just have a separate updater team for projects, since they're becoming a regular thing anyways and deserve to have regular and predictable rate of approval. The cons I see with removing one are:

1) You'd have to sacrifice one of two very different but equally important arrangement projects. If you get rid of Arrangement Projects, well, everyone would be sad. If you get rid of the Replacing the Sheet's project, the rate at which NSM will modernize will slow to a crawl.

2) You have no way to control Unofficial arrangement projects, which demand a large amount of updater attention as well. Even if they don't get their own update, it's just a large amount of arrangements going through the regular process.

If you use my idea, then the cons become:

1) Spreading the updater team too thin and/or finding enough qualified people to make a second team.

It's less cons, but I can understand how it could be an insurmountable one, so I dunno. If we had to get rid of one, I would prefer we got rid of arrangement projects rather than the Updating the Sheets. The only real positive to Arrangement projects is the fun and sense of teamwork. Updating the sheets is sorely needed, and while it may be less exciting *cough* Super Mario 64 *cough* I would really like to see all those crap sheets disappear in my life time.

[Sebastian]

Are you considering the fact that arrangement projects reduce traffic towards regular submissions as well?

I knew I forgot one
I totally agree.

Why not just have a separate updater team for projects, since they're becoming a regular thing anyways and deserve to have regular and predictable rate of approval. The cons I see with removing one are:

I like this idea too but there really isn't any Updaters that are really interested in projects.

1) You'd have to sacrifice one of two very different but equally important arrangement projects. If you get rid of Arrangement Projects, well, everyone would be sad. If you get rid of the Replacing the Sheet's project, the rate at which NSM will modernize will slow to a crawl.

That's why I thought we could have a separate submission board exclusive to replacements.
Everyone could have 4 sheets.....2 normal and 2 replacement.

2) You have no way to control Unofficial arrangement projects, which demand a large amount of updater attention as well. Even if they don't get their own update, it's just a large amount of arrangements going through the regular process.

Yeah, I'm not really a big fan of unofficial projects.

1) Spreading the updater team too thin and/or finding enough qualified people to make a second team.

You hit the nail on the head! One of the biggest problems imo, is the lack of Updaters. Even 1 or 2 more Updaters would help A LOT. You could have 3 for subs and 3 for projects.

It's less cons, but I can understand how it could be an insurmountable one, so I dunno. If we had to get rid of one, I would prefer we got rid of arrangement projects rather than the Updating the Sheets. The only real positive to Arrangement projects is the fun and sense of teamwork. Updating the sheets is sorely needed, and while it may be less exciting *cough* Super Mario 64 *cough* I would really like to see all those crap sheets disappear in my life time.

I agree. It's terrible that we have so many crappy arrangements on site. Imo, replacements are the most important thing. That's why I brought up the idea of having a separate board for them. Then, we could focus on any or all games, instead of just 1 at a time. That'd bring more interest among the members.

Yeah, three projects does seem kind of excessive at times. Plus, the Mario & B-K ones barely get any attention at all. I think the mods would appreciate more time getting sheets on site than worrying about some of these projects. The only question should be which ones to get rid of and why. Here's my thoughts on that:

The staff decided that we won't have 3 projects again. The Banjo project was started by Deku and I without a poll (the last project we won't have a poll for) and that project is soon to completion.
 

In my opinion, the "Replacing the Sheets" project seems kind of unnecessary, as we already have a "submit replacement sheet" option in NSM Panel already. Out of the three, it's the one I would get rid of automatically. Sure, there are some sheets that are in dire need of replacements, but someone can always replace it in Submissions.

According to Olimar, the Replacing the sheets thing has been discarded. It will be fixing the sheets from now on which is fixing and replacing.

I do like the Arrangement Projects, considering that it gets a lot of attention, and tends to get down quicker than the other two. Imo it should stay.

I agree, but we should have one at a time imo.

I wonder if we were going to have only 1 project. Couldn't it also be a combination of fixing and arranging? There are many games where there are some sheets that are old and poor but also songs that haven't been arranged, and this would be perfect for those games. One game that comes to mind is SSB Melee.

Well, any game we do for a normal arrangement project is bound to have songs that need replaced. Paper Mario and Animal Crossing: New Leaf both hands songs that needed replaced and they were normal arrangement projects.

[TheMarioPianist]

Are you considering the fact that arrangement projects reduce traffic towards regular submissions as well?

Why not just have a separate updater team for projects, since they're becoming a regular thing anyways and deserve to have regular and predictable rate of approval. The cons I see with removing one are:

If you use my idea, then the cons become:

1) Spreading the updater team too thin and/or finding enough qualified people to make a second team.

It's less cons, but I can understand how it could be an insurmountable one, so I dunno. If we had to get rid of one, I would prefer we got rid of arrangement projects rather than the Updating the Sheets. The only real positive to Arrangement projects is the fun and sense of teamwork. Updating the sheets is sorely needed, and while it may be less exciting *cough* Super Mario 64 *cough* I would really like to see all those crap sheets disappear in my life time.

The Project/Submission updater split was actually something i formulated a while ago. Like you said, spreading the updater team too thin would obviously reduce efficiently (if only there were people who would be willing to take the spot ). I think you would need 6 updaters to do this properly; we could always add a 7th if need be (for instance, if projects required more attention than submissions, or vice versa). Oh yea, and another hypothetical question. If there was this division of updaters, would their privileges be limited to their role? Actually, that might not be that important; we kind of have to establish the idea further first. I don't think the issue is too many projects as much as not enough staff members to support them. Since both fixing the sheets and arranging new sheets are crucial, I believe that we should seek out a couple more updater candidates and split them between projects and submissions.

[Sebastian]

I like your idea, TMP! But, we need to get the most important opinions, the Updaters.

[Olimar12345]

Olimar and I were talking and thought it'd be a good idea to go from 2 projects at a time to 1.

Woah woah woah, that's not what I said. I said that three was one too many, and went on to comment that fixing the sheets projects can't last forever, since we will eventually fix all of the old sheets.

Combining arrangement projects with fixing the sheets projects would be a cool idea. The only issue with that is some sections only need fixing or don't need that many new arrangements.

[Sebastian]

Woah woah woah, that's not what I said. I said that three was one too many, and went on to comment that fixing the sheets projects can't last forever, since we will eventually fix all of the old sheets.

lol.....my bad XD

Combining arrangement projects with fixing the sheets projects would be a cool idea. The only issue with that is some sections only need fixing or don't need that many new arrangements.

This^


Olimar, what do you think of another section like submissions, but is only devoted to replacements?

[TheMarioPianist]

Combining arrangement projects with fixing the sheets projects would be a cool idea. The only issue with that is some sections only need fixing or don't need that many new arrangements.

Yea, this is kind of what I was going for. The Arrangement Projects are obviously important, and those should stay. The other one would then be the Fixing/Replacing the Sheets project. I think this site is perfectly capable of running regular submissions along with 2 projects. The only thing is, we have but 4 updaters. That would be a substantial number...if they could spend their entire day on NSM. But they can't. I mean, they have to be learning all this musical knowledge from somewhere, right? And let's face it, these guys are doing this out of pure love for music and Nintendo. They aren't getting paid to do this. Oh, right, the point I was trying to make. With school and jobs and other stuff like that, four people maintaining submissions and 2 projects is not enough, in my opinion. I personally think it would be more efficient to have one team of updaters for projects and one for submissions. But cutting the number of available updaters for each section in half wouldn't really help with efficiency, now would it? So the solution (if we switched over to this system) would be to find at least 2 more site members who are qualified to be updaters (you can decide what "qualified" is) and then split the team: 3 for projects, and 3 for submissions. Heck, if we could get up to 7 updaters, we could have 3 for subs, 2 for APs, and 2 for Fixing the Sheets. If this idea goes through, of course, you'd have to think about who to nominate for the updater roles, but I definitely think this site has some viable candidates. Feel free to attack any or all flaws in this idea.   

[DonValentino]

Replacing and fixing should be one, I never understood why there's two of them in first place.

The "Replacing the Sheets" Project is an organized effort ... to bring each and every sheet of music on Ninsheetmusic up to the current standard.

The "Fixing the Sheets" Project is an organized effort ... to bring each and every sheet of music on NinSheetMusic up to the current standard.

'poteito' 'potahto' duh

[Olimar12345]

Replacing and fixing should be one, I never understood why there's two of them in first place.

'poteito' 'potahto' duh

You win the prize.

[Latios212]

I don't like the idea of splitting the updater team, but I'm all for combining projects so they encompass both fixing and arranging; that's something I advocated for a while back.

[TheMarioPianist]

I don't like the idea of splitting the updater team, but I'm all for combining projects so they encompass both fixing and arranging; that's something I advocated for a while back.

I agree, maybe "splitting" wasn't exactly the best term to uses. I didn't want it to sound like we were breaking the unity of the updating team. What I was kind of going for was that in this hypothetical 6 updater team, everyone would still have the same privileges and would still have the ability to collaborate over everything. The difference would be that half the team would spend the majority of their time on subs, while the others would be on projects a lot. I just think that having 3 people dedicated to each significant part of the NSM community would be better than having each member of the current team of 4 kinda splitting their individual time between the two. Like I said, I am not trying to advocate a split in the team here. For example, if Bespinben were part of the submissions team but saw something wrong in some sheet for a project, there would be no problem with him pointing it out. However, depending on how the idea develops, I think that he would point out the initial issues, and the project updaters could then handle the fixes from there. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if we had 6 updaters, they could do everything the current ones do. Half would just "specialize" in submissions, while the rest would focus more on projects. I'm not trying to create a schism; rather, I'm going for a 2 division "league" of updaters, if you will. It's kind of like divisions in the NFL or MLB (or any sport league, really). They don't break up the league. They just kind of make it a bit more organized. And teams still play against other teams that are not in their division; they just play games within their division more often. (And that's enough sports for one day on NSM. )