hello! i wanted to talk a bit about how OHB hostists share the results of their battles in chat.

this is something the admin team has done a bit of discussing about recently, and the general consensus is that we'd like to put forth a basic guideline that hostists should aim to spend no more than a minute or two talking in between ranking reveals. this guideline doesn't mean we are going to be breathing down your necks or anything, but good hostists should maintain some awareness of the time and shift things back on track when necessary.

OHB results posting has been a very free process my whole time here - different hostists approach their results in different ways and at different speeds. generally giving hostists that freedom is good! none of us want to step on peoples' toes. however, lately there's been a trend of results taking 5-10 minutes per entry, creating 1hr+ long results ceremonies, which seriously balloons the amount of time a single OHB consumes.

there's several reasons why that could cause issues:
- most obviously, another battle is coming up. it's best to wrap things up before a new battle starts if you can, and hostists should be reasonably aware of the schedule and act accordingly. this might mean doing a quick paste, however un-ideal that might normally be. (scheduling something should ideally account for at least a half hour for voting + results of a previous battle, too!)
- people might want to be posting about other stuff in the chat, such as folks asking for help troubleshooting, or trying to plan a future battle, but be discouraged from doing so because they don't want to interrupt or for their query to be quickly buried.
- not everyone has that much time to devote. you already spent an hour making something, and likely some number of minutes voting on everything. some people (myself included) may just peace out from a long results ceremony, even if otherwise they'd like to be around to chat about the entries.

relatedly, delaying one OHB's results until after another, IMHO, tends to compound these issues more than solving them; fewer participants are likely to still be around to witness the results posting by the time it happens, and in the meantime confused people may wonder what's going on, especially if they are new. participants in the second OHB will also have to wait if the first one wraps up first. we should aim for smoothness and consistency where we can, so everyone's battle experiences are of good quality.

my personal strategy as hostist has been to aim for ~2min or less between rankings and to sense whenever there's a lull in discussion, where most people who wanted to say something have probably said it, and then move on at that point. sometimes you do have to nudge things forward yourself, especially if they veer off topic (as discussions naturally do), but usually there is an opening to give the next ranking... and you should take it!

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now... with all of that said, i (and we, the admins) don't want to discourage the healthy discussion and camaraderie that results ceremonies bring. engaging with other peoples' work, giving thoughts and feedback and impressions, is one of the most valuable things about a community like this, and sets us apart from being "another place to set-and-forget tracks".

from that perspective i LOVE seeing the wealth of celebration of one another's work that's been going on. surely most participants enjoy hearing thoughts from others about their work, too - that little bit of attention is nourishing.

if you miss out on getting to say something about someone's entry during results, leave a comment after the battle is closed! comments rule, and we ought to have more of them. maybe you've seen me doing my best to comment on most major battle entries the last couple years, as inspired by thoughtful feedback being left by folks like gotoandplay and th4 D34D.

thanks for reading y'all, and happy battling 🫡

i personally think it would be really cool to see a new culture of commenting on botb. major entries, xhb entries... leave more comments on the website instead of the chat.
chats quickly move on and its hard to find feedback again, while it stays forever on the entry page comment section, directly linked to the content c:

and happy hosting! love to see new hostists <3

yes, that too! one thing i didn't mention is that i've been very glad to see a new wave of hostists the last several months. it's fresh and it's healthy and it's wonderful. you all keep the battlefields flourishing : )

i think i would also like to draft up a little list of hosting best practices for the lyceum, just so we have something to point to and for easier onboarding of new hostists

there we go -- new article: https://battleofthebits.com/lyceum/View/XHB+Hosting

kleeder brought up the exact point I was wanting to make -- having a smol resluts countdown in chat is a fine tradition (and agreed with OP on this too; don't over-extend it) -- BUT, chat is ephemeral. Comments and feedback on the entry pages themselves are gold -- they're much easier for our future selves to find, and folks browsing the site at a later date (i.e. long after the XHB is closed) can join in the fun without having to break through the Blank Page Barrier(tm) first.


This probably starts getting into Web Dev Territory(tm2), but I'd love it if it were possible to leave comments on entries _during the voting period_, i.e. when the entries are still anonymized. That way people can get the comment train rolling while listening to entries for the first time. Without this, people would basically have to remember to copy+paste their comments from chat into the entry page later, which probably won't happen. :P

welp this is turning into a topic for a different thread, I guess

Xaser, I suggested that in this other thread years ago, so feel free to bump it.

I agree that a guideline of no more than 1-2 minutes between results seems very reasonable!

The problem of delaying an OHB's results until after another is not as clear-cut a case in my opinion...it's not ideal for OHBs to overlap, but I prefer it to the alternative of battles not happening at all. More battols = more merriment!

Personally I would lean towards a guideline of "just post the results as soon as a battle is over, and if there's overlap with another OHB, try to expedite the results" but I'm not confident enough to say this should be the rule. I can see why some people would prefer to delay the results instead.

As for comments, I also think it would be great to see more of this! Enabling them during the voting/tallying period would help for sure.

As a bit of counterpoint though, I try to write listening notes for all the tracks in battles which I host, but these notes are very stream of consciousness and I don't feel like they are good or insightful enough to immortalize as comments on the individual track pages... this is more of a personal hang-up though, maybe I should stop overthinking it and just post them anyway.

Also just in case anybody didn't realize, there is an "IRC Log" button on battle pages as a semi-workaround to this issue. It's not ideal though because most people won't bother to check it and you have to sift through a bunch of unrelated comments.

I agree with you all on xhb comments on the site vs. in chat - bumped the thread. Not that site comments should supplant real time chat but to see a lot more of them would be cool.

Thanks for all the hosts out there

i dont care whose win or lose , i dont care about art or music good or bad (reason i love harsh noise and abstractive ) , what i concern is the people atittudes behind it . it more relevant reflective subjective than work

I basically agree - overlapping OHB votes + slugs seems like an entirely avoidable problem, if you take the time to do the math - and it's something that, in time, could be addressed by added functionality from the site itself (e.g. a warning if you attempt to beghast one XHB within ~90 minutes of another)

if we wanted to move to capturing more comments as *comments* on entry posts, especially if those comments could be written out during voting, while you're evaluating the entry, that feels ideal to me.

another suggestion that would require dev time is - automatic slugging. 🤷‍♂️ It's fun to play MC and dole out the results manually, but it doesn't need to be that way - ending the voting period could easily trigger the chat bot to spit out the results, one by one. "Reveal 8th place. Sleep for 2 minutes. Reveal 7th place. Sleep for 2 minutes." - should be very automatable.

I'll make sure to keep an eye on my own scheduling / slugging practices too for sure, regardless! Thanks for bringing it up officially! (and writing the Lyceum article)

you could also have a bot which generates a bitpack and format every 12 hours on its own and starts hosting a battle automatically.

the amount of work required and the amount of time saved doing automatic slugs is trivial enough that anyone who wants to do it should probably just program it themselves. AutoHotkey maybe?

"a bot which generates a bitpack and format every 12 hours on its own and starts hosting a battle automatically"

@kleeder april fools day prank??

"vombot has earned 192348102349580 hostist points"

I've been hosting results at damifortune's pace since this thread was created. Now, I want the one who is telling me to hurry up even more to stop doing this, because this is a non-issue at this point. I don't need my hosting speed to be constantly evaluated between ranking reveals ("next one pls", "next one pls", "next one pls") when I'm already doing this well enough. It's excessively annoying and unhelpful. Definitely not what I'm looking forward to experience while hosting.

tex, its not about counting down the seconds until you have to post the next rank, its about reading the room to see when you should post the next one. if there was no message in 20 or 30 seconds and you simply wait because the 2 minute mark wasnt reached yet, youre stretching results for no reason. especially if a battle is about to start in the next few minutes and you barely manage to reach the top rank before the next one starts. maybe someone wants to see the results AND have a minimal downtime to get a new cup of water before the next battle starts.

if the chat is all actively talking about an entry or whatever, sure you can wait until you move on, but just staying in place even when noone is talking anymore is exactly what we want to avoid.

kleeder, you need to understand that I was not waiting for the 2 minutes limit between ranking reveals to be reached and I know I don't need to. It is common sense to reveal the next ranking while the chat is quiet. I read the first post of this thread and am fully aware of the new hosting policy. Either way, rushing hostists, with "next one pls" (multiple times, no less) before the limit is reached is a bit rude and excessive.

My battle overlapping with the next one by 1 mere minute was not a problem unless one of the participants of mine explicitly told me so. Also, participants don't need to be present for the whole ceremony. They can take a break between battles on their own if needed.

From what I can tell, the overlap did not affect the other battle. On the contrary, it was a huge success. I understand that it's ideal that battles don't clash, but we should not be super perfectionists about this.

Please, let's not exaggerate here.

Also, the other battle was scheduled after I scheduled mine with only a half hour interval for voting and results. Imo, a half hour is not enough time to wrap things up and for people to take a break, because depending on the number of entries, ceremonies will take longer. A scenario in which hostists are often like "oh no, I must reveal the top 3 RIGHT NOW because another battle is coming up" is an underwhelming one. Who wants that?

That's why I think scheduling a battle should occur for at least 1 whole hour for voting + results of a previous battle. Not only for a half hour. I try to be attentive to this timeframe whenever I schedule a battle.

Sorry Tex that was my bad, I wrongly assumed that the votes for a draw battle would go really quick. I'll try to be more mindful of that when I schedule future battles.

Thanks. I think the voting/slugs period of the draw battle was quick enough. Glad it didn't overlap with your battle too much.