one big problem is that the whole site is built on the forum software, even the ladders themselves.

if the forum was upgraded or changed, it'd break everything. that's why a new site is being built.

(don't ask me why the ol site owners made it like that. no one who is currently active knows)

That's good news. Any idea when it's due?

 no idea when it'll be ready but work is advancing.

 You can expect me to be there when it's finished. Is there a possibility that you can transfer accounts over? I'm betting absolutely not, but I thought I'd ask anyway.

there's gonna be a way to migrate content from the site but other than that no specifics so far. i think that's something that will come up at some point due to all the data in the ladders and a lot of it being time consuming to add manually.

One of the reasons why the forum and ladder are integrated is so that you only have to log in once.  If the code was separate then you would have to log into the forum and ladder separately because they'd be effectively separate websites.

As for migrating things over to the new website, one of the problems is that there will be separate PAL and NTSC ladders.  The current data base stores all times as NTSC.  When you submit a PAL time the website converts it into an NTSC time and then stores that in the database.  Thus, transferring times to the new website is problematic because it is unknown which times are real NTSC times and which ones are converted PAL ones.

 in that situation we'd need a group effort to separate which is which. we could go by country flags and other things to at least do a separation. we'd also need input from people who have played a lot and remember what older people's versions were.

would be better than nothing.

Just because someone is from a PAL country doesn't mean they are using the PAL versions.

Wouldn't the orginal PAL time be stored on the database? If not, you could just reverse the formula to convert the times back to PAL, providing we know which ones are PAL.

Each FZX player has a personal setting which says whether they submit times as PAL or NTSC. I think our best bet for FZX separation is to check that setting. There has also been discussion (e.g. on Discord) of separating the F-Zero SNES ladder into NTSC and PAL though, and if we do that, the only things we can go on are the country flags. (EDIT: Uh, I actually didn't realize SNES had NTSC/PAL conversion on FZC too, so scratch that!)

And yes, rankings and forum accounts/content would definitely be migrated over.

The current site's ranking and forum integration may have its advantages, but I think the biggest problem is that we have a lot of forum-software modifications which make the forum software really hard to upgrade. You can check out the "Announcement: Developer log" thread in this forum for more technical info on the upcoming site upgrade, planned primarily by me and locks.

 The original FZC had times saved separately for PAL and NTSC. I might still have the backup spreadsheets on an old hard drive somewhere, if not Randal probably does. That'll help out with a big bulk of older times.