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About Us

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rodrigo edited this page May 19, 2024 · 38 revisions

RA Staff

The RetroAchievements project started as a personal project of Scott Breen and in the early days the project had only administrators, achievement creators, and regular users (and it's still like that on the website). At that time administrators were responsible to do things like:

  • keep an eye on the quality of achievements
  • keep an eye if someone is changing other people's achievements (accidentally or intentionally)
  • welcome new achievement creators and show them the information they need to start contributing
  • review the work of new achievement creators
  • get rid of trolls
  • get rid of cheaters
  • avoid legal problems related to piracy
  • sometimes host gaming events
  • besides all those chores, RAdmins also have interest in playing old games, you know...

As the community continues to grow, the amount of work, time, and energy required to keep it running also grows. In order to assure the project thrives, without administrators having burnouts and ragequitting the project, various roles with specific tasks were created.

These roles are not really visible in the website, but they are on discord and here in this page we list the roles and their responsibilities.

Team Accounts

Shared accounts used by their respective team members:

Root

Members who have direct access to the webserver.

Administrators

A group of dedicated and trusted users with varied responsibilities, the heaviest being decision-making regarding the direction of the project and community:

Moderators

The team responsible to keep the this community a healthy place (at least for those who adhere to the User's Code of Conduct and agree with the RetroAchievements Manifesto):

Developer Compliance Team

The team responsible for the adherance and driving updates to the Developer's Code of Conduct.

Quality Assurance Team

The team responsible for ensuring the overall quality of achievement sets: including logic, correct titles and descriptions, working leaderboards, working rich presence and hash compatibility:

Code Reviewer Team

The team responsible for helping Jr. Devs learn how to make achievements sets and review their work to ensure their understanding is enough to make sets on their own:

Tech Team

The team that is more involved with the tech side of things, whether it be the website, emulators, Discord bots, etc.:

Sub-Team Leads

Users who oversee one of the QA sub-teams:

Short History

The RetroAchievements project was created by Scott Breen in 2012. He hacked some open source emulators to add the RetroAchievements feature and coded all the backend/website mostly alone.

By January 2014, there were 4 RA emulators, over 5000 achievements to earn (thanks to the devotion of many passionate achievement developers) and over 1000 players registered. After a couple of years Scott was called by the real life the website development went into a period of hiatus with just a few sporadic improvements (the achievement developers were continually working on more and more games, though).

In late 2015 leiradel started to work to integrate the RetroAchievements feature into RetroArch. And, as RetroArch is able to run on a wide variety of platforms (such as Mac and Linux) and devices (such as Android phones and Raspberry pi), it helped a lot to increase the popularity of the RetroAchievements project.

As the site slowly grew, so did the bandwidth costs, so in late 2016, Scott reached out to the community and they suggested doing a Patreon to keep the site going. After implementing it, the community response was fantastic, which allowed the site to continue completely ad-free.

Mid 2017 the RetroAchievements Discord server was started and it made communication across the community much easier. Since then, many knowledgeable members (coders, web developers, etc.) joined the scene volunteering to contribute to the project.

Up to this point all the achievement creation knowledge was scattered in several forum posts, making it very tough for a newbie to learn how to create achievements. Then in the late 2017 meleu started the RADocs project and thanks to contributions from many experienced achievement creators it is now a reasonably solid resource of information. Helping dozens of Jr. Developers (and even the experienced ones) to create content for our community.

In the early 2018 Scott opened the source of the back-end/website, which was a turning point in the history of the development of the whole RetroAchievements project (see us at github).

Later in the same year a more concise staff began to take shape and is now an awesome team. These talented guys keep the ball rolling and make it very clear that the RA community is alive and stronger than ever.

In some areas the project may still look like a beta version, but we are continually working hard to make things better.

RetroAchievements Documentation

Official Website RADocs Discord Server

Wiki Home Page

Guidelines

General

Achievement Development

WIP

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