the melee.uk post

I've maintained melee.uk for a while now, and it's always been a goal of mine to make it into something that the scene could refer to or use as a way to onboard new players.

I think I've succeeded in a few small ways. Something a lot of regions use is a "[scene].melee.uk" subdomain that redirects to their own discord, or website. This is probably the best thing the site is currently doing as it makes joining the local community a little smoother for newbies. I'm also a big fan of the Slippi leaderboard that still updates to this day (thank you Zepple for emailing me to fix it).

When I think about it, besides a few little things, there's not a lot the website is truly useful for. I've tried over the years to make something out of this lucky diamond of a domain that fell into my lap, but it hasn't fully come into fruition.

Truth is, I've struggled to maintain the passion I had when I first envisioned it. It's been around 7 years since the website first went up and It's still a mostly unfinished project. A lot of my inattention can reasonably be attributed to the ADHD I figured out I had, but there is a lot more that can't. I think a lot of it has to do with my own issues with feeling disconnected, with the community and with humanity at large. I've found it pretty difficult to work on a project providing a service to others, when you don't even really know what they want, or if what they wanted would even be accepted if it was made by someone the likes of you.

I tried to work on giving the community something that TOs and even players could actually use for themselves. We have a CMS (content management system) in place so that all the links, events, even the damn navigation bar is all editable by clicking a few buttons. If a TO wanted to maintain their own event page, all they would have to do is get access to the repository and they can update whatever they want.

The bones of a working system are there, but it needs some people who actually want to use it, for it to make any sense at all. I thought I could convince someone it was worth using. Maybe I just didn't try hard enough to get people on board, to be honest I shrink into nothingness at the thought of trying to convince people of this stuff again.

The only people with even a dusty fingerprint on the website's repo are me, Jack (QwertyFinger) and my boyfriend who i forced to be co-authored on a few commits after he helped me with some code and ideas. It makes me kinda sad to feel like I've wasted all this time trying to give to people something that they do not want to use. I sat down and learned web development and made this out of thin air for some reason that I now struggle to relate to or even fully remember.

Earlier on in the project, I struggled with the thought that maybe I wasn't the right person to do something like this. I knew I wasn't the only one that wanted the melee.uk domain, but I had it. I only got it because in 2019 I saw a very rare opportunity, in that unclaimed .uk websites were being released soon. Before then you could only reserve "website.uk" if you owned the corresponding "website.co.uk", and it seemed the owner of "melee.co.uk" wasn't going to do it before the deadline. I used godaddy (shit service in hindsight) to buy it when it finally was released to the world, and lucky me actually got it.

I wanted to at least do something with it. And so I put up a silly little page that had a link to the discord and a funny cool emoji man. I thought it was awesome, to have this place on the web for our dumbass community of gamers. I still kinda think it's cool. The early site was hosted off a Raspberry Pi 3B+ in my room that I used as a webserver (and a terraria server). I miss when it was just some little thing I was enjoying tinkering with.

It grew and evolved naturally over time as I had new ideas and reworked the site into many different interpretations of the same idea which was: to make a directory that linked us together, and a home on the internet to bring us together. With hindsight, this thought process was truly a landmark moment in human optimism, but I did get some decent stuff through the door such as the rankings page which IMO still gaps most others of its kind. Especially the horrendous wikipedia type ones.

When the new UK discord was being made I thought that it was the perfect time to renew the site, and get people on board to help out and make it into something people actually wanted. I tried to build a team to help give it a new life and get some fresh ideas into the mix, and there were people eager to help. I genuinely just, I don't know why but it just fizzled the fuck out so quickly. 1 person on that team made commits that weren't me. I don't really blame anyone but it made me so sad about the whole thing. Deep into the backburner it returned, with me occasionally fixing a link or doing a small update after someone says "who does that melee.uk site? it's kinda outdated" for the nth time. It's depressing.

I had a lot of ideas like a blog that TOs and community members could post to, with articles and news and stuff (kind of inspired by Bristol's basement). A corner of the site that every scene could claim and edit to show off their own little cultures and communities that I know thrive in their region of our world. I think I had hope that people would be interested in building something like that, when I think people really just want to do their own thing, not my vision of 'our thing'. I look back and wonder if I was too ingrained in the identity of the site such that people were scared to step on my toes, or if I made it in a way that was a nightmare to work on, or this and that and just etc. etc. in a loop.

melee.uk is a monument to good intentions, decent ideas, and painfully bad follow-through. It continues to burn this proverbial hole in my pocket, and I genuinely just don't know what the fuck to do with it. I think about it more often than I probably should given its low priority in my life, it's the one that I could never finish even though I loved it more than some projects that I wrapped up nice with a bow. I hope that with time it can serve some real purpose for the scene past the discord redirects and the hall of fame.

Although... I could make it so every redirect has a 2% chance to redirect to meatspin.com instead and go out in a whirling blaze of glory, but I don't see a world where anything that funny could happen while I'm still friends with people here.

lov from mel

If you are interested in helping to maintain the site, or have some ideas about what to do with it, then hit my email at "moon@melee.uk".