What is PB Tracker?

PB Tracker is a web app for tracking speedrunning times, personal bests (PBs) and viewing other runners' PBs. Runners sign up and submit their times to populate their very own personal runner page. This runner page is the main feature of PB Tracker, providing a useful reference point for looking up a runner's best times.

Help! I forgot my password! How do I reset it?

Since we don't require users to provide or verify any contact information, we don't have a fool proof way to provide password resets automatically. If you need a password reset, send rggibson a message or email us and we'll get you straightened out as quickly as we can.

Is there a banner for PB Tracker that I can use on my Twitch TV channel?

Yes there is! Funny you should ask. It's nothing special, but this simple PB Tracker banner should do the trick. If that doesn't suit your fancy, IAmCorgii designed a nice, slick alternative banner, and sickmind and Deinol did the same. Be sure to link the banner of your choice to your runner page.

I cannot find game X and category Y on PB Tracker. Where is it?

While PB Tracker does contain a healthy database of games and run categories, not every game and category is listed. However, users may submit times for any game and category they wish. If the game or category does not exist, PB Tracker will create a page for the game and add the category to the database. So, feel free to add run times to any games and categories you wish!

I made a mistake when I submitted a run. How can I fix it?

When logged in, head to your runner page by clicking on your username in the top navigation bar. From there, there will be a list icon in the top left just above your PB table. Clicking this icon will bring up a list of all of your runs, default sorted by date. Find the run you wish to edit or delete and click the appropriate icon in the far right column of the table.

How does auto-submission with Time Split Tracker and LiveSplit work?

Time Split Tracker and LiveSplit are splits programs for speedrunning and are useful tools to keep track of level completion times during a run. Both support auto-submission of runs to PB Tracker. Below are some useful tips for getting started with TimeSplitTracker. If you have problems auto-submitting with LiveSplit, contact the authors CryZe or wooferzfg1.

To enable auto-submission in TimeSplitTracker, click options and go down to enable auto-upload. Enter your credentials and the game info on the menu that pops up. Note that new games and categories currently cannot be auto-submitted and the first run of a new game or category must be submitted manually on the web. Once enabled, on completion of a run (after the final split is hit), your run time will be automatically submitted to PB Tracker. If a mistake was made in the auto-submitted time (such as the final split was hit too late), you may always edit your runs from your list / edit runs page. Note that the date of the run will be the current day in UTC unless you update your time zone information on your edit profile page.

Here are some useful tips for getting started with Time Split Tracker:

  1. Download Time Split Tracker and extract the files to a local directory.
  2. For basic splits, copy and rename the "Sample No Comparison Times.txt" file to something more appropriate (such as "mega-man-2.txt").
  3. Open the Time Split Tracker executable, go to "Open splits," and select your new file.
  4. Right-click on various parts of the Time Split Tracker window to bring up contextual menus and edit the appropriate labels, add or remove split rows, change row images, etc.
  5. Go to Options -> Enable auto-upload, select PB Tracker as the server, and enter the appropriate information.
  6. Finally, Time Split Tracker offers several advanced features, including comparison against multiple split columns. If you prefer a simpler, single column of splits, you can edit your preferences yourself or download this configuration file and overwrite the existing file in your Time Split Tracker directory.

Does PB Tracker have an API?

Yes it does. For more information, send us an email. Just let us know what you would like to do with PB Tracker in your application and we will be happy to help.

Isn't there a blog about PB Tracker?

Yes there is! It is currently a bit outdated, but you can find it at http://www.pbtracker.net/blog.

How can I request a feature or report a problem?

You can send an email or contact rggibson on Twitter. Unfortunately, we have very little time these days to add new features, but one day hopefully we can start tackling this growing list.

Some of the games and categories are mislabelled and thus are not merged properly. How can this be fixed?

You can let rggibson know of any problems like this that you find. However, a better approach might be to send a friendly message to the runner if you believe they have mislabelled a game or category and ask them to edit their run.

How can I contribute?

The code for PB Tracker is open-source, so anyone is welcome to work on the site. Check out the issues and let rggibson know if you want to work on any of them. He is happy to take pull requests from anyone willing to put in the time to come up with a workable solution. If you have a feature that you want to work on for PB Tracker and it is not listed on the issues page, drop us a line to make sure that it is a suitable feature for PB Tracker.

Where is the box art for game X?

While we are trying to keep up with all of the games being added to PB Tracker, sometimes the box art for certain games are missing, particularly games recently added. In fact, the easiest way that you can help contribute to the site is to send us links to box art images that you would like to see added. Alternatively, if you are a fancy pants and are familiar with GitHub, you can clone or fork the open-source repository, add the box art image to the /static/boxart/ directory and send a pull request. When sending a pull request, make sure the box art image file name is [game_code].jpg, where http://www.pbtracker.net/game/[game_code] is the URL for the game page.

Why does PB Tracker occasionally go down and not come back up until the next day?

PB Tracker is hosted on Google App Engine (GAE), a web service that allows web applications to be built and run on Google's infrastructure. GAE offers free tier quotas on things like database reads, outgoing bandwidth, and other necessary services to run a web app. PB Tracker currently runs on this free tier and some days, we receive enough traffic so that we hit one or more of these free resource limits. Once one of these limits is hit, some or all of PB Tracker's pages become inaccessible. We currently do not ask for donations to increase the quota limits, though we could look into it if there is enough interest in keeping the site functional every day around the clock. In addition, we have not looked into adding advertisements or sponsorship to PB Tracker, but only because we have not found the time to do so.