BeastSaber Rising: Rebuilding a Community Cornerstone

What is happening to BeastSaber?

The BeastSaber website launched on June 4, 2018, a mere 26 days after BeatSaver, and 34 days after the May 1st early access launch of Beat Saber itself. The site was originally created as a “pretty” front-end for the bare-bones BeatSaver map repository, with the ability to host articles, tutorials, interviews, provide a social experience, and more in the days when the community was a few thousand people and map keys were two and three digits.

Since then, Beat Saber has sold MILLIONS of copies, there are more than 71,000 human-made maps (125,000 in total), and there are hundreds of community touchpoints across Discord, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and more. Though the community has evolved, the BeastSaber site hasn’t kept pace. A system that was designed for thousands of maps and tens of thousands of users is now struggling under the weight of community growth.

The Admin team at BeastSaber — namely Rorekk, Agoza, Pixelguy, and HelenCarnate — wants to acknowledge and apologize for the struggles our users have faced, especially in the last 12 months, including:

• Loss of easy access to bookmarks
• Frequent issues with undelivered system emails
• User registration redirect deathloops
• Failure of map syncing with BeatSaver

What is being done about the site issues?

It’s clear to the team that the site needs a major rebuild, but we want to ensure access to popular functions while that happens. In the summer of 2021, we began conversations with Top_Cat, the owner of the newly transferred and upgraded BeatSaver website. What was once a simplistic repository without much active development had transitioned into a clean, but full-featured new site on a new code base with continuous improvement.

As a team, we asked ourselves a few important questions:

1. If we were to rebuild BeastSaber what would be the benefit of developing redundant functionality?
2. What is BeastSaber’s place in the community if tutorials live on the wiki and maps live on BeatSaver?
3. The community has grown so much, are there needs that didn’t exist in 2018 that aren’t currently being met?

The result of reflecting on these questions and extensive surveys and conversations is a partnership between the two sites — a rationalization of what features belong on each site to best serve the various needs of the community. We have spent much of the last nine months redeveloping important map and playlist-related functions on BeatSaver. These include:

• January 2022 – Allowed mappers to add genre and style tags when they upload their maps
• February 2022 – Moved the act of curation and elevated curator access
• April 2022 – Implemented the Verified Mapper feed
• July 2022 – Updated the tag filtering system to allow tag exclusion
• August 2022 – Added a full Alerts system and updated the way that ratings are displayed on maps
• September 2022 – Search and discover community-made playlists; follow your favorite mappers to be notified of releases; enhanced features on mapper profiles
• October 2022 – Added support for BeatLeader leaderboards; map reviews
• January 2023 – A new bookmarks system

By redeveloping, and in many cases enhancing, these features on BeatSaver, we are able to ensure that important map-based functionality is preserved while we rework BeastSaber.

What will Beast Saber 2.0 be like?

Our vision for the next iteration of BeastSaber is to become more of a community hub where players from all parts of the community can find information or be directed out to some of the more specialized areas.
We hope to bring lots of different resources together in an easily accessible site that doesn’t rely on any one technology (like requiring a Discord account). And, yes, we may still link to recent curations, featured map packs, and other map-based items over on BeatSaver.

Features of Future BeatSaver	Features of Future BeastSaber
Mapper Upload with Genre/Style Tagging ✔ Song Repository & Robust Search ✔ Map Curation ✔ Playlist Creation, Sharing, & Curation ✔ Verified Mapper Flag & Search Filter ✔ Followed Mappers ✔ Bookmarking Maps for Later Download ✔ Simplified Map Reviews/Recommendations ✔	Community Hub News Articles Event Listings Getting Started & Tutorial Resources Links to the BSMG Wiki Links to Global Rankings Links to ModelSaber, Questboard, etc. Featured Videos The BeastSaber Mapping Awards

 

How can I help?

All features necessary to start development on BeastSaber 2.0 have been transferred to BeatSaver! However, any help on future features is always welcome.

If you know (or are willing to learn) Kotlin and React you can chip in at BeatSaver to move things along… The backlog is deep!

• BeatSaver Repo: https://github.com/beatmaps-io/beatsaver-main/

We are looking to build the new BeastSaber site with JavaScript, using Svelte as the front-end framework. Experience working with APIs will be essential as we hook into other services like BeatSaver, ScoreSaber, BeatLeader, ModelSaber, and more! We’re also looking for someone(s) with a design background to help us visualize a site with its own identity but still looks like it’s part of a family with BeatSaver.

• BeastSaber Repo (WIP): https://github.com/beastsaber/bsaber
• BeastSaber SiteMap (WIP): https://octopus.do/wrz4gzpgdae
• BeastSaber Designs (WIP): https://www.figma.com/file/Espj6p4Llw0wUqWUstX14s/BeastSaber-2.0

If you have any of these skills and are interested in helping us rebuild BeastSaber, please Discord DM one of our admins or email our Team email:

• Admin Email: [email protected]
• HelenCarnate
• Pixelguy
• rorekk
• agoza

Stay tuned for more news and updates in our Discord or follow us on Twitter (while it lasts!). We will be starting to make changes to address the inconsistent map syncing within the next week.

Last updated: November 1st 2023