The leaderboard has been revamped in view of the upcoming SpeedGaming tournament. NTSC/PAL and 1P/2P are now split as subcategories.

Please note that this means you will have to select your region twice when submitting runs: the usual JPN/USA/EUR parameter, as well as the new NTSC/PAL variable.

I'm happy to announce a new SMK tournament, hosted by SpeedGaming!

For this first edition, we will be competing in a double elimination bracket of NTSC GP speedruns. You can find detailed rules here: https://pastebin.com/jQJ38kjf

The tournament is open to anyone. All you need to do is fill out this form before February 13 at 23:59 CET: https://forms.gle/dVe4dLi4am2W6bj96

You can find the bracket (including all players currently signed up) here: https://challonge.com/smkspeedgamingseason1

This had been in the works for a long time, but I finally got around to doing it: all 1P/2P categories have been merged, and 1P/2P has been made a mandatory variable for all new submissions.

The old setup had been around since the SMK leaderboards were first made by KVD in the early days of SRC, and reflected the site's limitations at the time. I spoke with him about merging the categories and he agreed with me that it was the best thing to do.

I realized after the change that by deleting the 1P categories, I also deleted the pending runs for those categories. My apologies to anyone affected by this, please resubmit your times to the new categories (with the 1P variable selected).

Hello everyone,

As most of you are probably aware, I am the series moderator for Mario Kart. I'm not really involved in the MKW community, so I usually let the MKW-specific moderators handle the game's leaderboards and forum.

However, it was recently brought to my attention that several issues with the current state of the leaderboards have been brought up on the forum, and that the game-specific moderators have been ignoring them entirely.

Given the situation, I felt that it was necessary for me to step in and make some changes to the game's moderation. That being said, it would have been inappropriate for me to blindly intervene and appoint new moderators on a whim while going behind the current moderators' backs.

I exchanged Twitch PMs with Jcool after being told that he was the only active moderator at the moment (which seemed likely after a cursory glance at the MKW moderation log and the other moderators' profiles). He confirmed to me that he has been the only active moderator for a while now. I also asked him about his general take on the current state of the leaderboards and why he hadn't addressed any of the forum threads. His response gave me the impression that he isn't particularly motivated to do anything beyond approving runs. Jcool, please correct me if I'm wrong. (As an aside for all readers, please note that this is in no way criticism of Jcool or the other moderators, nor of the work that they've put in for the leaderboards here. All moderators are volunteers spending their own free time and energy on helping out with the site.)

At this point I felt that it was necessary to find a new "head moderator" for MKW, so I read through the relevant forum threads. I know that many users have expressed interest in becoming a moderator, but ultimately I decided that the person who best met what I value in a moderator (see https://www.speedrun.com/mario_kart/thread/ermcv/1#plqc0) was charlocharlie. I talked with him privately on Discord, and he agreed to take the position.

Unfortunately, the timing of all of this happened in such a way that after several days of planning and discussing with relevant parties on my end, I went to make changes to the moderator team only to find that a few hours prior, kirkq had written this post: https://www.speedrun.com/mkw/thread/ict1t/1#czsy6.

I contacted kirkq privately on Discord to explain what I had been working on and asked him to revert his change, which he agreed to do. An additional hitch came from the fact that I was away for the entire weekend and wasn't able to write this post until now. I apologize to all for the confusion this caused.

I hope that everything I've written above makes my reasoning clear and properly explains why I am making the following changes in moderation, effective immediately:

• all current moderators, except for Jcool, are removed.
• charlocharlie is now the unofficial "head moderator" of MKW (which in practice means that he's a super mod).

I leave it to charlocharlie to appoint new moderators as he sees fit.

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, etc., please feel free to respond in this thread.

Regards, Lafungo.

I'd like to have a trace of category discussion here on the forum since this is much easier to access than digging through Twitter. I'll start off by simply linking to indy's pastebin.

I'm opening this thread as a general moderation log for the Mario Kart series.

As the first item of the log, after discussing with several other moderators, we've decided to remove all of BigMac's runs (SMK, MKW, MK7, MK8) due to suspicious submission behavior throughout the Mario Kart series (as well as elsewhere on the site). He will need to provide video proof to be able to rejoin any of the series' leaderboards.

http://www.speedrun.com/mario_kart/thread/ermcv

Please respond in the other thread.

It was recently brought to my attention that King is no longer interested in moderating the Mario Kart leaderboards. Given that he was the main person who took care of the Mario Kart Wii and Mario Kart 8 leaderboards, there is now a vacancy for moderating these leaderboards. The idea is to get two or three new mods to handle MKW and/or MK8.

Ideally, new mods would be:

• mature. As a leaderboard mod, you're a representative of the Mario Kart speedrunning community. Behaving inappropriately (be it on the forum here or elsewhere) deteriorates discussion, and reflects poorly on the community as a whole. Personally, I think this is the most important trait to have, as cheesy as it may sound.
• available. You should have time to check the site to approve runs every two or three days (this doesn't take very long). You should also have time to check the forum and respond to discussion once or twice a week (this takes longer).
• knowledgeable. You should be well-acquainted with leaderboard rules, game mechanics, strats, outside resources, etc. This is for matters such as approving runs, debating changes, as well as helping new players out.
• pre-established. This is perhaps the less important point, but you should (again, ideally) already be someone other runners know and respect. This makes many things easier, such as justifying your promotion to mod, intervening in debates, and contacting people.

If you're interested, post in this thread with some reasoning as to why you'd be a good pick for mod, and mention which game(s) you're interested in modding.

I know this may seem a bit over-the-top, but my goal is to maintain the quality of the leaderboards. If you have any issues with this or any other aspect of the Mario Kart series on speedrun.com, feel free to let me know.

Edit: I'm going to leave this open for a few days before I work through the applications. I will consult other people to make a decision, as I am not as familiar with the MKW/MK8 communities as I am with the others. If you have an opinion on someone else's application, feel free to post it here.

I was wondering why some games (namely, MKSC and MKDS) only have single cup categories, but no all cup ones. Also, if you want to have single cup categories, why not have them for all games in the series? MKSC is also missing all the Extra cups, by the way.