This is an old thread on Reddit that references the specific site policy I'm talking about: Speedrun.com changes their rules to prevent game moderators from banning individual users from submissions : r/speedrun

A quote from an SRC representative at the time: "Our intent was not to gain more control of leaderboards or overrule community decisions or anything like that, we simply saw some holes in our ability to handle site-level issues due to communities having these private blacklists that are not shared with site staff".

I'm currently on the receiving end of a private blacklist, along with a public news post and forum post that misrepresents my actions. I would go as far as claim what's been stated about me in these posts is clear defamation. No evidence or context was provided alongside the posts to support what's claimed, my comment defending myself deleted and the thread locked.

The original intent of SRC reverting these changes has been lost. I'm not a cheater and I'm not a harasser; this is the result of petty in-fighting within the community.

Action was still taken against my account by SRC, and I was removed as a moderator of this specific game despite them never reaching out to me to hear my side of the story. I went as far as providing a Google doc of the chat-logs and harassment I myself received and my evidence went ignored. It's of my opinion the SRC representative that took my tickets was extremely negligent.

Another quote from that Reddit thread by the SRC representative: "it's clear that this was not a good approach to solving this issue. We will re-evaluate this and come up with a solution that allows communities to continue doing what they're doing and doesn't intrude on their freedom to operate the way they have been. That said, until that time we do encourage game moderators to report cheating/other cases of users breaking site rules to site staff."

I believe the solution they came up with seems to be completely backtracking their accountability when it comes to how game moderators treat members of the community they manage.

The bar to become a moderator is very low and I'm in agreeance with this decentralised approach but community members should be able to feel safe to speak out against "tyrant" moderators. Moderators unable to take fair criticism, are willing to abuse perms and mute/ban community members without a real reason outside of bad faith, moderators that segregate themselves in separate chats and roles and take on this sort of authoritarian approach to handling other community members and their criticisms.

I'm just relaying my personal experiences here for now, and I urge SRC to re-evaluate the relevant site policy.

That policy change was quite frankly a terrible knee-jerk reaction, implemented practically overnight with no foresight, no evaluation of what the impact would be, and no real plan for how it would even be enforced. It would have solved very few (if any) real problems and made everything far more complicated for everybody. The entire community was so adamantly against it that it was reverted less than 8 hours later. I do not think any part of that needs to be re-evaluated; it's quite clear that it was the wrong call.

Worth mentioning that the site was sold to new owners not long after all that, so any choices made before mid-late 2020 have little to do with the current leadership. Personally, I think the best case scenario would be something built into the site itself, so game moderators can continue to operate autonomously but in a way that gives site staff the ability to directly monitor and more easily follow-up on this sort of thing. Unfortunately, development time/resources are always limited, and with new ownership came new leadership with new priorities, so... maybe some day, but for now it is what it is.

That said, I can't speak to your specific situation (and I have no desire to - I don't wish to take a side here), but given that site staff apparently was involved it doesn't sound like it has much to do with private blacklisting or any particular site policy, seems more like just a (potential) issue with how this specific situation was handled.

Considering there's no log of the contents of the policy at the time; it's difficult for me to ascertain its specific reach and intent but I maintain it's a relevant vehicle for my point - there's an obvious line that's been missed. Perhaps the relevant site policy I'm referring to is just better judgement on things stated as fact publicly without evidence or context, and how bad faith becomes obvious, in my case, when an arbitrary 3 month board ban is thrown in. Why not 1 month? 6 months? Why at all?

It was also threatened and apparently "recommended" by someone that, "if my punishment wasn't enough, I would be permanently banned from submitting to this specific board". It's quoted I was put under a "ban-watch" which was "under review" by an unnamed person or group, it's claimed this is "not my first offence" and my actions are described as "continuously egregious". Despite having evidence of approaching one of the other game moderators to make myself and another user game moderators, I was described as "going above the mod-team to acquire my mod-powers through deceit". The author wishes it to be "publicly known" that I'm "never to be trusted" and "several mods agreed on this", despite when I reached out to the current game moderators, only one responded, stating they were indifferent and weren't involved with the actions made against me.

I'll cover what I did; it involves decisions made as a game moderator of this board I have niche knowledge in, Glitchless category was created half-way through the boards lifespan and those with perms formed pressure to not grandfather runs. Players that have Glitchless records in the Restricted category are forced to either duplicate the record submission into Glitchless (2 records, 1 run) or not be compared with the majority of already submitted Glitchless runs. According to my accuser, this doesn't matter, and I was vilified for attempting to move Glitchless runs to the Glitchless category. Due to it's state, it just became a board where new players swooped up free records. I wanted to remove it to reimplement it properly, but it didn't happen. I had already moved some runs in the months leading up to deciding the category needed to just be redone, rejecting a couple submissions that no longer had video as I couldn't determine if it was Glitchless or Restricted. As my accuser was 2 months offline, I didn't message him. 3 out of 4 other moderators are inactive "squat" moderators and I found it incredibly disrespectful to be expected to consult them about a game they don't even verify runs for. There's 1 mod that can be argued I could of messaged, and when we spoke after the fact it was admitted there was actually agreeance with parts of what I was proposing. I also implemented console boards as game updates made certain categories impossible for console to compete in due to down-patching and to maintain 1st place records for one specific new console runner that had been misled about what the Glitchless records actually were. This was one variable that is and was completely reversed by simply deleting it.

During the climax of this saga which catalyzed the post about me, messages from a separate chat room were referenced to me but not shared with me. Such as, questioning why I was unable to retort to things said in the chat room I wasn't in and discussions of "punishing" me.

This could have been handled privately, in good faith, without resorting to defamation, the game moderators chose not to do this.

"We will not remove the posts", is SRC's only official response to me. It's my belief that alongside being informed the game moderators were removing my posts and comments defending myself, leaving public their narrative only, as well as not answering questions in tickets about staff involvement or acknowledging presented evidence, the SRC rep acted negligently to maintain my silence and public defamation.

If it's not a private blacklisting considering the author admitting it and threats of further punishment, I'd be interested to know what it is. I'd be open to consider it was a potential issue with how this specific situation was handled, but from my point of view, SRC won't prioritise my claim unless there's actual accountability presented. Otherwise, there's no urgency felt towards hosting my defamation, and I'm deeply disheartened this is seemingly the approach SRC has taken.

The contents of that policy at the time were awful. For the most part it just shifted an executive decision that could be made by people with some history and first-hand context, to the site moderators who for the most part had a lesser grasp on each specific case outside of what could be said by both parties after the fact. It was reverted because of this reason. Site mods on that particular case were overstepping their bounds and the community backlashed against it. It wasn't the right approach at all.

As a site mod at the time of that rough policy, though I can't remember my exact standing on it as it has been several years and really all logs of the conversations and such have been completely lost now; some reasoning behind that was that the site did have a problem with some game moderation though. Not all, and no point speaking specifically about the situation you're in right now, but it was pretty clear at that time the site had some serious issues with moderation in the more obscure, smaller communities because there were was zero consideration put into exactly who could be a moderator at all. I can't speak to how the site is currently obviously.

So you would, for instance, run into many situations where someone would attain moderator and then just mass add all their close friends and essentially mob moderation for a game. This was, in essence, the intended communities a policy such as that was supposed to combat, but the way it was presented initially was downright awful and the response was so awful the idea was completely scrapped altogether.

No one here has full context to your situation though, so it's outright pointless for anyone here to give their side on your specific situation.

Thank you for the insight into the policy at the time. I'd like to share the full context to my situation however I don't think this forum post is appropriate. I'm providing as much context and evidence (if not more) here as my accuser provided in their public post.

I want to highlight what I initially stated about SRC's current site staff; there's a notable lack of accountability regarding certain game moderator behaviour and such a noticeable lack of communication.

My accuser reached back out to me on this site, after I made it clear I was willing to defend myself within my rights, citing my "behaviour is unacceptable", "settling privately is unrealistic", "meaningful internal discussion cannot take place when you're (I'm) predisposed to act hostile", my accuser says they have moved on and I should as well. They then blocked me, again.

The accusing post in question remains up. The post hyperlinks to deleted evidence (my "announcement", as the post quotes, deleted by my accusers) that may or may not be backed up on SRC's servers. It's been made clear by my accusers that my personal account, Laggy, won't be allowed to re-enter the discord server to further document the public messages exchanged.

As the arbitrary 3 month board ban has passed, it's now being asked that I leave "their boards", as they put it. This is a board I have multiple world records in and contributed a lot to. As of 12 days ago at the time of writing this, SRC was allegedly notified by my accuser to "handle me". As far as I know, I've received no such correspondence or further actions against my account as of writing this.

Slander or any reference to defamation in the site rules is only mentioned as "run submission comments shall not slander users or moderators". I believe this specific line in the site rules was changed recently as I believe it recently said something along the lines of "run submission comments containing slander of users/mods may be rejected by moderators". News posts and forum posts are not included and should be. If the content is objectively slander, why host it anywhere SRC?

SRC/ELO are running ads on the post that slanders and misrepresents me... 100+ accounts following the page received notifications of it. I'd respect myself less if I didn't defend myself, all the way. I'm confident.

Current site staff, please step up and do better. Am I really going to be forced to send a cease and desist? Then what? Is SRC and the author confident?

As I'm more or less challenging site policy (regarding defamation and the title of this post), I believe it's in the wider community's interest I document here what I experience moving forward and if I'm further silenced or banned here because I defended myself, let the record show.

Edit 23/05: "run submission comments shall not slander users or moderators" has been reverted back to "run submission comments slandering users or moderators may be rejected" in the site rules at some point since I brought it up here, I believe. I find this interesting and worth mentioning.