July 9th 2017,

Added a new game version to the versions column, 2.0.7.5. This version is used for some changes in Dead Air and Cold Stream.

Changed up how the Fortnight Challenge category is displayed. There are now three, Fortnight Challenge (Unique), Fortnight Challenge (Stayin Alive), and Fortnight Challenge (Dash). Unique is for all mutations which use regular, tweaked gameplay and are on whole campaigns. Dash is specifically for maps using the Dash gametype. Stayin' Alive is specifically for maps using... well, guess. This sets it up in the future to add new Dash and Stayin' Alive maps easily, have proper Solo and Co-op subcategories which is much cleaner than before, and most importantly lets only Stayin' Alive use the reversed timing, where longer times are better. The two Fortnight Challenge categories which are currently inactive every two-week period will be moved to misc (currently Stayin Alive and Dash).

August 20th 2017,

Big rule changes regarding addons!

Previously, all addons were banned except for survivor models, gun textures and models, and HUD elements (excluding the item radar). After some careful thought and discussion, the trigger has finally been pulled on banning the rest of the allowed addons listed above for many reasons such as the fact that a big, colorful survivor can make it easier to see a teammate stuck or specialed, you could change the grenade launcher model to make it easier to see (which is very relevant to co-op now), and so on. The rules now state that all addons are banned outright, which is far more simple, fair, and vanilla.

Further updated that section to now state that a live recording is required for all submissions (not a recording of demo playback) so that it can be confirmed no addons were used. This doesn't change any way we've been recording our runs for months, and prevents future abuse of hiding addons behind demo playback.

Added a list of allowed console commands that contains map, viewmodel, glow commands, and network commands, so it's clear what can be changed. More may be added if I forgot about any, but as of this writing that's what is on there.

August 23rd 2017,

Minor rule addition that you cannot switch Realism mode on or off during a run, you must commit to it when you start.

August 27th 2017,

Added the "jointeam" command to the banned commands list.

August 28th 2017,

Added language near the top of the rules that each individual campaign must be run continuously in a single server. Since the map command is allowed, this prevents abusing that command to launch a new server between levels to restore your health to full (and any other abuses we may not even have thought of).

November 12th 2017,

Replaced the custom campaigns "Urban Flight" and "Detour Ahead" with "Dark Blood 2" and "Grey Scale". Both campaigns were replaced because of just awful RNG pathing things and situations that will cause an insane amount of resets for something pure RNG. Hopefully the two new campaigns goes much better and further changes won't be necessary.

February 10th 2018,

Added the command "report_entities" to the banned commands list. This command which looks to be server-only prints a complete list of all spawned items in the level which could enable you to know if something useful has spawned or not so you can save time not bothering to look for it. It was also made cheat-protected at some point as 2.0.2.7 allows it, but newest does not.

March 28th 2018,

Changed run obsoletion setting to "match any, any order" which now means that any run in which each individual player has a better PB than it, regardless of their player roster being different or not, will be obsoleted, which makes the leaderboards much cleaner now. Runs will only show if it is the PB of at least one of the runners involved.

November 3rd 2018,

Created a new game in the series for category extensions which you can see at speedrun.com/l4d2_ce

As of writing there aren't any categories or runs migrated there yet, but pretty much anything here that is custom content or isn't "legitimate" to the base game will be moved over there.

November 4th 2018,

Created a new thread for general game rules which apply across all runs submitted unless otherwise specified in the rules popup for a category. This helps clean up our edit game page as well as make it so only different rules are shown in each category rather than 80% of it being the same pasted wall of text.

https://www.speedrun.com/l4d2/thread/x3cng

November 13th 2018,

Finished moving everything relevant over to the category extensions leaderboard including the custom campaigns, so make sure to take a look over at speedrun.com/l4d2_ce if you want to get some action on Blastoff or some curated custom campaigns. Additionally, the old Fortnight Challenges are now permanently open there!

March 19th 2019,

Added a small bit to the rules clarifying that you can't change game versions mid-run.

Updated from this, "You cannot switch Realism on or off mid-run, you must commit to what you started with."

To this, "You cannot toggle Realism nor change game versions mid-run, you must commit to what you started with."

June 23rd 2020,

After community discussion, removed the rule that disallowed toggling realism on or off during a run, so you can now change it freely between campaigns. Since it hasn't been the idea for a while that a run takes place within a single server instance, banning the toggling of realism no longer made sense.

July 6th 2020,

Removed the "Realism" Yes/No column from all categories and hid the "Time with loads" column after a community vote. I made two awful collages of the votes for posterity seen below assuming the image links last,

In brief summary, here are the questions and the votes in text,

vote: should the "realism" column be removed from the leaderboards? vote by adding a reaction, only one vote, and please don't add meme reactions
1 = yes, remove it - 11 votes
2 = no, leave it there - 1 vote
3 = yes but only removed for full-game - 1 vote
4 = i am neutral on this - 7 votes

vote: should the "time with loads" column be removed from the leaderboards? this will leave only the without loads time shown, vote by adding a reaction and again, please only react with one vote and don't add meme reactions
1 = yes, remove it - 11 votes
2 = no, leave it as it is - 8 votes
3 = i am neutral on this - 1 vote

August 21st, 2020

Made a number of changes to the wording of the game's general rules with community input to add/fix/clarfiy anything that might have been unclear, and also finally added it to the site's new "Game Rules" tab as well as changed each category to reference checking that for the rules rather than having to go to the rules thread. Including a screenshot here showing the text delta of what changed from the old wording to the new wording. Pretty interesting.

Site's rules are dumb and ignores tab spacing so I had to spam hyphens to space out the dates from the commands instead. Better than nothing?

September 28th, 2020

This was actually a few days ago but the site wouldn't send me my PIN. Not my fault!

Because 2020 is the year that just won't stop surprising, many changes have been made to the boards to accommodate the new Last Stand update that is somehow a magical thing that exists. "All Campaigns" was renamed to "All Campaigns Legacy" to preserve existing runs and remain a mainstay for the "final" version the game existed in for all those years. A new "All Campaigns" is in its place which adds Last Stand. This may be renamed and moved to misc in the future if yet another new campaign comes out. Did the same for the bhop misc category.

Last Stand has been added as an IL.

A new version from the "final" previous release of the game and before the mic bug was fixed has been added officially, 2.1.4.7, and Newest now applies to any runs Last Stand or later, which is 2.2.0.0+. All previous runs labeled as "Newest" were updated to the 2.1.4.7 version which is technically incorrect as the number changed with small security fixes and such, but it's impossible to label them with the actual versions and they are functionally identical for a speedrun anyway.

Updated wording on the rules for the All Campaigns category to better make sense for the campaigns that are played, and specified how many of them there are (thirteen and fourteen). Also added a warning that the new categories may be moved to Misc and replaced if new campaigns ever release again.

Credit to burhac for getting the categories and versions sorted out on the day of release!

November 1st, 2020

Updated wording on the following to try and clear up any confusion about recording runs,

"Video must be a live, uncut recording for the duration of run time (not demo playback) and audio must be enabled and clear enough to confirm no addons were used."

Changed to,

"Video must be recorded as you play (not demo playback) and be uncut for the duration of run time. Game audio must be clear enough to confirm no addons were used."

April 24th, 2021 (as written by @bill_play3bill_play3 )

• The video submitted for runs must be hosted on a permanent platform. That means that whatever is linked in the submission cannot expire (like a Twitch VOD, for example). Twitch highlights and Youtube videos are recommended, but anything that doesn't expire will suffice
• Official dedicated servers are now banned from use for Co-op runs. Main reason for this is that timing such runs has always been a problem, since it's not always consistent who loads first, and it either leads to invalid submissions or to a lot of extra effort to verify a run
• Added the wait command and the -dev launch option (which changes the developer cvar) to the banned command list. I'm pretty sure this has been publicly discussed before, but it wasn't written down yet. Brief explanation about why these are banned: wait allows for some basic scripting and developer gives you extra information you couldn't have otherwise (and probably other applications i can't think of immediately)
• Last but not least, added some Markdown formatting to the rules so it looks a bit nicer
• Rules were also restructured/reordered for the sake of clarity

October 18th, 2021

• Demo files are now required for runs which meet a top X standard as described in this forum post
• Null cancelling movement scripts are now explicitly banned as it's now enforceable due to demos.
• Changelevel is temporarily unbanned for L4D1 v1.0 only to facilitate demo recording without losing time due to the lack of cutscenes (refer to forum thread for futher details/explanation).

January 1st, 2022

• Demos are now required for all submissions.
• Changelevel is now banned again for L4D1 v1.0.