Due to the recent actions of speedrun.com, the SHAR modteam has decided to enforce a "blackout."

The speedrun page will remain dormant and we will not verify runs on speedrun.com/shar until speedrun.com allows the disabling of comments and gives regular moderators the ability to delete comments.

We apologise for any runs waiting in the queue to be verified.

• SHAR modteam

post that in the games forums: https://www.speedrun.com/shar/forum

oh, I thought they were talking about something to do with the game, my bad.

Gotta read the entire thing first before you talk.

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know that we hear your frustrations and agree 100% that the state of comments is unacceptable. I apologize for the pain and frustration that some users and communities are experiencing.

We are making changes in line with your requests along with a few additional safety/moderation features as well. I expect these to go live either Tuesday or Wednesday this week.

Again please accept my apologies, we’ll have things in much better shape soon!

It's great that Elo is working on adding mod features for comments, but they still should just remove them. A lot of speedrun.com users explicitly explained why comments are a bad idea.

Well, at least now we know what it takes to actually get staff to respond to something.

Some bugs and issues are to be expected after releasing something new, but the sheer number of incredibly unfinished / poorly thought out additions and changes in this update is reallllly bush league and just flat out unacceptable. You're running a large website that hosts a lot of communities, act like it. Test things before they go public.

Comments should really be disabled until these changes can be pushed. Ideally, they're disabled permanently. I think it's pretty clear now that comments do not belong on this website.

Im sorry Camcorder but thats not good enough , anyone with half a brain would see the releasing an unmoderated comment system in 2021 would be a bad idea and low and behold it was a bad idea. If you agree that the state it was released in was unacceptable why release it? You have dodgy phishing links littered across leaderboards, Sexist, Racist & Homophobic Slurs, NSFW Content and ACTUAL fucking porn.

You and your team at Elo has dropped the ball big time, while i might be a LB mod for a smaller game but i think i can still speak for most when i say this is unacceptable. Comments should be wiped site wide and turned off until further notice pending theses "additional safety/moderation features"

I would love to see comments return but with the following changed:

• The ability to turn them off altogether (perf an Opt-In System rather then Opt-Out)
• Obsolete runs has comments locked automatically
• Hold for Verification for people who don't have a verified run
• Proper notifications (cause no one knows when a run is commented on making it useless and hard to moderate)
• Proper moderation tools

This is a joke. wait no, its worse then a joke. The ball is now in your court, either get your act together or this site will rebel.

@Camcorder Please beta test these features as well as large leaderboard design changes first. Besides that, Elo needs to take a serious look on how design is ran for these sorts of changes for this site. Start by reading what Liv posted in the initial thread from Meta and you could probably see that quite a handful of these mistakes were easy to spot and probably fix before even pushing live.

For comments, I think speedrun.com is better off without them. I would even raise the question.. who asked for this? Keep comments to YouTube and Twitch and keep speedrun.com to its roots and that is hosting leaderboards and representing communities.

Besides that, please please please, don't forget that there is a huge backlog of well requested features and bugfixes that are pending since years before Pac left. You would do the community a big favor by looking into these first and dropping these silly features like a comment section that I believe nobody asked for?

If Elo said: "We are going to listen to communities" then its about time to start listening to them and start listening less to the internal voices.

"We are listening to the community" is the default go-to message every time a company screws up, and more often than not that's never actually true. So I'm sorry if you take my scepticism the wrong way when I say I don't believe you. It's surprising it actually got someone from ELO to comment on this, but i assume it's because it's actually causing you damage - it doesn't invalidate the other hundreds of times when someone should've come forward and addressed several other issues (Bans related, sketchy updates, etc), when all that happened was complete radio silence.

I think the community was clear enough about this: you don't have to fix the comments feature. All you need is to remove it entirely. It adds nothing to the content this website is supposed to provide, as well as it does nothing extra that the Forums or YouTube comments don't do (something that you should be happy you aren't responsible for).

The one other thing that I would like ELO to actually understand is that they need to be transparent and actually communicate with the community in advance before pushing these "updates", ELO needs to talk to us, be honest about stuff like like banning/unbanning users and not actually adding the reasons that explain their decisions or making them available to protect the communities.

In the past 6 months, all that this website managed to do is get the community to be 100% distrustful of its management - and that is not the kind of relationship you want from the people that make your website as popular and traffic-heavy as it is.

Leaderboard mods signed up for a VOLUNTEER POSITION to manage a speedrun leaderboard, not a no-holds-barred chat room. But even if that WASN'T the case, AND there were proper moderation tools... that helps nothing!

If comments are to be a thing, they MUST be opt-in, because untold leaderboards and runs are old and inactive. Which is part of the purpose of a leaderboard site - archiving a piece of speedrun history.

Moderation tools "help" only so far as in it gives a shovel to empty a constantly growing landfill of garbage, but even that does nothing in a place no one is looking. You would need employees to look at and pre-approve every single comment coming into the site.

Or how about a simpler solution: just remove comments from a site where it fills no purpose

[quote]Leaderboard mods signed up for a VOLUNTEER POSITION to manage a speedrun leaderboard, not a no-holds-barred chat room. But even if that WASN'T the case, AND there were proper moderation tools... that helps nothing!

If comments are to be a thing, they MUST be opt-in, because untold leaderboards and runs are old and inactive. Which is part of the purpose of a leaderboard site - archiving a piece of speedrun history.

Moderation tools "help" only so far as in it gives a shovel to empty a constantly growing landfill of garbage, but even that does nothing in a place no one is looking. You would need employees to look at and pre-approve every single comment coming into the site.

Or how about a simpler solution: just remove comments from a site where it fills no purpose[/quote] Yes this ^100000000000000000000000

The Fallout community has followed suit

"Following the recent update to speedrun.com, the Fallout speedrunning community will be observing a leaderboard blackout in support of the SHAR speedrunning community.

Any submitted runs will not be verified and the series' pages will remain dormant until either speedrun.com allows the disabling of comments and gives regular moderators the ability to delete comments, or the comment feature is removed from the site.

We apologize for any inconveniences.

• Fallout mod team"