UPDATE: Okay, the responses seem pretty clear. We didn't expect this to cause such an uproar. We'll pull this rule back to re-evaluate further for now.

I do want to emphasize just the reason why we made this post before doing this, and that is that our intent was never to gain more control over communities, far from it. The reason we posted this is so that communities would engage much more with site staff regarding users that break site rules and also be more transparent about their currently off-site blacklist procedures. Though, from the responses this did not seem to be the best way to do so.

This thread will be locked from here on with the abovementioned.

Via this thread we want to inform all game moderators about a new but rather important addition to the site moderation rules - bottom of section 'Leaderboard Moderation'.

Effective immediately: 'Game Moderators may not maintain individual leaderboard blacklists, involving the suspension, temporary or permanent, of users from their leaderboard. Any users suspected of foul play should be reported to site staff.'

We expect all game moderators to abide by this new rule and drop any user blacklist(s) they maintain immediately.

The motivation for this is quite simple. Users that continiously break site rules, such as for example by repeatedly submitting cheating/splicing should always be reported to site staff, as this directly falls under bannable behavior. We do not wish for game moderators to police these actions themselves via user blacklisting. Game moderators should address users breaking the rules but should not control the access of site functionality for a user, such as prohibiting them from submitting runs to a leaderboard. This should be left to site staff, as well as the severity of the punishment for those actions.

However, game moderators are allowed to reject a cheated/spliced/falsified run if there is exhaustive evidence for it. For conscious attempts at getting those runs on the leaderboard should site staff be contacted. Please include the aforementioned evidence with the report.

Edit: It's not only for repeated cases. Sorry for the confusion.

We are looking into adding site functionality for this, but for now, please directly message a site full moderator if you wish to report a user.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

• The SR.C Full Moderator team.

@fGeorjje

1. ...do people do this? If so they absolutely should not, that should never have been a thing. The only exception to this is for banned users, in which case whether or not runs remain fully listed is at the game moderators' discretion. Otherwise, there is no good reason to de-list or "de-associate" valid runs that don't break any site rules.

2. If a runner appeals their run rejection to site staff, we will investigate it. What is considered valid proof is considered on a case-by-case basis (I wish I could give you a better answer than that but every situation is different and has different burdens of proof). In the vast majority of cases we will differ to the game moderator's judgement if they have a solid reasoning for the rejection.

3. This is absolutely not our intent. Our goal is not to prevent game moderators from removing runs performed by known cheaters. However, there is a proper way to go about doing this, and game moderators keeping an internal blacklist is not it (I'll explain why when I address the next point). Report the cheated runs to site staff, in cases of clear cheating with clear evidence the user will be banned, at which point it's up to the game moderators to decide what to do with existing runs, and any future runs that user may wish to have listed.

4. Cheating is not just a problem for individual leaderboards, this is a problem for the entire site, which therefore makes it something that site staff is ultimately responsible for. If someone cheats on one leaderboard and merely "blacklisted" by that game's moderators, who don't inform site staff or anyone at all, that user is free to continue cheating on other leaderboards, and in all likelihood no one will ever end up investigating this known cheater. Then who knows, maybe they go and cheat on another game and get "blacklisted" there as well. Then they do this for 3 or 4 other games, some of which they don't get caught on. Before long we have a mass cheater on our hands that nobody knows about. Obviously this is an extreme case, but this absolutely does happen, and is something we would very much like to avoid.

y'all do realize that cheating runs isn't the only reason a community may collectively decide to ban somebody, right? y'all want reports for that too? the fuck do SRC mods need to be involved in any community to that degree for? this is bound to be ignored by necessity, if not purely on the fact that it's completely asinine. why not just build in blacklist functionality to the site, and y'all get notified any time a user gets blacklisted, and maintain an internal count? then you can investigate accounts blacklisted x number of times and act to take global action if necessary instead of being an entirely unwanted nuisance. no reason to try to police communities that run perfectly fine on their own.

This change is baffling. SRC should not be a melting pot for all of the communities within speedrunning to exist in the same way, it's a piecemeal combination of a bunch of communities built around speedrunning specific games. Taking way the individual agency of specific games to ban specific users and delist runs will only further reduce incentive for those currently not using this website to become a late adopter. Adding "red tape" for the sake of the end user within the community is a far larger hinderance than it may initially seem, because of the limits it puts on those that create, maintain and facilitate said community for the rest of those involved.

I think many communities would have instead preferred some form of tandem, in which Moderators can provide some form of reason directly to SRC staff while blacklisting a user, and SRC staff can open a dialogue with said Mods where they can further explain or work through blacklist-related decisions, and both parties can come to individual conclusions on specific users based on the kind of threat they may pose to the site as a whole. On the other hand, it would be some form of quality control for the mods in question, and you can more closely monitor mods who are a bit too ban-happy and stop the problem at it's source, since that seems to be what this change was made for in the first place.

Hopefully this change goes back to the drawing board for a bit.

I'm not a mod, but I do agree with these changes. I do have two questions:

1. Won't this increase your already high work load during this time?

2. How will you give suspects a fair chance to explain themselves if all you can reasonably rely on is what the moderator says is proof? You simply wouldn't have the time to research each game's technical aspects individually on a website this large, especially if this rule change is to crack down on chronic cheaters. It seems too easy to jump to conclusions if you're working across multiple game leaderboards.

Every change you guys try to make to get control over leaderboards of communities you know nothing about is appalling. Just stop.

This is an awful decision, and most leaderboard mods will simply not abide by this rule. SrCom staff have absolutely no right to choose who I ban from the GTA leaderboards. As others have stated, plenty of people can be justifiably banned even though they haven't broken any rules on this specific website.

You are a hosting site for communities, not the enforcement team for every speedrun community that exists. We'll be keeping our blacklist and hope that you rethink this decision, if you have a problem with that we will happily find somewhere else to have our leaderboard and I imagine a lot of communities will do the same.

Remember when "I'm reporting you to the speed police" used to be a joke?

Okay, the responses seem pretty clear. We didn't expect this to cause such an uproar. We'll pull this rule back to re-evaluate further for now.

I do want to emphasize just the reason why we made this post before doing this, and that is that our intent was never to gain more control over communities, far from it. The reason we posted this is so that communities would engage much more with site staff regarding users that break site rules and also be more transparent about their currently off-site blacklist procedures. Though, from the responses this did not seem to be the best way to do so.

This thread will be locked from here on with the abovementioned.