Incredibly popular speedrun leaderboard website speedrun.com has added the ability for users to comment on runs, but introduced very little in the way of moderation, causing backlash from some speedrunning communities.
An October 14 update on the Speedrun.com website announced run comments, a tool intended to increase “the social aspect” of the site beyond its forums. The post states that a fair few people have been asking for the feature, and that users can now “celebrate runs with your friends and favourite runners.”
In response to this, The Simpsons: Hit & Run speedrunner LiquidWIFI posted to Twitter yesterday (October 18) saying that comments need to go “immediately,” adding that “no moderation being possible means all my runs have disgusting comments on them from banned people from my stream.”
Comments on @speedruncom need to go immediately. No moderation being possible means all my runs have disgusting comments on them from banned people from my stream, and they've spread it to the entire SHAR leaderboards and other leaderboards too
I may delete my account until then
— Liquid
(@LiquidWIFI) October 18, 2021
Liquid has also written multiple posts about intentions to delete his speedrun.com account, and the deletion of all his The Simpson: Hit & Run speedrun records on the site as well. As of publication Liquid’s account is still up on the site, but all of their speedruns are deleted.
As outlined by LiquidWIFI, moderators who delete runs can restore comments whilst the commenter can’t, but commenters who delete their comments can restore them whenever they want, with no verification that the comment was even deleted and uploaded again.
This was followed by news that the Fallout speedrunning community will be engaging in a “blackout” in support of the protests against the addition of largely unmoderated comments. A Twitter post from Bethesda and Obsidian games speedrunner NoobSalmon shows a message from the Fallout speedrunning community. LiquidWIFI also confirmed that The Simpsons: Hit & Run community completely stopped verifying runs as well.
“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,” says the post.
According to speedrunner Helix, they have had direct confirmation that Elo Entertainment – which acquired speedrun.com last year – is aware of the “potentially dire situation” that the addition of these comments has created.
got direct confirmation that elo staff are aware of the potentially dire situation their poor implementation of comments on srcom has created.
here's hoping it's addressed very quickly.
— Helix ('fastest monkey') (@Helix13_) October 18, 2021
NME has reached out to Elo Entertainment, LiquidWIFI, NoobSalmon and Helix for comment, and will update this story accordingly.
In other news, the Dark Souls community is running another annual “Return to Lordran” event where players attempt to recreate the online activity present from when the game launched in 2011.
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