Hey everyone, following up on the recent Games & Profiles update and the concerns around the comments feature we’ve incrementally released a host of bug fixes, anti-spam measures, as well as moderation and privacy features. Here’s a list of the changes

• Allow runners (and run submitters) to moderate comments on their runs • Allow runners to globally disable comments on their runs • Fix issue where sometimes game moderators could not moderate comments • Added additional actions when moderating comments:

• Option to remove all other comments made by that author on that run
• Option to add the comment author to your block list
• Added ability for moderators (and runners, on their own runs) to view deleted comments

• Added measures to limit comment spam • Added measures to limit unproductive comments • Added measures to limit the ability for accounts created with malicious intent to post comments

• Allow users to globally disable comments on their runs • Allow users to hide the "Games Followed" statistics on their profile • Comments cannot be posted on runs if the comment author is blocked by the runner

These options can be toggled through the new Privacy settings page

• Added a "RUNNER" badge on comments when a runner posts a comment on their own run • Minor comment style improvements • Minor leaderboard style improvements

For more details, check out the news post about the changes here https://www.speedrun.com/news/883-2021-10-19-games-profiles-moderation-features-privacy-improvements-more

Nice. The comments are fixed.

What about comments notifications? Do I have any way to know if I got comments on any of my runs?

@Oreo321 no

I don't see why the ability to disable comments is only available to individual users, rather than allowing leaderboard super mods to disable comments for all runs of that game. This doesn't prevent the same kind of harassment from happening towards users who are unfamiliar with the settings that Speedrun.com offers, especially since the option to disable comments isn't enabled by default. Additionally, it's still possible for malicious users to harass board mods or the community in general by posting on every run on the boards, since (from my understanding) moderators cannot block users from commenting on every run for a game, only runners can for their own runs.

Finally, there's still no option for seeing comments on your own runs, through something such as notifications. These should absolutely be options, so that runners can find and block harassment immediately, rather than letting it hide in one of their runs until they discover it months later.

Edit: Any activity relating to comments is still not visible in the Audit Logs, this seems like a pretty important thing to include in an update focused on moderation and privacy.

What are these anti-spam measures? Currently a large portion of runs on speedrun.com/shar are still spammed with grotesque imagery with no clear way for us to ban someone from commenting, mass-remove their comments or disable them as a whole - anything revolving around deleting comments off individual user's runs doesn't really help us with that at all.

While runners being able to disable comments on their runs is nice, I hope moderators being able to disable comments for the entire game is in the works. I'm surprised that that wasn't one of the top priorities.

Edit: There also should be a toggle for showing the "Games Moderated" profile statistics in the Privacy section. Again weird that this is low priority for ELO. It gives similar privacy concerns.

a good start would be to wipe all comments from the site and start from scratch. can't expect runners to retroactively moderate the mess that was already made

@skyweiss I hope they don't I need my tic-tac-toe games to be preserved.

allowing comments should be opt-in not opt-out, otherwise all it does is incentivize spambots and bad actors to find inactive people on the boards to spam

Comments are basically unusable without notifications. Even though I would be interested in seeing potential comments on my runs, I had to turn mine off since there’s no way I’m regularly checking every single one of my runs for comments.

IMO Moderators should have the ability to disable run comments in the entire board. Because now older runs with runners who don't use SRC anymore/Never even used it (like historical runs) have risk of getting spammed too. Is this possible now? I don't see a clear mention on the changelog unless I'm missing something.

Also, can images still get embed on comments? That's a huge risk right there, as several accounts have been posting harmful images, even NSFW content.

@Meta - You and the team need to poll users and involve (or at the very least give notice to) your volunteer moderators in changes that require more time and effort from them. You're (ELO) on thin ice already with a lot of folks, and whether that's fair or not in general, in this instance you and the team have not been very communicative over the Comments issues.

It would go a long way in restoring faith if you announced exactly what will be in these site updates before they go live.

Will you guys mention why this website needs a comments feature?

That's nice and all but this is all stuff that even an idiot would have included as features in the first place, so can't congratulate Elo that much.

Finally, a good update.

It may have been rushed out to fix one of the worst updates pushed thus far and lacking some important things, but its still a good update.

Steps in the right direction, but still things need addressing.

Not being able to opt-in to comments and game moderators being unable to disable comments on their games probably being the biggest one of all.

IMO, comments (which should be plaintext btw, never allowing HTML or images and stuff) should only work if and only if the game has them turned on, and the runner has them turned on. If either are off, no comments for you.

Great changes overall, but we're still missing some things.

Comments should really be opt-in, because, like amyrlinn mentioned, people will simply find communities with inactive runners and moderators to post their hate speech and/or NSFW content under.

Additionally, supermods need a comments enabled/disabled toggle for their games. Without that, you're essentially forcing us to moderate a feature that most of us don't want and didn't ask for. Reminder that we're not being paid for this.

Runners should have an option to turn notifications on for comments, because most of us, like Pear, will not manually check all of our runs.

Comments posted before this update should be wiped, as skyweiss mentioned.

And just in general, where's the communication regarding this? As far as I know, we have yet to hear a specific reason why comments were implemented, especially with no warning. This is greatly damaging the already-wavering trust the community had in Elo, and I'm watching a growing number of people pack up and leave the site.

Edit: The "games followed" statistic should also be opt-in, not opt-out.

But what about for runs by runners who aren't active anymore? What would we do then if people with malicious intentions go after those?

Users being able to opt-out is nice but yeah, moderators should also be able to opt-out the boards they moderate.

It is, after all, the moderators who are being expected to do extra work to facilitate this feature that I think precisely zero of us asked for to begin with, so it is only fair that they get to choose if they're willing to do that extra work.

If the end result of that is that comments go removed on most boards then well, you'll have an answer about whether this was a worthwhile inclusion to begin with.