Eldora
https://www.runitonce.com/chatter/shady-rio-free-elite-top5-monthly/

Have you looked up into Flight_Risk epic 1-day climb?

Glad to be part of the elite crew. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a few thousand videos to watch.

Eldora ty for your time, I think it's better to reply here.
You replied this in the other thread here

Now I want to point out that CLEARLY Flight_Risk is NOT one of these users at all

Since, it is so clear, I guess you can help me point out where I'm wrong.

I've prepared a spreadsheet to highlight the whole situation, you can find it here but I'm going to post the screenshot in the case someone got trouble seeing it

As Mikey said we are indeed checking the results for legitimacy before publishing them.

I guess you would have a similar table in your backend then, don't you find something strange?
How long have been registered Badabing, quixoticflux888?
What other posts have like those users?

He provided lots of value to our community over the last few weeks with all of his activity

Actually he haven't provided much input since the last week, as you can infer from the posts date in my spreadsheet

And I don't like the thought of members who are possibly naturally inclined to show a high forum activity getting second thoughts due to a fight over the monthly leaderboards.

I beg your pardon, but you should be happy than users bring out these issues that would go under the radar. It's like poker rooms, many scandals were undig by players, doing the PR's job.

If we find people multi-accounting just for the sake of the leaderboard, we will be doing our best to spot this and we have some options to succeed in this. If it gets really gross we'll team up with the security team from Run It Once Poker, I think this will be a piece of cake to them

Great, don't you see any multiaccount here? I'm glad, since I see 2 user, especially one, give the most like to Flight_risk.

While one could argue which of these different membertypes (and the many more not mentioned) could deserve a free Elite membership the most - I don't think that's the plan. It is thought to give all types of different members a unique chance to experience Run It Once at its fullest.
I'm personally very happy to see a new member coming up and playing his part to increase the forum livelihood,

This is the whole point imo, because to me there are 2 reason of your decision:
1. You haven't look deep enough into the issue
2. You decide the user would benefit the most from the free memebership.
I tend to lean toward the latter, since a non-Elite user can take a peek at the content and, the next month, in the case he wouldn't take his free pass, he can be converted into a paid user

I don't want a free membership, I don't deserve one since I haven't posted like the latest month, but I would let another poster a well deserve price.
From the data I've posted above Fligh_risk doesn't deserve the price where the rank is determinated by 1-2 user. This doesn't measure the true value of the posts.

This issue isn't only leaderboard related, but is misleading for the newcomer.
If aa new user comes along and want to learn, he would value the users which more points.
More points = more value
If the point system get rigged by ghost accounts, the whole system is flawed, so... there's no point in have one

Personally I would give the possibility to give a like only to a Pro or to a verified competent user (maybe a new kind of user?). In this way the rankings and the quality of the forum would certainly be different: many posts written to make volume, scarce in terms of content and suggestions for improvement, would no longer exist as well as all these chatter that shows no trust in those who have worked well so far based on my experience.

Thanks for all your input regarding the current discussion. I feel obliged to give you guys some more information on all this especially since my own initial post in the other thread was not completely free from some bias I'd like to apologize for. But I hope I can clear this up here.

forCarlotta my quoted statement
"Now I want to point out that CLEARLY Flight_Risk is NOT one of these users at all"

was mainly directed to my previous paragraph in that thread where I chatted about how from time to time some harmful users come up that all challenge our patience and how lucky we are that this is a rather rare event in these forums. I felt like other members reading the inital thread could fall into the trap of making quick conclusion about Flight_Risk going forward and this was mainly what I wanted to avoid from happening with my post. Upon reviewing most of his posts I found that I assessed his input as valuable to the community and him putting lots of diverse effort into community engagement.

And at this point it was not about the discussion if he was a top 5 member for April or not. It was more about protecting his reputation that could have gotten at risk by the accusations of the post (which I know were not meant personally harmful in any way). If you take a close look at his account in general (not just focused on the leaderboard and when exactly he shows up among the top 10) you will see that Flight_Risk was a quite involved member from when he joined the community and already had lots of high effort posts starting mid march and he also regularly posted in the beginning of the month as well and on a side note also continued doing so once May started. I fully stand to my statement of him being a member bringing lots of value to the community and would hate seeing him end up discouraged to continue doing so going forward.

The part I was addressing before (my last post including some bias) and for which I'd like to apologize for, is me saying that we can 'outrule any scammy behavior'. It was not my intention to disguise any of the data that we found or being dishonest. But I likely fell into the trap of 'over-protecting' Flight_Risk for some of the reasons mentioned above which in return wasn't fair to the others of you who had concerns. I hope it's okey for you Flight_Risk that I share some of the data as they should be publicly accessible anyhow (as forCarlotta showed :P).

Flight_Risk received Points from 22 different members over the course of April. From these 22 members 14 members granted him more than 3+ points and the remaining ones just 1 point. There indeed exists one single user which could indicate a potential critical behavior, however, there's by far not a second user in this regard that would deserve suspicion since no second user who is not a coach has contributed more than 4 points. Even when disregarding the potentially accused and critical account Flight_Risk would keep 72% of his accumulated points. Now back in my original post this data and his high quality posts were enough for me to drop the accusations as it is not the case that he received 'almost all' of his likes from just a few members and neither did the majority of likes occur on posts that just didn't provide any value whatsoever. I've since then, once again looked even deeper in this and the critical accounts and therefore want to correct my statement. One of the accused accounts seems to have pushed the point results in an unnatural way. But we have to point out that we cannot be sure if the accused account is indeed a friend of him that became active in the forums to support him and that looks suspicious now or if indeed maybe some intended measures were taken specifically with regards to the leaderboard.

I'd personally rather trust our newly engaged community member in favor of falsely accusing him with no hard proof on that - just think how you'd feel if something similar whould happen to you. But I'm aware you can disagree with me here.

forCarlotta I hope you didn't mean it all too seriously when saying we'd be likely to consider tweaking the leaderboard for any value/money considerations. And in this very case it would even be quite the contrary as our fellow member Flight_Risk is an active Elite member as we're speaking.

After having said all this, let me make sure again that in this unique topic I'm sharing my opinion and would not like you to equal what I write with what Run It Once thinks. We've thoroughly discussed this in team and we all agreed that this ended up being a quite unfortunate situation. We truly don't want to have anyone involved having any disadvantage from these discussions which is why we will grant a free month of Elite for the 6th place of the leaderboard in April. The results above have been edited. forCarlotta we've privately chatted before and I highly respect you and everything you do for the Run It Once community here. I know you didn't engage in this discussion because you wanted the prize but because you truly care about this topic. I hope that even though we might disagree in this exact matter you don't take any of this wrongly. Maybe you can even understand a bit how in the current situation I favor protecting an accused member unless we're absolutely sure something was done intentionally and with bad intentions. I appreciate the discussion about the integrity of the Leaderboard and all of you caring so much about it. We'll continue to monitor this going forward and maybe some adjustments were inspired by the discussions here for the future. I hope you will accept Flight_Risk as a fellow competitor in the ledearship race going forward as he told me how shocked and sorry he was for how this all turned out.