5 minutes ago, saltycroissant said:

The tweak or cheat ppl use will never get shared with the public.

In fact some of the ppl commenting here have already enjoyed the fact that we don't disclose it.

Im still not sure what's going to happen with the other things, but for sure some rules and bug will need to be explained in details because some ppl can't understand basic things.

I honestly dont think anyone here needs detailed report of how he did it, but its not everyday someone from the top gets caught "cheating" or using "tweaks". More open and public announcement would be welcomed by everyone as u now see in this thread, at least who, which score and how long is the suspension... and bending rules to keep sponsors happy... I know the funding is not ideal right now and I dont want hwbot to disappear but this was not the good way to do it

Edited January 13Jan 13 by Slovak_Killer

5 minutes ago, Adam33k said:

I can say it to everyone, then everything will be clear to everyone. For now, you are just hiding the info

That you uploaded cheated score recently....yes

1 minute ago, saltycroissant said:

That you uploaded cheated score recently....yes

It doesn’t matter. Points don’t have any meaning here. What you call a cheat, someone else will call a tweak. This is a problem to be solved by the whole community, not just behind closed doors. I have never modified a benchmark, I have never used a hex editor to modify anything, and I have not changed any DLLs either

Obviously nobody ever does anything....

Given the bullshit you spout, you must not have many followers.

12 minutes ago, Slovak_Killer said:

Honnêtement, je ne pense pas que quiconque ici ait besoin d'un compte rendu détaillé de la façon dont il a procédé, mais ce n'est pas tous les jours qu'un joueur de haut niveau se fait prendre à tricher ou à utiliser des techniques de triche. Une annonce plus ouverte et publique serait appréciée de tous, comme vous pouvez le constater dans ce fil de discussion : au moins, qui est concerné, quel score et quelle est la durée de la suspension… Ne pas contourner les règles pour satisfaire les sponsors… Je sais que le financement n'est pas optimal en ce moment et je ne souhaite pas que HWBot disparaisse, mais ce n'était pas la bonne méthode.

He didn’t cheat! What don’t you understand?”

“But you’re right, he should at least say something about the score he deleted! Instead of muddying the waters or stringing people along — I don’t understand the point of it…”

5 minutes ago, saltycroissant said:

Obviously nobody ever does anything....

So you claim that this is a benchmark modification?

7 minutes ago, saltycroissant said:

Évidemment, personne ne fait jamais rien...

“You’re much more efficient at finding and deleting scores than at answering a simple question.”

“In fact, he simply needed to say that the score which was removed—and which therefore cost him a ‘suspension’—was an SLI run on 3 cards in 2001SE (it turns out that rendering in ’01 is done on a maximum of 2 cards).”

I think people need to pause, take a breath, and think about what the actual facts that we know are.

A lot of people are speculating about what's happening, which I think we need to all slow down on. I think the one consistent thing here, that keeps coming up, is transparency. I think people here are fairly unified in wanting a bit more transparency when it comes to moderator action on big names, though there will always have to be nuance and freedom for what the mods/admins think is appropriate on a case by case basis. There's more grey area between what constitutes a "cheat" vs a "tweak" in the mod's eyes and different members of the community's eyes than people seem to always appreciate. Take wprime dll, or numerous other examples...

Salty is absolutely right in saying that people should check with a mod if they think that something is a legit tweak or not; at the end of the day transparency both ways is the only way to keep trust in the community. Benches aren't always that secure.... even with systeminfo running... and I don't think mods should share too many details about how they can be broken, since that lowers the bar and allows even more people to cheat than before. Though we also need to acknowledge as a community that the technical hurdles to cheating is getting lower and lower, as salty said on tech tested's show, a simple ai prompt can go a long way to clearing that technical hurdle. Security through obscurity isn't ideal. That leaves video proof / the requirement to share info with mods as the real hurdle to cheating. Benchmate and other improvements will hopefully go a long way as well but limiting ourselves to only those benchmarks will hurt hwbot as a whole quite a bit...

As someone else already suggested, notifying the community that significant moderation action, user block / ban, occured is probably a good step, still that would have helped a lot in this case. Though I think people here need to also realize that lots of things can be at play, for instance, the msi sponsorship in this case...
My personal suggestion in these kind of scenarios would be that he wouldn't have been allowed to sub for cc, and hopefully things can be changed so the subs with no pts don't affect pts for others. I think if there was a history of a bit more transparency with this and other things people would be less likely to see it in as bad of a light even knowing about the msi sponsorship. Otherwise, based on what I'm seeing some people say on various discords, that hwbot is covering for a cheater.

Let's all try to be constructive and consider that the mods are volunteers and just like us with their own opinions about what to do in different circumstances. Leeg's been around for quite a while and definitely knows more about what actually goes on. He has to make a lot of decisions about what is an accidental bugged score and what is actual cheating all the time. Without knowing the actual details (I think it wouldn't be a big issue to give some ideas, but also understand that the mods don't want to share too much) we can't always say what should be a ban vs block. Different people are split on what the punishment should be for different things, I think more transparency into some of that would be good, but we can't just ban everyone for a bugged score (not at all saying thats' what happened here, more just in general).

As long as I'm interested in messing with hardware and sharing that with other people, I'll be around. I'd rather hope that other people are as well. And that requires the community to have confidence in the competitive nature of hwbot which requires people to see that things are properly moderated. People will always be looking to get an edge through tweaks (even if leeg wishes we just pressed run) and that necessarily means that some moderation action needs to be taken if its not a valid tweak but also not that they necessarily need to be banned if its not repeat offences / closer to be a tweak than an outright cheat. Repeat offences especially for the same thing definitely needs to be taken seriously though.

Lets all just slow down on the outrage and see. If salty and/or leeg shared a bit more info that might help clarify things for a lot of people. From what I've heard its a case of using something that he might have considered a tweak, if it is what I heard it was then its something that was made clear to me years ago as not allowed and I'd assume he should have known about. But I definitely don't know exactly what it was, all most people can go off of are rumors and I think that's not helping.

I hope Leeg sticks around, I don't always agree with everything he does as a admin/moderator, but he definitely cares about hwbot and supporting xoc.

24 minutes ago, rm3113 said:

“You’re much more efficient at finding and deleting scores than at answering a simple question.”

Yeah let me just post a long list of illegal tweaks or cheat so everyone can use them.

Also, yeah 01se only renders on 2 cards 🤣. This is exactly why im not even going to bother. Those who reported the score in questions understand the reason why. Outside that, no one has to know how to cheat/use illegal tweaks.

If someone gets a 2 months account block, it's not his first offense. So stop assuming things and just move on.

And as a reminder to everyone.....

“I wasn’t asking him to reveal tweaks or anything like that—just to say that 3-/4-way in 2001SE is not allowed. On the other hand, calling it cheating seems a bit over the top to me (that’s just my opinion). So should all 3-/4-way runs on 2001SE be removed then?”

“I can also understand the suspension, since it’s not the first time he’s made mistakes… But I find the timing a bit questionable considering his latest score (though the judgment can’t be easy).”

6 minutes ago, rm3113 said:

“I wasn’t asking him to reveal tweaks or anything like that—just to say that 3-/4-way in 2001SE is not allowed. On the other hand, calling it cheating seems a bit over the top to me (that’s just my opinion). So should all 3-/4-way runs on 2001SE be removed then?”

Nothing wrong with the 01se c3/x4 category.

As for the timing. I don't choose when someone upload a bugged/cheated score.

Thanks to Allen for creating this thread. I’ve been biting my tongue, but I can’t stay quiet any longer.

This whole situation is genuinely upsetting, and it’s shaken a lot of my faith; not in HWBOT or the moderators (their job is difficult and unpaid), but in the community and in the integrity of competition. I'd like to thank the moderators for moving forward on this topic, but I agree with Allen that this punishment has had no real impact.

We’ve dealt with this before; people repeatedly pushing or breaking rules and damaging the rankings. Over the last few years I’ve been enjoying getting back into benching, but this has completely drained my motivation. I’ve barely touched my gear in the last two months.

From my perspective, I’ll spend two weeks on a benchmark, testing, multiple LN2 sessions, fine-tuning, finally land a record, and then someone beats it the next day. That’s competition, and I can live with that. What I can’t live with is not knowing whether the score that beat it is legitimate. Once that doubt is there, the motivation disappears.

Over 15 years of competitive overclocking, I’ve had that “something isn’t right” feeling a few times, and it’s pushed me away from the community for 12–18 months at a time because it felt like the playing field wasn’t level or the rules were being bent. I have that same feeling right now, and I know it’s not just me. A lot of the Australian community feels the same, and among people I’ve spoken to in the top ranks, I haven’t talked to anyone who doesn’t feel something is off.

This also isn’t about one questionable score. It’s a pattern: a growing list of removed, questionable, or unexplained results. And that raises an even worse question, what about the scores we haven’t flagged because they were done cleanly enough to avoid detection?

So where do we go from here? I’m not quitting overclocking, but I have no desire to compete when I can’t trust whether the results are real human-generated, scripted, AI-assisted, whatever the case may be. Right now, there’s significant doubt hanging over future scores, and that’s the part that’s killing the spirit of competing.

I think Exaberries covered the point very nicely.

The issue I see here though is pure transparency.

Not saying in any way that Alby/Salty have done a bad job, and I for one appreciate what they do voluntarily and the shit they would have to deal with on the daily here. But, when you have someone that is near or think was at the top of the ladder that has been blocked for something they knew wasn't right, it should be made known. Not because "how dare they" or "they are cheats" but because it can help educate the community and let them know that HWBot has integrity and those participating should too.

In the past, I personally had emailed our mods about some subs I suspected were cheated and they handled/deleted them at the time without too much fuss. I assumed in the background a warning was sent to the perpitrator.

Remember the saying, Silence breeds contempt?

When you say nothing, gossip thrives in the background, disrespect grows, resentment builds and the mobs come out in anger wanting a public execution.

In the dark ages (as someone put to me), when someone stole/did something against their community there would be public notification or public punishment as a way of letting the people of the community know that this type of action wasnt acceptable in the community and if you do it there is concequences for it. It wasnt just because the people were thirsty for blood or the executioners enjoyed cleaning up the shit afterward, it was because keeping order and harmony in the community was priority for the safety and enjoynment in the community, otherwise chaos reigned and well, bad shit happens.

Anyway, I've lost my train of thought here, but what I am trying to say is, we have times where there is a minority of people that do what we see as the wrong thing here, nothing gets said as things happen in the background, little whispers start happening and no-one has provided the community with the answers or what will be happening moving forward. A little clarity right now will appease the masses and an announcement on the main page as an education will clear most of this up I am sure.

Interesting ... This is the same guy that was cheating back in the day when he was just starting ocing , on FireStrike with rx 6900xt thru MPT buggin the score to the moon and never got any kind of punishment :/ , Like my Grandpa used to say " Once a cheater , Always a cheater " Nothing more to say or add from me as to me he will never change ☠️ ...

Edited January 13Jan 13 by chispy

To add onto what I said earlier,

I don't think we need a massive amount of transparency, moreso that a lot of people don't always get a sense of the hard work that leeg/salty are constantly putting into moderating hwbot. Even some amount of stats (should be easy enough to query from the db) about how many reports, how many scores removed, how many blocks were given out (no need to name anyone).
I think many people want more, but I also understand that there's a lot the moderators don't want to share, and I think they have some good reasons to not share.

I don't think the mods should be sharing info on all the moderation actions they take, for instance if I report a score that I think is cheated, I know that investigating it can take quite a while sometimes and its quite possible that someone just found a legitimate tweak, and I don't expect to know the details just because I reported it.
That being said, giving some indication as to the amount of moderation that goes on might go a ways mitigate this from happening in the future. There has to be some balance, and both leeg and salty being volunteers don't owe us whatever we want.

For the most part what happened here is an example of what we should want, someone was caught doing what they shouldn't and they recived the approprite punishment for it. A decision was made to balance the interests of sponsorships, which are necessary to keep hwbot going as it is, while still punishing someone. I agree that some of the messaging around it wasn't ideal but this has blown up way bigger than it needs to be.

I think there are enough comments above now for people to get a sense of what this is over, its not a case of claiming a different score than what the benchmark actually ran, its an illegitimate tweak situation and it got the punishment laid out in the rules.

i am a bit confused🤔 Why have so many people a problem with banning cmaker? correct me if i'm wrong, but why did he get so many chances ????? what happen if i do the same as he did? how many "second" chances do i get? same as he?? i doubt it..........

Rules should be for everyone without exception of "certain" people 😑 The fact that we are seriously discussing this topic is causing more harm than good.

On 1/14/2026 at 9:05 AM, Markus503 said:

i am a bit confused🤔 Why have so many people a problem with banning cmaker? correct me if i'm wrong, but why did he get so many chances ????? what happen if i do the same as he did? how many "second" chances do i get? same as he?? i doubt it..........

Rules should be for everyone without exception of "certain" people 😑 The fact that we are seriously discussing this topic is causing more harm than good.

„All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” © George Orwell, Animal Farm

If i may add a little comment here.
To all participants in this thread.

Please keep low profile and carefully watch what you write.
You don't want to wake the fierce instincts of the super duper moderator.

That , would potentially lead to a thread lock (it's been done before) ... and the conversation will be over.
Because ? ... because that's it.

A proper post in this thread , that really contributes , should be something like this

1 hour ago, Adam33k said:

If he cheated, then where and how? We want to know how it happened. If he really cheated, he deserves a ban. Its simple, everyone should be treated the same

11 hours ago, tomekmak said:

„All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” © George Orwell, Animal Farm

yes like how someone bugged geekbench3 memory score twice even after receiving warnings... and never got blocked or banned for it.

Sad to get messages like this. Instead of improving one self pointing fingers in another direction. This leads me to believe that reform is not in the cards, just don't get caught next time. Im starting to feel the same way as this message. Maybe hwbot has run it's course.

15 hours ago, saltycroissant said:

yes like how someone bugged geekbench3 memory score twice even after receiving warnings... and never got blocked or banned for it.

Who and when ?

16 hours ago, Splave said:

Sad to get messages like this. Instead of improving one self pointing fingers in another direction. This leads me to believe that reform is not in the cards, just don't get caught next time. Im starting to feel the same way as this message. Maybe hwbot has run it's course.

Don't let a couple people destroy your hobby. Keep it fun bro, you know that's always been the way.

Maybe hwb needs an accountability board for OC crimes penalties. Something like a half a dozen respected members Plus the moderation team, so it all doesn't get lumped on to moderators to take care of. Just throwing ideas at the wall.