Since this is somehow contentious,
Boshy cheated in quite literally every way that can be detected from what we have (which is 16 tick STV demos). This also includes the
weaponswap firing speed cheat which I forgot when writing the OP since he managed to sweep it under the rug a while before he was banned. There is zero reason to belief he would limit himself to only those cheats which we can prove from looking at STVs. Without admin, that includes macros and third-party cheats, with admin that includes access to stripper with which any map can be modified pretty much invisibly as well as the ability to just replace the map entirely. This is not an "innocent until proven guilty" thing. He proved that he was willing to cheat and also to cover up that cheating, and then to lie through his teeth about the extent of cheating for years. What logical reason is there for us to believe that every other time is legitimate? Trust the person who chose to deceive the community for at least 5 years, and who only came any amount cleaner because he realized that he couldn't just ask a friend on the admin team for favors anymore? Because he was sloppy with cheating times that weren't autouploaded?
At this point the burden of evidence is on proving any of his runs legitimate, and that's something which quite literally cannot be done since the only record is an STV or stream VOD, neither of which have any guarantees about what stripper code or map version was loaded at the time. If someone wants to work out fully decoding Source network packets and prove this from low-tick STVs, be my guest. You would incidentally make all offline runs falsifiable since it's a proof of concept for editing demos to remove such evidence.
Speedrunning for
any game relies on a large degree of trust -- only under exceptional circumstances will anything get reviewed to the point of "proving" if it's legitimate or not, and even then people are only caught when they make mistakes. We don't trust that riot's WR on jump_bounce is legitimate because we have incontrovertible evidence that it's not cheated, we trust it because riot isn't a known cheater. This is why it's pretty much universal to respond to top-level cheating by removing
all times from cheaters; they have broken that trust and so you cannot assume any of their times are legitimate. That will remain the case until jump takes place on hardware provided by a trusted party with supervision (i.e. never).
Regarding runs set outside of the time Boshy held admin, remember that even if we only consider times proven cheated, he did not exclusively cheat with admin. Additionally, recall that when Boshy was first unbanned (for no cause, just because scotch was taking too long with looking into cheated courses), he was still dedicated to falsely claiming that he only cheated a handful of random bhop bonuses, which has been conclusively proven false. Furthermore, the first day he played on Tempus after being unbanned his good friend and Tempus admin gorge004 rezoned jump_beyond for him (deleting many years of checkpoints, including for multiple extremely grinded runs) and threatened players in the server with retribution if they "harassed" him (i.e. said anything about the cheating). If that isn't a blank check to do whatever he wanted without punishment, I don't know what is.
People are justifiably concerned about the integrity of leaderboards. Naturally, we would prefer if top players simply didn't cheat. Since they have in this case, removing cheated times is by far the most important thing we can do to protect the leaderboards. Pretending that we can trust by default everything done by the most prolific/insidious cheater in Tempus's ~9 years of running is both disingenuous and harmful to that end.
Players always get better and no records (other than very short/degenerate zones) are perfect; there's nothing magic or special about Boshy's times other than that they're untrustworthy. A little under 20% of Boshy's map/course records (measured from the time of the first ban) stood as of the wipe. They will all be beaten in time, so if any are legitimate then this is a non-issue. Leaving cheated times up permanently stains the legitimacy of rankings.
As a side note, Boshy wiped song's records with
no evidence of cheating and plenty of those haven't been beaten yet -- there was nowhere near this much backlash despite him having a ton of records at the time. I'd probably have manually/piecemeal reversed song's wipe by now since it was a complete miscarriage of justice, but the broken nature of old wipes means they would have no demos; still weighing if that's worth it.
tl;drQuite a lot of the community seems to be having trouble understanding that Boshy cheated for years, then dug in his heels and lied through the entire process of being exposed (later deleted all of his posts in the relevant threads to hide this), and then continued lying about it for years afterwards. It doesn't matter that he was a top player; it doesn't matter that he was a big streamer; it doesn't matter if he was your friend. Any speedrun game with functioning top-level moderation/administration would have immediately deleted all of his records from leaderboards and permabanned him without a second thought --
here's an example of that process from a "traditional" speedrun game with a similar juxtaposition of longer categories and very short ones, note the commentary at the end of how they would have been selective if there was a form of evidence that was reliable. Also, months before being banned for cheating, I literally posted a smoking gun video of
Boshy editing zones to cheat. Nothing came of this. Boshy has been treated (both by admins and players) extremely leniently at every step of this process, up to and including the impassioned defense of his times now. It's ridiculous and just makes the entire community look culpable.
If you want to run against Boshy's wiped times, go for it -- that's part of why we waited until I finished recording everything to
archive. However, pretending that every such time is the "real WR" is just disingenuous.
As with quite literally every decision we or I have made, people like to act as though this was done in haste or without proper discussion simply because they disagree with it or because it adversely affects one of their friends. Rather than immediately and loudly claiming that everything is mismanaged and that you personally should have been consulted, consider trying to understand the reasoning fully. Administration will continue to be performed by administrators, and we'll continue to solicit community opinion and feedback where applicable.
