New Restrictions for Members
Last month, due to the current political situation in Ukraine, we had to make some changes to our platform and terms. Members in Russia and Belarus are no longer allowed to participate in paid work on our platform.
I'm seeing some backlash now for not having made bigger/wider announcements of these changes and I'm sorry.
What kind of message can one write to say that because of all the injustice in the world, that you may not even be directly a part off, you are no longer able to come to Topcoder.
I wrote one and sent it to many of our most active members, it nearly broke my heart to be honest. 😢 Some wrote back hateful things, but most completely understood and were sad.
Should I have contacted everyone? Maybe? If you were not able to log in because of your country of residence, I am very sorry for that. It was my fault if you were not communicated to. It was an unavoidable action we had to take to protect our customers that was required by legal.
The message may have said they couldn’t log in until we made some changes or they were in a different country with different laws but it also said that once part of our community, always part of our community.
I’ve been actively working with the team to reinstate accounts for members who are no longer in Russia/Belarus as well as members who have no history of customer work. I appreciate your patience and understanding.
I've always been proud of our diverse community here - we rise above politics, religion, race, ethnicity, and gender. All are welcome at Topcoder even if you all can't participate fully at the moment. I do hope this is temporary and we are here to support you all.
Comments
we rise above politics, religion, race, ethnicity, and gender.
You are doing great job! Please keep it up!
Thank you, I appreciate that. It's definitely been hard for our members in Ukraine and those we know who are good people in Russia. We are always thinking of you all and hope things get right sooner rather than later.
Do I understand correctly that this all has to do only with the "freelance work" part on TopCoder and not at all with SRMs and MMs? Perhaps it makes sense then, if your customers have legal or moral problems with making payments yo Russia.
However you have to understand that for competitive programmers TopCoder is a competitive programming website, visited for SRMs and marathon matches. All this freelance work/design/QA is seen as something to navigate past in the website. Thus you can hopefully understand that freelance work implications don't even occur to us.
Can this freelance work part of Topcoder be properly separated from SRMs and MMs? I know there are signs that the competitive programming part of Topcoder is seen by management as an irrelevant component kept on life support, but still. Would it not make sense to then ban Russians and Belarusians from participating in freelance work, rather to deactivate their accounts altogether? Because this freelance work does not have anything to do at all with SRMs and MMs.
Yes @thuustalu It is not legal issues with SRMs.
All members from Russia and Belarus will have their accounts reactivated. This will enable:
1. Participation in SRMs on the Arena applet
2. General perusal of our content and using forums, etc.
I will notify you here once this is completed.
Everyone is back online as of Friday, May 27. Thanks to the platform team and security team for making this happen.
what if we can make diy vod platform for ukrain and russian member ? Because they are in need right?