Yes you can do any amount of preparation before entering the dungeon and timing will start upon control in the first room. This includes early Master Sword, taking damage, having soup active, or even having stored keys from other dungeons. The rules from http://zeldaspeedruns.com/tww/Speedruns/individual-levels should be adapted or copied to speedrun.com in my opinion.

This isn't stated in the rules but I believe the video should show the opening cutscene of the dungeon, which will verify that it is the very first time you've entered the dungeon. I think my Tower of the Gods 100% IL is a good example: . Whether or not you watch the opening cutscene will affect timed cycles in the dungeon (like lava in DRC and water level in TotG), so I believe a decision should be made on whether it's required, and I believe it should be.

It would be nice to have a page showing my runs that haven't been verified yet, with a way to edit them while waiting for verification. I would like to add splits to a run I submitted, and it would be nice to add them now instead of having to wait for verification a second time.

Doesn't have to be a separate page, showing on my profile would work as well.

Maybe it's the wording that is throwing me off then, if it means more "double-checked by a moderator to be reasonable". That's not quite the definition of "verified" so I guess that's what is tripping me up.

But it's not like edits can't be made once a run is on the board. I could be wrong, but wouldn't you rather get 1 notification that a run needs to be corrected rather than a notification for every run submitted (and minor edit such as adding splits) when 99% of the time it's fine?

I'm wondering why the default behavior has to be this aggressive. If certain games have such an influx of spam and phony submissions, I can understand why they might want to opt in to this. But for most games I feel this option is unnecessary.

So what is the meaning of verification? You say it's "not to check if the time was correct or for cheating", but then you seem to suggest it's so people know "the run is still legit". I still don't understand how a run being verified is different than the run having a video. Just because someone at one point declared a run to be legit means absolutely nothing. That mod may be long gone in a couple years, they may be forgotten and their word may mean nothing. A run is not truly verifiable without a video. Obviously I think most communities would be fine having runs without videos on their leaderboards, as long as they are not suspicious. But "verified" does not mean the same as "not suspicious". I'm just confused about the concept itself. I know the idea of "all our runs are verified to be legit by trusted members of the community" sounds good on paper, but in practice a run is really only known to be legit if it has a video, so I don't see the point of adding this extra vetting process under the guise of "verification".

I feel that requiring approval for every single run seems like way too much work for mods. Why not just deal with dubious runs as they occur, since those are much much less common than legit runs?

Also, I don't really understand the meaning of "verification". What does "verification" mean when a run has no video? It's not verifiable at all in that case. I suppose it either means the runner is "trusted" or the time isn't "good enough" to need more inspection, both of which are very subjective reasons and are pretty far from the concept of "verified".

In my mind, there really shouldn't be this concept of a "verified" run. A run can be "verifiABLE", meaning anyone can see for themselves that the time is legit, i.e. it has a video. So I don't really see the point of this extra vetting process for runs.

It's also annoying that if I make a small edit to a run that's already verified, like just adding splits, the run needs verification again and disappears from the boards or my profile page. I suppose a page that I can access of "runs waiting for verification" would help, but it still seems like the new process of vetting every run is just a bit too much. What does everyone else think?