“We never use them in our work and that policy will never change. We remind our users again and again that it’s both illegal and pointless, so they should never do that,” Yudintsev explained in an emailed comment to AeroTime. We forbid our users to share documents like this on our platforms. “We always delete posts containing classified or restricted information from our forum as soon as possible. UPDATE 01-17-2023, 16:20 (UTC +3): According to Anton Yudintsev, the founder of Gaijin Entertainment, the documents contained in the post were considered export restricted and contained information on the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) and its use on the F-16. However, publication of such documents may still be restricted by national law in some countries, as was the case with the manuals of Leclerc and Challenger tanks. However, these efforts appear to have had limited success.Īs noted by some reports, at least some of the restricted documents posted by the game’s fans had already been leaked and can be found elsewhere on the internet – a caveat that likely extends to the F-16 flight manuals in question. Furthermore, in 2021 Gaijin Entertainment actively reached out to the users of the game, asking them to stop publishing classified documents. In addition to tanks, the game’s players also posted restricted documents detailing armor layout on the Eurocopter Tiger attack helicopter.įorum moderators promptly removed the documents in all these cases.įorum rules have reportedly been modified to ban the behavior. In the coming years, various restricted documents pertaining to French-made Leclerc tanks and Chinese DTC10-125 anti-armor shells were also posted by users, followed up by a host of classified documents regarding China’s latest Type 99 tank.

The first such instance appears to have taken place in 2021, when excerpts from a British Challenger 2 tank user manual were posted on one of the game’s forums, an attempt made by one user to convince the game’s developers to revamp the in-game model of the tank. This is not the first reported incident where potentially classified or restricted documents regarding military vehicles have been posted by fans of the game. Without knowing the nature of the document posted, AeroTime could not confirm its status.

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